Metabolic changes during recovery in normothermic versus hypothermic patients undergoing surgery and receiving general anesthesia and epidural local anesthetic agents

BACKGROUND: Mild hypothermia is accompanied by metabolic changes. Epidural local anesthetic agents attenuate the surgical stress response, but it is not known whether they modulate thermal stress. METHODS: Thirty patients undergoing colorectal surgery, performed by one surgical team, received epidural 0.5% bupivacaine to achieve T3-S5 sensory block. They were then assigned randomly to two groups of 15 patients each. The control or unwarmed group was left to cool during surgery, whereas active warming was used in the warmed group. General anesthesia was induced by thiopentone, vecuronium, fentanyl, nitrous oxide in oxygen, and enflurane. At the end of surgery, both groups received epidural 0.25% bupivacaine to maintain a T5-L3 sensory block. Aural canal (core) and skin surface (15 sites) temperatures; oxygen consumption; pain visual analogue score; and concentrations of epinephrine, norepinephrine, glucose, cortisol, lactate, and free fatty acids in plasma were measured before epidural blockade, 30 min after epidural blockade, at the end of surgery, and for 4 h after surgery. Patients and those measuring the outcomes were unaware of group allocation. RESULTS: Core and mean skin temperatures decreased significantly in the control group (P < 0.001) but not in the warmed group. Catecholamine concentrations in plasma decreased significantly after epidural block, and although concentration of epinephrine in plasma increased from baseline sharply in the control group at the end of surgery (P = 0.004), it decreased in the warmed group (P = 0.007). During recovery, there was no difference between the two groups for norepinephrine concentrations in plasma, body weight-adjusted oxygen consumption, pain visual analogue score, and metabolites. CONCLUSIONS: The postoperative metabolic changes obtained with epidural block were similar except for an attenuated concentration of epinephrine in normothermic patients compared with those who were mildly hypothermic.     

Cyclic operation strategies in inclined and moving packed beds—Potential marine applications for floating systems

The hydrodynamics of a periodically operated packed bed subjected to column oscillations and obliquity was studied. Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) and capacitance wire mesh sensors were employed to measure the local instantaneous liquid saturation in stationary slanted and moving packed beds, respectively. A swell simulator with six‐degree‐of‐freedom motions was applied to emulate the behavior of floating packed beds. The results revealed that column inclination from the vertical position considerably decayed liquid waves excited by different cyclic operation strategies. However, ON–OFF liquid and gas/liquid alternating cyclic operations showed an attempt to conserve wave identity in the slanted bed and to decrease phase maldistribution resulting from bed inclination. It was also found that symmetric and non‐symmetric split ratios of ON–OFF liquid cyclic mode were able to noticeably decrease fluid maldistribution in the oscillating packed bed. This study opens up possible prospects for process intensification of floating packed bed reactors and contactors. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 62: 4157–4172, 2016     

Experimental Modeling of Large Pile Groups in Sloping Ground Subjected to Liquefaction-Induced Lateral Flow: 1-G Shaking Table Tests

A series of 1-g shaking table model tests were carried out to study the behavior of pile groups embedded in sloping ground subjected to lateral flow of liquefied soil. Two different configurations of pile groups: large (6×6 and 11×11) and small (3×3), were considered. The models were subjected to the liquefaction-induced large ground deformation to investigate the effect of several parameters on the response of pile groups and mechanism of lateral flow. These parameters comprise amplitude, frequency, and direction of input motion; density and slope of ground; and the thickness of non-liquefiable layer at the surface. The outcome of this parametric study reveals the importance of above mentioned factors which should be taken into account for analysis and design purposes. In addition, the results from the experiments clearly illustrate that in sloping ground configuration, both front (in upstream) and rear (in downstream) row piles receive greater lateral forces than middle row piles. This finding is attributed to the distribution of soil motion (displacement and velocity) of the liquefied soil in the model. As a result, installation of additional pile rows in front and behind an existing pile foundation can be considered as an effective retrofitting technique. Finally, soil-pile interaction was evaluated by running experiments with different pile spacings, and reliability of the JRA 2002 design manual in estimation of liquefaction-induced lateral force on piles is evaluated.     

People counting via multiple views using a fast information fusion approach

Real-time estimates of a crowd size is a central task in civilian surveillance. In this paper we present a novel system counting people in a crowd scene with overlapping cameras. This system fuses all single view foreground information to localize each person present on the scene. The purpose of our fusion strategy is to use the foreground pixels of each single views to improve real-time objects association between each camera of the network. The foreground pixels are obtained by using an algorithm based on codebook. In this work, we aggregate the resulting silhouettes over cameras network, and compute a planar homography projection of each camera’s visual hull into ground plane. The visual hull is obtained by finding the convex hull of the foreground pixels. After the projection into the ground plane, we fuse the obtained polygons by using the geometric properties of the scene and on the quality of each camera detection. We also suggest a region-based approach tracking strategy which keeps track of people movements and of their identities along time, also enabling tolerance to occasional misdetections. This tracking strategy is implemented on the result of the views fusion and allows to estimate the crowd size dependently on each frame. Assessment of experiments using public datasets proposed for the evaluation of counting people system demonstrates the performance of our fusion approach. These results prove that the fusion strategy can run in real-time and is efficient for making data association. We also prove that the combination of our fusion approach and the proposed tracking improve the people counting.

