Heat transfer of bio-oil in a direct contact heat exchanger during condensation

Rapid quenching of volatiles in fast pyrolysis is important for achieving high yield and quality of the bio-oil product, but few studies have examined the condensation of volatiles and their related heat exchangers. Accordingly, we have studied the condensation characteristics of volatiles by varying heat transfer conditions in a direct contact heat exchanger. As the mass flow rate ratio of quenching oil to pyrolysis gas increased, the heat transfer rate and yield of bio-oil increased. The heat transfer rate and yield of bio-oil reached a maximum value at an intermediate air-to-quenching oil mass flow rate ratio. Additionally, the heat transfer rate and yield of bio-oil decreased as the temperature of the quenching oil increased. Experiments were also conducted to derive an empirical relationship for the volumetric heat transfer coefficient for direct contact heat exchangers.     

Influence of process conditions on product yield of waste tyre pyrolysis- A review

Waste tyres have become a grave concern as their accumulation is aggregating every year. Not only the size of waste tyre has to be reduced, but also some useful energy has to be recovered out of it as the world badly requires energy from alternate sources. Pyrolysis is one such method to extract energy potential products from waste tyres. It is extensively used to generate carbon black (solid product), tyre-oil (liquid product) and syngas (gas product) from waste tyres. In that connection, this article discusses the effect of various parameters on the product composition of pyrolysis of waste tyres. The current usage of pyrolysis products and their typical characteristics are also discussed in this critique. Of late, extraction of high value added products, such as activated carbon from carbon black, and limonene from tyre-oil is gaining attention. The article also throws some light on the application and generation routes of activated carbon and limonene from waste tyres.     

Advances in the biological treatment of coal for synthetic natural gas and chemicals

Coal, the most primitive fossil fuel, has been exploited for ages, and reserves dictate the economies of many countries. Presently, most energy is generated by direct combustion, raising concerns over global warming. Biological pretreatment of fossil resources and generation of alternative green energy can address the environmental issues associated with global coal utilization. Biological coal treatment can produce industrially important chemicals and bio-methane by employing microorganisms able to depolymerize/degrade coal. This review discusses current advances in microbial coal conversion, such as the efforts made to comprehend microbial processes, significant outputs of coal conversion, principle components responsible for coal conversion, and factors affecting the biological processes to convert coal. Development of these biological processes can be a stepping stone for greener coal; however, integration of multidisciplinary technologies is needed to increase the efficiency of economic coal utilization and production of economically and industrially feasible biomethane.     

A monolithic three-axis micro-g micromachined silicon capacitive accelerometer

A monolithic three-axis micro-g resolution silicon capacitive accelerometer system utilizing a combined surface and bulk micromachining technology is demonstrated. The accelerometer system consists of three individual single-axis accelerometers fabricated in a single substrate using a common fabrication process. All three devices have 475-/spl mu/m-thick silicon proof-mass, large area polysilicon sense/drive electrodes, and small sensing gap (<1.5 /spl mu/m) formed by a2004 sacrificial oxide layer. The fabricated accelerometer is 7/spl times/9 mm/sup 2/ in size, has 100 Hz bandwidth, >/spl sim/5 pF/g measured sensitivity and calculated sub-/spl mu/g//spl radic/Hz mechanical noise floor for all three axes. The total measured noise floor of the hybrid accelerometer assembled with a CMOS interface circuit is 1.60 /spl mu/g//spl radic/Hz (>1.5 kHz) and 1.08 /spl mu/g//spl radic/Hz (>600 Hz) for in-plane and out-of-plane devices, respectively.     

Linear-Time Construction of Two-Dimensional Suffix Trees

The two-dimensional suffix tree of a matrix A is a compacted tree that represents all square submatrices of A. We present the first complete version of a deterministic linear-time algorithm to construct the two-dimensional suffix tree by applying a divide-and-conquer approach.     

