Research benchmarks

The main aim of FCTES " is to address the aspects of pre-normative research, benchmarking, and validation through round-robin testing of harmonized, industry-wide test protocols and testing methodologies for PCs. 

Customer and supplier surveys Suggestion schemes Research Experiments Benchmarking... 

One of the most promising research lines in EDSS development is the definition of benchmarks to assess and evaluate the performance of EDSSs in a set of well-... 

Besides their interesting color application values, betalainic plants are also worthwhile from a nutritional standpoint. Research on this topic has recently been resumed with great scientific vigor in both in vitro and in vivo studies on red beets, amaranth, red-colored Swiss chard, red-violet pitahayas, and especially cactus pears. ° In the future, betalainic color crops will be benchmarked because of their pigment structure and quantity and also because of the individual and synergistic activities of their components such as colorless phenolics, amino compounds, peptides, proteins, and hydrocolloids. 

During the last years, more and more researchers have applied density functional theory to small transition-metal complexes and benchmarked the results against either high level wave function based methods or experimental data. A particular set of systems for which reasonably accurate benchmark data are available are the cationic M+-X complexes, where X is H, CH3 or CH2. Let us start our discussion with the cationic hydrides of the 3d transition-metals. 

The structure elucidation of the kinamycins was a formidable challenge, and the information presented below draws from the work of several research groups over a period of more than 20 years. As will be shown, the originally proposed structure of the kinamycins contained a cyanamide rather than a diazo function. Subsequent synthetic and biosynthetic studies led to replacement of the cyanamide with a diazo function. The structural elucidation was challenging, in part, because of the high degree of unsaturation of the kinamycins, which limits the utility of H and 2D NMR analysis. In addition, because these structures were unprecedented, there were no clear benchmarks for comparison at the time. The pathway from isolation to determination of the correct structure is described below. 

A benchmark done in a European research project showed that in the context of the above described case study from the lacquer industry realistic model sizes could neither be solved by the timed automata model nor by the classic MILP approach. It affirmed though a new methodical approach which allows the modeling of diverse, relevant problem scenarios on a high level of detail in just one integrated model. This new approach is based on the so-called quant-based combinatorial... 

The results of this study are somewhat atypical in the sense that the inferred re and tq structures of Sis are nearly the same. This is a somewhat fortuitous circumstance, which cannot be attributed entirely to the fact that Sis appears to be only weakly anharmonic (see cubic constants in Table I), since it has a relatively low-frequency bending mode that is potentially problematic. Nonetheless, it can be stated with some certainty that the structure obtained in the present research is accurate to within 0.002A and 0.2 . Hence, this structure can be used as a reference for benchmarking quantum chemical methods intended for high accuracy calculations on silicon clusters, as well as for comparison with structures of other silicon-containing molecules. 

US-EPA. 1995. The use of the benchmark dose approach in health risk assessment. US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Research and Development, Doc. EPA/630/R-94/007, Washington, DC. 

For applications as electro- or photo-catalysts, or for other applications as sensors, solar cells, electrodes in biosensing and biofuel cells, etc. the problem of the amount of titania is less critical, but there is still the need to optimize the film thickness. One of the active directions of research in this area, in fact, is to maintain the nanostructure, but increase the film thickness. A new benchmark for Ti02 nanotube arrays was recently reached. 

US EPA (2003a). Procedures for deriving equilibrium partitioning sediment benchmarks (ESBs) for the protection of benthic organisms endrin. EPA-600-R-02-009. Office of Research and Development, Washington, DC 20460. 

Once the experiment has been conducted and data collected and analyzed, a conclusion can be drawn concerning the original hypothesis. The experiment does not establish absolute truth concerning the hypothesis. A researcher should resist the temptation to state that the hypothesis was proven or not proven. In science, absolute truth can never be established. Results of an experiment may either support or not support the hypothesis. Ambiguous results can cause the researcher to modify the hypothesis and redesign the experiment. Even when the results are not ambiguous, an experiment is often repeated. One of the benchmarks of science is reproducibility. When an experiment is conducted and certain conclusions reached, another researcher should be able to repeat the same experiment and obtain similar results. 

---