Tanning

The tannins are synthesized by plants and are abundantly distributed In many different forms of plant life. Common sources of tannins include for example, the bark, leaves, fruit and roots of many plants most tannins, however, have been and are still derived from the bark of a few trees and shrubs, such as oak, chestnut, hemlock, mangrove, quebracho, and wattle, from which they are generally extracted with water. 

All the tannins readily react with proteins, forming insoluble, stable compounds when they react with collagen, the main constituent of animal skin, they form leather, a material that is resistant to hydrolysis, oxidation, and biological attack and therefore stable to weathering and resistant to decomposition. Since tannins from different plant sources have different chemical compositions, each tannin used for tanning skin produces a leather having slightly different properties and color. Tannins that have 

Trees from Which Tannins Have Been Extracted 

Bark Fruits Fruit pods Galls Wood 

Mineral tanning was probably first practiced in ancient Mesopotamia and then spread to Egypt, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean Sea area (Levey 1958). Mineral-tanned leather is soft to handle, has a velvety texture, and is almost white, a color practically impossible to achieve by other tanning processes. It is, however, very sensitive to humidity and water under wet conditions the alum in the leather is hydrolyzed (decomposed by water), forming sulfuric acid, a very strong acid that attacks the leather and causes its rapid decay. Mineral-tanned leather that has been humid or wet for a more or less extended period of time loses some of its characteristic properties, such as softness, pliability, and strength, and becomes hard, horny, and brittle. 

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Enzymes are used in baking, cheese manufacture, wine-making, brewing and distillation, pharmaceuticals, leather tanning, paper manufacture, adhesives, sewage disposal, animal feeds and in detergents. 

Na COj and Na2S with SO2 or from Na2S03 plus sulphur. Forms many hydrates. Used-in photography ( hypo ) because it dissolves silver halides. Also used in tanning, preparation of mordants, as a fermentation preventative in dyeing and in chemical manufacture. 

In ellipsometry monochromatic light such as from a He-Ne laser, is passed through a polarizer, rotated by passing through a compensator before it impinges on the interface to be studied [142]. The reflected beam will be elliptically polarized and is measured by a polarization analyzer. In null ellipsometry, the polarizer, compensator, and analyzer are rotated to produce maximum extinction. The phase shift between the parallel and perpendicular components A and the ratio of the amplitudes of these components, tan are related to the polarizer and analyzer angles p and a, respectively. The changes in A and when a film is present can be related in an implicit form to the complex index of refraction and thickness of the film. 

Iiifomiation about the behaviour of the 3D Ising ferromagnet near the critical point was first obtained from high- and low-temperatnre expansions. The expansion parameter in the high-temperatnre series is tanli K, and the corresponding parameter in the low-temperatnre expansion is exp(-2A ). A 2D square lattice is self-dual in the sense that the bisectors of the line joining the lattice points also fomi a square lattice and the coefficients of the two expansions, for the 2D square lattice system, are identical to within a factor of two. The singularity occurs when... 

Albrecht A C, Smith S P, Tan D, Schaertel S A and DeMott D 1995 Ultrasharp spectra and ultrafast timing from noisy coherence in four wave mixing Laser Rhys. 5 667-75... 

Kopelman R and Tan W 1993 Near-field optics imaging single molecules Science 262 1382-4... 

Kopelman R, Tan Wand Birnbaum D 1994 Subwavelength spectroscopy, exciton supertips and mesoscopic light-matter interactions J. Lumin. 58 380-7... 

Tan Wand Yeung E S 1997 Monitoring the reaotions of singie enzyme moieouies and singie metai ions Ana/. Chem. 69 4242-8... 

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