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Adenoviral (AdV) infections after transplantation remain a challenge in pediatric patients. Qualitative and quantitative PCR offer new approaches to early diagnosis and monitoring. However, their role in the management of AdV infections in pediatric transplant recipients remains to be determined. We report six children with positive qualitative serum-PCR for AdV on routine follow-up after transplantation (liver n = 4, hematopoetic stem cells (HSCT) n = 1, combined liver and HSCT n = 1). None of these children were symptomatic at the time of first detection of AdV. Two patients remained asymptomatic, one developed hemorrhagic cystitis and enteritis. Three children with positive PCR developed high viral load on quantitative PCR, all developed clinical AdV sepsis with further rising virus load. Despite antiviral therapy with cidofovir, these three patients died of septic multiorgan failure. Positive qualitative AdV-PCR from blood after pediatric transplantation is not necessarily followed by clinical disease. In case of positive AdV-PCR, monitoring by serial quantitative PCR is useful regarding treatment decision and prevention of fatal disease.

The analysis of the behavior of thermal storage load systems under typical solar conditions may be realized in the laboratory if a heat source is available that behaves like a predifined solar collector. For this purpose a collector hardware simulator (CHS) was built. This CHS allows repetitive experiments with solar storage load systems under variable conditions of temperature and power. The influences of different radiation time patterns, of the collector parameters and of the collector size on the performance of the coupled storage-load system may be studied easily in “quasi-solar” experiments. The description of the CHS includes the analysis of the dynamic behavior of, both, solar collectors and the CHS in the time domain as well as in the frequency domain. The governing differential equations are formulated, and the transfer functions that are obtained by means of Laplace transforms are presented. These transfer functions allow a clear assessment as to which collectors under which conditions can be simulated by a given CHS.