The Inclusion of Informal Environments in Science Teacher Preparation

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Gender differences in the junior secondary (grade 7) mathematics curriculum in Hong Kong

This article seeks to examine gender differences across the mathematics curriculum in the various topic areas and mathematical abilities. It is suggested that a profile of these differences, when compared with students at different grade levels or across curricula, would be more fruitful for classroom teachers and curriculum developers. Breakdown and discriminant function statistics reveal that boys performed better than girls in Geometry and excelled in comprehension, and solving routine and non-routine problems. Girls were better at mathematical manipulation problems.     

Effects of maze geometry and experience on exploratory behavior in the rat

Rats were exposed twice in a rotated sequence to a series of six mazes, consisting of hexagonal alleys, balanced for different alley length and structural complexity. Locomotor activity increased with alley length and decreased with structural complexity of the mazes. Locomotion became less stereotyped with increased experience, showing an increasing number of turns, less constant velocity, loss of the initial preference for outward leading alleys and weakening of the forward tendency at reentry from side alleys into hexagonal alleys. In contrast to these qualitative changes of locomotion, the amount of activity remained almost unchanged throughout the experiment. The results suggest that these increases in locomotion complexity depend upon complex interactions between experience and stimulus content of the mazes.     

A SPECIAL‐PURPOSE STUDIO

The paper describes the design and use of a studio system which arose out of the need to give demonstrations of experimental procedures to practical classes of up to 150 students. Since the requirements could be specified in some detail it was possible to use novel methods of working which turned out to be very efficient and economical.     

Conversion of CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> to useful substances with composite iron,nickel, and copper catalysts

Composite materials of Fe/Al₂O₃, which consist of small particles of iron supported by thermally stable alumina even at 500–700 °C, have been widely used in the water-gas shift reaction for natural gas reforming. Therefore, Fe/Al₂O₃ is one of the promising candidates for re-transformation of exhausted CO₂ into fuels such as alcohols and hydrocarbons. The development of a CO₂ reforming system using the composite materials of Fe/Al₂O₃ through CO₂ reduction to CO, dissociation of water into hydrogen, and methanol synthesis has been investigated. It was found that dry and steam (i.e. wet) reforming of CO₂ produced almost the same amount of CO. At a temperature above 500 °C, maximal and saturated yields of CO and H₂ from CO₂ and water were obtained. However, this CO₂ reforming system requires higher-pressure conditions from several tens to hundreds standard atmospheric pressure in order to achieve high yield and selectivity for methanol production. In this study we developed the modified CO₂ reforming system by the utilization of Ni and/or Cu instead of Fe in order to obtain other types of useful products such as CO, CH₄, and carbon, more efficiently and selectively under atmospheric pressure. When Ni or Cu was used, conversion of CO₂ was reduced to 76%, while 9% of methane was detected in the case of Ni. On the other hand, though the CO₂ conversion reduced half of the Fe, the selectivity of CO from CO₂ increased to 95% in the case of Cu.     

Numerical investigation of cavitating flow behind the cone of a poppet valve in water hydraulic system

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of cavitating flow through water hydraulic poppet valves were performed using advanced RNGk-epsilon turbulence model. The flow was turbulent, incompressible and unsteady, for Reynolds numbers greater than 43000. The working fluid was water, and the structure of the valve was simplified as a two dimensional axisymmetric geometrical model. Flow field visualization was numerically achieved. The effects of inlet velocity, outlet pressure, opening size as well as poppet angle on cavitation intensity in the poppet valve were numerically investigated. Experimental flow visualization was conducted to capture cavitation images near the orifice in the poppet valve with 30° poppet angle using high speed video camera. The binary cavitating flow field distribution obtained from digital processing of the original cavitation image showed a good agreement with the numerical result. Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 59835160) and Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry of China (No. 50175097)     

Filtration of micro-particles within multi-fiber arrays by adhesive DEM-CFD simulation

A 3D multi-time scale discrete element method-computational fluid dynamic (DEM-CFD) coupling approach was applied to investigate the filtration of micron-sized particles by different types of fiber arrays. Both the pressure drop and the filtration efficiency were examined to indicate the filtration performance of the fiber arrays. Fibers that were uniformly arrayed in a parallel or staggered manner were compared. Results showed that the staggered array showed a better performance than the parallel array in terms of both pressure drop and filtration efficiency. Further, we compared the performance of different staggered arrays, i.e. a regular case, one densified in the front layers and another densified in the back layers. The front densified array was found to enter the clogging and cake filtration stage in the shortest time, leading to the highest filtration efficiency, but the highest pressure drop. The back densified array still achieved a much higher filtration efficiency, despite a much lower pressure drop comparable to that of the regular array. The results suggest that the two kinds of densified arrays may be suited for different purposes, e.g. baghouse filters or breathing masks.