Defining a relation for equilibrium pressure in a porous medium has been difficult to do in terms of readily measurable parameters. We present a simplified analysis of this problem using the first law of thermodynamics combined with a fractal description of a porous system. The results show that the variation in fluid interfacial area with fluid volume, and the respective interfacial surface te...

The Kelvin equation relates the equilibrium vapor pressure of a fluid to the curvature of the fluid-vapor interface and predicts that vapor condensation will occur in pores or irregularities that are sufficiently small. Past analyses of capillary condensation in porous systems with fractal structure have related the phenomenon to the fractal dimension of the pore volume distribution. Recent wor...

abstract purpose - the aim of this paper is to describe the population ecology theory through fractal thinking, an emergent human operating system that is creative, adaptive, healthy, and evolutionary; furthermore, a parallel is drawn between the population ecology model and the fractal structure. top-down hierarchies are typically characterized by command and control systems of the authority t...

The crystallization of proteins or colloids is often hindered by the appearance of aggregates of low fractal dimension called gels. Here we study the effect of electrostatics upon crystal and gel formation using an analytic model of hard spheres bearing point charges and short range attractive interactions. We find that the chief electrostatic free energy cost of forming assemblies comes from t...

A one-year series of hourly average PM10 observations, which was obtained from the urban and national park air monitoring station at Taipei (Taiwan), was analyzed by descriptive statistics and fractal methods to examine the temporal structures of PM10 concentrations. It was found that all PM10 measurements exhibited the characteristic right-skewed unimodal frequency distribution and long-term m...

INTRODUCTION AND HYPOTHESIS Some papers have shown that bone mineral density (BMD) may not be accurate in predicting fracture risk. Recently microarchitecture parameters have been reported to give information on bone characteristics. The aim of this study was to find out if the values of volume, fractal dimension, and bone mineral density are correlated with bone strength. METHODS Forty-two h...

The fractal structure of the aggregates in food protein gels was analyzed. Three kinds of food protein gels were prepared: (1) β-lactoglobulin (β-LG) gel; (2) 11S soybean globulin gel; and (3) caseinate gel. From the concentration dependence of the gel elasticity, the fractal dimensions Df of the aggregates in the gels were evaluated, according to the theory of Shih et al. These gels showed the...

1. Understanding the general principles governing the impressive diversity of plant morphology has long been a goal of botanists. However, the broad variability of plant growth forms has challenged the development of general models of plant growth. 2. A recent theoretical model, the fractal branching model of West, Brown and Enquist (WBE), purports to explain the scaling of plant form in a vari...

Nanoscale zerovalent iron (NZVI) rapidly transforms many environmental contaminants to benign products and is a promising in-situ remediation agent. To be effective, NZVI should form stable dispersions in water such that it can be delivered in water-saturated porous media to the contaminated area. Limited mobility of NZVI has been reported, however, attributed to its rapid aggregation. This stu...

Heat transfer by electromagnetic radiation is one of the common methods of energy transfer between objects. Using the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, we have studied the effect of particle arrangement in the transmission of radiative heat in many-body systems. In order to show the effect of the structure morphology on the collective properties, the radiative heat transfer is studied and the re...