Parsimonious use of indicators for evaluating sustainability systems with multivariate statistical analyses

Indicators are commonly used for evaluating relative sustainability for competing products and processes. When a set of indicators is chosen for a particular system of study, it is important to ensure that they vary independently of each other. Often, the number of indicators characterizing a chosen system may be large. It is essential to select the most important indicators from a large set so that a dependable bias-free analysis can be done using the reduced set of indicators. In this paper, we propose the use of principal component analysis (PCA) along with the partial least square-variable importance in projection (PLS-VIP) method to ensure that the explicit or tacit assumption of the independence of the chosen indicators is valid. We have used two case studies to demonstrate successful use of these two methods for parsimonious use of indicators for sustainability analysis of systems.     

Pharmacophore mapping of arylbenzothiophene derivatives for MCF cell inhibition using classical and 3D space modeling approaches

Considering the worth of developing non-steroidal estrogen analogs, the present study explores the pharmacophore features of arylbenzothiophene derivatives for inhibitory activity to MCF-7 cells using classical QSAR and 3D space modeling approaches. The analysis shows that presence of phenolic hydroxyl group and ketonic linkage in the basic side chain of 2-arylbenzothiophene core of raloxifene derivatives are crucial. Additionally piperidine ring connected through ether linkage is favorable for inhibition of breast cancer cell line. These features for inhibitory activity are also highlighted through 3D space modeling approach that explored importance of critical inter features distance among HB-acceptor lipid, hydrophobic and HB-donor features in the arylbenzothiophene scaffold for activity.     

Experimental Study of Forced Convection Heat Transfer of Water in a Short Microduct at a Turbulent Reynolds Number

The present study deals with experimental investigation of cooling of machining tools, by water flowing through a microduct at the tip of the tool. The average diameter of the microduct is 200 μm and the flow takes place at a turbulent Reynolds number. The outer wall temperature of the tool and the temperature of water at inlet and exit have been measured. The convective heat transfer coefficient is calculated at different wall temperatures and mass flux. The experimental results show that the average Nusselt numbers in the short microduct are higher than those predicted by conventional correlations for large-diameter ducts. This enhancement may be attributed to the micro size of the duct, entry effects, transition from laminar to turbulent flow at the microduct entrance, suspended microscopic particles in coolant water, and Prandtl number estimation based on the mean fluid temperature. A correlation has been proposed to compute convective heat transfer during turbulent flow through a short microduct of a particular geometry for a range of Reynolds and Prandtl numbers.