Use of Fenton oxidation to improve the biodegradability of a pharmaceutical wastewater

The applicability of Fenton's oxidation to improve the biodegradability of a pharmaceutical wastewater to be treated biologically was investigated. The wastewater was originated from a factory producing a variety of pharmaceutical chemicals. Treatability studies were conducted under laboratory conditions with all chemicals (having COD varying from 900 to 7000 mg/L) produced in the factory in order to determine the operational conditions to utilize in the full-scale treatment plant. Optimum pH was determined as 3.5 and 7.0 for the first (oxidation) and second stage (coagulation) of the Fenton process, respectively. For all chemicals, COD removal efficiency was highest when the molar ratio of H(2)O(2)/Fe(2+) was 150-250. At H(2)O(2)/Fe(2+) ratio of 155, 0.3M H(2)O(2) and 0.002 M Fe(2+), provided 45-65% COD removal. The wastewater treatment plant that employs Fenton oxidation followed by aerobic degradation in sequencing batch reactors (SBR), built after these treatability studies provided an overall COD removal efficiency of 98%, and compliance with the discharge limits. The efficiency of the Fenton's oxidation was around 45-50% and the efficiency in the SBR system which has two reactors each having a volume of 8m(3) and operated with a total cycle time of 1 day, was around 98%, regarding the COD removal.     

A hybrid named entity recognizer for Turkish

Named entity recognition is an important subfield of the broader research area of information extraction from textual data. Yet, named entity recognition research conducted on Turkish texts is still rare as compared to related research carried out on other languages such as English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. In this study, we present a hybrid named entity recognizer for Turkish, which is based on a manually engineered rule based recognizer that we have proposed. Since rule based systems for specific domains require their knowledge sources to be manually revised when ported to other domains, we enrich our rule based recognizer and turn it into a hybrid recognizer so that it learns from annotated data when available and improves its knowledge sources accordingly. The hybrid recognizer is originally engineered for generic news texts, but with its learning capability, it is improved to be applicable to that of financial news texts, historical texts, and child stories as well, without human intervention. Both the hybrid recognizer and its rule based predecessor are evaluated on the same corpora and the hybrid recognizer achieves better results as compared to its predecessor. The proposed hybrid named entity recognizer is significant since it is the first hybrid recognizer proposal for Turkish addressing the above porting problem considering that Turkish possesses different structural properties compared to widely studied languages such as English and there is very limited information extraction research conducted on Turkish texts. Moreover, the employment of the proposed hybrid recognizer for semantic video indexing is shown as a case study on Turkish news videos. The genuine textual and video corpora utilized throughout the paper are compiled and annotated by the authors due to the lack of publicly available annotated corpora for information extraction research on Turkish texts.     

Can primary failure of arteriovenous fistulas be anticipated?

Primary failure, early thrombosis, and inadequate maturation are the main complications encountered in arteriovenous fistulas. Doppler ultrasonographic assessment of flow‐mediated dilatation (FMD) is currently used for the early diagnosis of atherosclerosis. Clinical experience in the use of FMD for preoperative assessment of vasculature is rather limited; therefore, we sought to elucidate the relationship between preoperative FMD and primary failure of the fistula. Thirty‐three patients with end‐stage renal disease who were admitted to our hospital between January and July 2005 were included in our study. Medical histories were established and the internal diameter, wall thickness, peak systolic flow rate, and resistive index (RI) were measured in the cephalic vein and radial and brachial arteries. Flow‐mediated dilatation and nitrate‐mediated dilatation (NMD) of the brachial artery were assessed. Fistulas were evaluated 48 hours and 30 days postoperatively. Brachial arterial internal diameter was lower in all fistulas that developed primary failure in 48 hours (0.4 ± 0.07 cm vs. 0.35 ± 0.07 cm, P = 0.016). The radial artery RI was found to be significantly elevated in fistulas with both early (48‐hour) and late‐term (30‐day) failure (0.9 ± 0.08 vs. 0.68 ± 0.3, P = 0.01, and 0.86 ± 0.8 vs. 0.67 ± 0.3, P = 0.038, respectively). The brachial artery peak systolic flow rate was significantly reduced in patients in the radiocephalic fistula group that developed early and late‐term failure (42.9 ± 12 cm/sec vs. 68.4 ± 10 cm/sec, P = 0.01, and 44.1 ± 13 cm/sec vs. 57.7 ± 16 cm/sec, P = 0.038, respectively). Our study, constrained by a smaller, older patient group, was unable to show a statistically significant correlation between FMD, NMD, and fistula success. Any single parameter may not be sufficient to assess vascular health preoperatively. A multifactorial approach incorporating parameters evaluating arterial and venous function might be more effective in predicting fistula success. Further studies on larger patient groups may indeed demonstrate the value of these assessments.     