     

Multistage adaptive stochastic mixed integer optimization under endogenous and exogenous uncertainty

To solve multistage adaptive stochastic optimization problems under both endogenous and exogenous uncertainty, a novel solution framework based on robust optimization technique is proposed. The endogenous uncertainty is modeled as scenarios based on an uncertainty set partitioning method. For each scenario, the adaptive binary decision is assumed constant and the continuous variable is approximated by a function linearly dependent on endogenous uncertain parameters. The exogenous uncertainty is modeled using lifting methods. The adaptive decisions are approximated using affine functions of the lifted uncertain parameters. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework, a number of numerical examples of different complexity are studied and a case study for infrastructure and production planning of shale gas field development are presented. The results show that the proposed framework can effectively solve multistage adaptive stochastic optimization problems under both types of uncertainty.     

Bio-Foam Internals for Potential Water Treatment Units Adapted to Marine Applications: Hydrodynamic Study

Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Engineering - Reliance on harmless and renewable resources to mitigate process environmental footprint has become increasingly important for the design and...     

CFD study and experimental validation of multiphase packed bed hydrodynamics in the context of Rolling Sea conditions

The necessity for a validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based model to deepen our understanding about the complex hydrodynamics of gas–liquid flows in oscillating porous media has driven this experimental and simulation work. A transient three-dimensional Euler–Euler porous media CFD model using moving reference frame and sliding mesh techniques was applied to elucidate the dynamic features of gas–liquid flows of cocurrent downflow packed beds subject to tilts and oscillations reminiscent of sea conditions. Incorporation of capillary and mechanical dispersion forces besides interphase momentum exchange terms in the CFD model to achieve reliable predictions was evaluated with respect to experimental data acquired by capacitance wire-mesh sensors and differential pressure transmitter. In the light of the validated CFD model, a detailed sensitivity analysis was performed to address the interrelations between hydrodynamic parameters, influence of fluid properties and packing size on the model predictions, and additional contribution of column oscillations on multiphase dynamics. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 65: 385–397, 2019     

Shaking Table Model Tests on Pile Groups behind Quay Walls Subjected to Lateral Spreading

This paper presents experimental results of 1-g shaking table model tests on a 3×3 pile group behind a sheet-pile quay wall. The main purpose was to understand the mechanisms of liquefaction-induced large ground deformation and the behavior of the pile group subjected to the lateral soil displacement. The sheet-pile quay wall was employed to trigger the liquefaction-induced large deformation in the backfill, and a study was made of the effect of several parameters such as soil density, amplitude and frequency of input motion, pile head fixity, and superstructure on the magnitude of soil lateral displacement and the maximum lateral force of liquefied soil. Furthermore, distribution of the maximum lateral force within the group pile was thoroughly studied. It was found that the force varies depending on the position of individual piles in the group. To evaluate the contribution of each pile in the total lateral force, a new two-dimensional parameter that is called contribution index was introduced and recommended values for each pile were suggested. Finally, it is concluded that displacement and velocity of soil are the most important parameters that affect the distribution of the lateral forces in the group pile, and these two parameters are highly dependent on the configuration of the ground (geometry).     

Constitutive modeling of the nonlinearly viscoelastic response of asphalt binders; incorporating three-dimensional effects

A dynamic shear rheometer is again used to characterize the nonlinearly viscoelastic properties of asphalt binders at intermediate or high temperatures. In our previous work, the dynamic shear rheometer test results showed that, under certain conditions, a compressive normal force was generated in an axially constrained specimen subjected to cyclic torque histories. This normal force could not be solely attributed to the Poynting effect and was also related to the tendency of the asphalt binder to dilate when subjected to shear loads. The generated normal force changed the state of stress and interacted with the shear behavior of asphalt binder. This effect was considered to be an “interaction nonlinearity” or “three-dimensional effect.” The concept is explored further in this paper by developing a fundamental approach to modeling the observed behavior. In this approach, the octahedral shear stress is used to represent the three-dimensional stress state in Schapery’s model of nonlinearly viscoelastic behavior. The model was successfully validated for several different loading histories. These results highlight the importance of modeling the mechanical behavior of asphalt binders based on the three-dimensional stress state of the material.