Comfort evaluation and bed adjustment according to sleeping positions

This study explodes the relationships between the height adjustment of bed sectors and subjective comfort depending on three types of sleeping positions. An adjustable bed system that regulates the heights of 8 adjustment sectors of the bed was developed. To evaluate the comfort of 9 body areas, subjective ratings were requested from 64 subjects ranging in age from 25 to 50. The subjects included 29 males and 35 females. For an objective evaluation, the patterns of pressure distribution were investigated according to the three sleeping positions. During two separate states (before bed adjustment and after bed adjustment), measurements of the adjusted bed height and pressure distribution, and subjective ratings according to three sleeping positions were performed. Based on the results of the adjusted heights of the 8 sectors in the bed, the subjects preferred the W‐shaped sleeping posture in both the supine and side positions. However, the U‐shaped sleeping posture was preferred in the prone position. With respect to these sleeping positions, the heights of sectors significantly correlated with the subjective ratings presented by the subjects, as well as the ratios of pressure. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Security system architecture for data integrity based on a virtual smart meter overlay in a smart grid system

As an efficient and intelligent system for managing and monitoring electricity usage, the “smart grid” has many useful applications. It supports energy producers and energy consumers efficiently by supporting the estimation and provision of the proper amount of electricity at the proper time. The most serious threat to a smart grid system may be when information is altered or forged by attackers; the system could malfunction and could collapse. In some cases, the attackers could waste system resources on purpose and this could lead to disastrous results. In this paper, we propose security system architecture to provide the secure and reliable smart grid service. It includes a data authentication process to verify the aggregated data and virtual network management to detect a compromised area or node. It detects a false data injection attack and further prevents a denial of service attack efficiently with less overhead for the individual devices comprising the smart grid system.     

Microfluidic-based biosensors toward point-of-care detection of nucleic acids and proteins

This article reviews state-of-the-art microfluidic biosensors of nucleic acids and proteins for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. Microfluidics is capable of analyzing small sample volumes (10⁻⁹–10⁻¹⁸ l) and minimizing costly reagent consumption as well as automating sample preparation and reducing processing time. The merger of microfluidics and advanced biosensor technologies offers new promises for POC diagnostics, including high-throughput analysis, portability and disposability. However, this merger also imposes technological challenges on biosensors, such as high sensitivity and selectivity requirements with sample volumes orders of magnitude smaller than those of conventional practices, false response errors due to non-specific adsorption, and integrability with other necessary modules. There have been many prior review articles on microfluidic-based biosensors, and this review focuses on the recent progress in last 5 years. Herein, we review general technologies of DNA and protein biosensors. Then, recent advances on the coupling of the biosensors to microfluidics are highlighted. Finally, we discuss the key challenges and potential solutions for transforming microfluidic biosensors into POC diagnostic applications.     

Finding the longest common nonsuperstring in linear time

String inclusion and non-inclusion problems have been vigorously studied in such diverse fields as molecular biology, data compression, and computer security. Among the well-known string inclusion or non-inclusion notions, we are interested in the longest common nonsuperstring. Given a set of strings, the longest common nonsuperstring problem is finding the longest string that is not a superstring of any string in the given set. It is known that the longest common nonsuperstring problem is solvable in polynomial time.In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for the longest common nonsuperstring problem. The running time of our algorithm is linear with respect to the sum of the lengths of the strings in the given set, using generalized suffix trees.     

On-Line Construction of Two-Dimensional Suffix Trees in O(n<Superscript>2</Superscript> log n) Time

The two-dimensional suffix tree of an n × n square matrix A is a compacted trie that represents all square submatrices of A[11]. For the off-line case, i.e., A is given in advance to the algorithm, it is known how to build it in optimal time, for any type of alphabet size [11],[18]. Motivated by applications in Image Compression[22[, Giancarlo and Guaiana [14] considered the on-line version of the two-dimensional suffix tree and presented an O(n² log² n)-time algorithm, which we refer to as GG. That algorithm is a nontrivial generalization of Ukkonen's on-line algorithm for standard suffix trees [23]. The main contribution in this paper is an O(log n) factor improvement in the time complexity of the GG algorithm, making it optimal for unbounded alphabets [9]. Moreover, the ideas presented here also lead to a major simplification of the GG algorithm. Technically, we are able to preserve most of the structure of the original GG algorithm, by reducing a computational bottleneck to a primitive operation, i.e., comparison of Lcharacters, which is here implemented in constant time rather than O(log n) time as in GG. However, preserving that structure comes at a price. Indeed, in order to make everything work, we need a careful reorganization of another fundamental algorithm: Weiner's algorithm for the construction of standard suffix trees [24]. Specifically, here we provide a version of that algorithm which takes linear time and works on-line and concurrently over a set of strings.