The Magnetic and Structural Properties of SiC-Doped MgB2 Bulks Prepared by the Standard Ceramic Processing

According to general formula MgB_2?x SiC _x (x=0,0.05,0.1,0.2), MgB₂ and SiC-doped bulk superconductors were prepared by the standard ceramic processing. The mixtures of the corresponding powders were sintered at 750?°C for 0.5 h under pressure of 8 bar Argon. X-ray diffraction patterns show that all the samples have MgB₂ as the main phase with a very small amount of MgO; further, with SiC-doped, the presence of Mg₂Si is also noted. The magnetization-temperature measurements showed a transition temperature of 37.5 K for the undoped sample which indicates the typical transition temperature of MgB₂. When the content of SiC increased in the sample, the transition temperatures decreased to the lower temperatures systematically. The M?CH loops measured using a VSM showed very large magnetization value at low temperature for SiC doped samples. The largest M?CH loops were taken from the sample contains 5% SiC. The critical current density of samples calculated from M?CH loops indicated a value of around 4×10⁵ A/cm², which is in good agreement with the literature.     

Improving privacy in health care with an ontology-based provenance management system

Provenanc refers to the origin of information. Therefore, provenance is the metadata that record the history of data. As provenance is the derivation history of an object starting from its original source, the provenance information is used to analyse processes that are performed on an object and to track by whom these processes are performed. Thus, provenance shows the trustworthiness and quality of data. In a provenance management system in order to verify the trustworthy of provenance information, security needs must be also fulfilled. In this work, an ontology-based privacy-aware provenance management model is proposed. The proposed model is based on the Open Provenance Model, which is a common model for provenance. The proposed model aims to detect privacy violations, to reduce privacy risks by using permissions and prohibitions, and also to query the provenance data. The proposed model is implemented with Semantic Web technologies and demonstrated for the health care domain in order to preserve patients' privacy. Also, an infectious disease ontology and a vaccination ontology are integrated to the system in order to track the patients' vaccination history, to improve the quality of medical processes, the reliability of medical data, and the decision making in the health care domain.     

Sesame cake protein hydrolysis by alcalase: Effects of process parameters on hydrolysis, solubilisation, and enzyme inactivation

We investigated the effects of process parameters (substrate concentration, enzyme concentration, temperature and pH) on the hydrolysis and solubilization of sesame cake protein as well as enzyme stability. The sesame cake protein was hydrolyzed by Alcalase enzyme (a bacterial protease produced by a selected strain of Bacillus Licheniformis) that was chosen among five commercial enzymes examined. The optimum process conditions for hydrolysis and solubilization were obtained as 15 g L^?1 substrate concentration, 3 ml L^?1 enzyme concentration, 50 °C and pH 8.5. Under these conditions, the values of degree of hydrolysis and solubilization were found as 26.3% and 82.1%, respectively, and enzyme lost its activity by approx. 56% at the end of 120 min processing time. Modeling studies were performed to determine the kinetics of hydrolysis, solubilization and enzyme inactivation. The relationship between hydrolysis and solubilization was found linear for all experimental conditions examined. The inactivation energy of Alcalase at the temperature range of 45–55 °C was determined to be 25544 J mol^?1.     

Glycopolymer brushes with specific protein recognition property

Here, we report the synthesis of glycopolymer brushes on the silicon substrate by interface‐mediated reversible addition‐fragmentation chain transfer polymerization of pentafluorophenyl acrylate as well as subsequent attachment of d ‐glucosamine to determine specific and nonspecific protein interactions. The root‐mean‐square roughness of the glycopolymer brushes is only about 3.1 nm, indicating unstable distribution of the collapsed glycopolymer chains on the surface. The water contact angle of glycopolymer brush was determined as ～53° indicating a hydrophilic behavior. The results of fluorescence microscopy studies indicated that the glycopolymer brushes have specific interaction with fluorescence‐labeled Concanavalin A and nonspecific interaction with fluorescence‐labeled bovine serum albumin. The glycopolymer brushes tested here are hoped to enlarge to our knowledge of recognition phenomena at the surface of polymer brushes. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2017 , 134, 45238.