SUPERCRITICAL EXTRACTION OF STUART OIL SHALE

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the recovery of oil from Stuart oil shale using a supercritical extraction technique employing carbon dioxide as solvent. This supercritical technique provides yields superior to comparable retorting techniques. The importance of extraction temperature, pressure, and time has been investigated. In addition, the chemical composition of the oil extracted from the shale is presented. Simulated distillation has been employed to assess the effect of extraction conditions on the quality of the shale oil extracted.     

CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF SHALE OIL I. DEPENDENCE ON OIL SHALE ORIGIN

ABSTRACT

Shale oils obtained by nitrogen retorting of North Carolina, Cleveland, Ohio, Colorado, Rundle, Stuart, and Condor oil shales have been chemically characterized by g.c.-m.s. techniques. After species identification, chemical compositions of the shale oils have been related to the geological origins of the parent shales. Based on the characteristics observed in the chromatograms, eight semi-quantitative parameters have been used to describe the chromatograms. Six of these parameters describe the relative abundance and distribution of straight chain alkanes and alkenes in the chromatograms. The other two parameters represent the abundance, relative to the total amount of volatiles in the oil, of alkylbenzenes and alkylphenols.     

Rind of the rambutan, Nephelium lappaceum, a potential source of natural antioxidants

The rind of rambutan, which is normally discarded was found to contain extremely high antioxidant activity when assessed using several methods. Although having a yield of only 18%, the ethanolic rambutan rind extract had a total phenolic content of 762 ± 10 mg GAE/g extract, which is comparable to that of a commercial preparation of grape seed extract. Comparing the extract’s pro-oxidant capabilities with vitamin C, α-tocopherol, grape seed and green tea, the rind had the lowest pro-oxidant capacity. In addition, the extract at 100 μg/ml was seen to limit oxidant-induced cell death (DPPH at 50 μM) by apoptosis to an extent similar to that of grape seed. The extracts were not cytotoxic to normal mouse fibroblast cells or splenocytes while the powderised rind was seen to have heavy metals contents far below the permissible levels for nutraceuticals. Our study for the first time reveals the high phenolic content, low pro-oxidant capacity and strong antioxidant activity of the extract from rind of Nephelium lappaceum. This extract, either alone or in combination with other active principles, can be used in cosmetic, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical applications.     

Kinetic and isotherm studies of the adsorption of Acid Blue 92 using a low-cost non-conventional activated carbon

Adsorbents prepared from waste plants for the treatment of dyeing effluents have high significance in environmental sustainability. In this research, an attempt is made to analyze the applicability of activated carbon prepared from Euphorbia antiquorum L wood by H₃PO₄ activation method for the removal of Acid Blue 92 dye. Various kinetic models were used for the analysis of adsorption kinetics and pseudo second-order model fits well for the selected adsorbent-adsorbate system. The moderate rate of dye uptake indicates that the rate-determining step could be physisorption in nature. Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin-Raduskevich isotherm models were applied for the analysis of isotherm data. The positive enthalpy of adsorption substantiates that the adsorption process is endothermic in nature.     

Two-dimensional approximations of three-dimensional eigenvalue problems in plate theory

The eigenvalues and eigenfunctions corresponding to the three-dimensional equations for the linear elastic equilibrium of a clamped plate of thickness 2?, are shown to converge (in a specific sense) to the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the well-known two-dimensional biharmonic operator of plate theory, as ? approaches zero. In the process, it is found in particular that the displacements and stresses are indeed of the specific forms usually assumed a priori in the literature. It is also shown that the limit eigenvalues and eigenfunctions can be equivalently characterized as the leading terms in an asymptotic expansion of the three-dimensional solutions, in terms of powers of ?. The method presented here applies equally well to the stationary problem of linear plate theory, as shown elsewhere by P. Destuynder.     

Synthesis of Bisindolylmethanes and Their Cytotoxicity Properties

Polymer supported dichlorophosphate (PEG-OPOCl₂) is an efficient green catalyst for the electrophilic substitution reaction of indole with aromatic aldehydes, in neat condition, to afford an excellent yield of bis(indolyl) methanes with short reaction time, at room temperature. The synthesized compounds and their anti-cancer activity are evaluated.     

Common Mode Voltage Reduction Using 3D-SVPWM for 3-level CI-NPC Inverter with Hybrid Energy System

This paper elucidates Common Mode Voltage (CMV) reduction in transformerless 3-phase 3-level Coupled Inductor Neutral Point (CI-NPC) Clamped Inverter with Hybrid Energy System. The three dimensional Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (3D-SVPWM) with Nearest State Vector (NSV) is implemented to reduce the CMV by proper selection of medium, large and small vectors in 3D cubic space region. This NSV scheme in addition to CMV reduction, reduces the capacitor voltage balancing issues and minimizes switching losses. The proposed control provides full utilization of dc link voltage with reduced harmonics. This 3-level CI-NPC inverter is energized by hybrid energy source which includes photovoltaic system and wind energy system. The results obtained for the proposed scheme through simulation and experimental setup is compared with the conventional 2D-SVPWM and 3D-SVPWM scheme. From the compared results it is evident that the proposed scheme reduces CMV to a larger extent than 2D and 3D-SVPWM control. The simulation and experimental results are verified using matlab-simulink and FPGA-Spartan-6 controller respectively.     

Fractional weighted nuclear norm based two dimensional linear discriminant features for cucumber leaf disease recognition

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The quality and quantity of agricultural products are significantly affected by plant diseases. The plant diseases could be mitigated if identified at an early...     

Multiple multicast with minimized node contention on wormhole k-aryn-cube networks

This paper presents a new approach to minimize node contention while performing multiple multicast/broadcast on wormhole k-ary n-cube networks with overlapped destination sets. The existing multicast algorithms in the literature deliver poor performance under multiple multicast because these algorithms have been designed with only single multicast in mind. The new algorithms introduced in this paper do not use any global knowledge about the respective destination sets of the concurrent multicasts. Instead, only local information and a source-specific partitioning approach are used. For systems supporting unicast message-passing, a new SPUmesh (Source-Partitioned Umesh) algorithm is proposed and is shown to be superior than the conventional Umesh algorithm for multiple multicast. Two different algorithms, SQHL (Source-Quadrant Hierarchical Leader) and SCHL (Source-Centered Hierarchical Leader), are proposed for systems with multidestination message-passing and shown to be superior than the HL scheme. All of these algorithms perform 1) 5-10 times faster than the existing algorithms under multiple multicast and 2) as fast as existing algorithms under single multicast. Furthermore, the SCHL scheme demonstrates that the latency of multiple multicast can, in fact, be reduced as the degree of multicast increases beyond a certain number. Thus, these algorithms demonstrate significant potential to be used for designing fast and scalable collective communication libraries on current and future generation wormhole systems     

From particle-mass to multibody systems: graph-theoretic modeling

The distinction between geometry and dynamic interactions is fundamental for the consistent dynamic analysis of physical systems. A unified treatment of such systems is possible when we adopt a hierarchical mathematical model with a consistent set of embedded abstractions. This new view is adopted in the general formulation strategy for obtaining a simplified dynamics model of mechanical systems. We show that there exists a consistent general extension from the model of constrained particle-mass systems (PMS) to the model of multibody systems (MBS) based entirely on graph-theoretic concepts