A hierarchical approach for the synthesis of batch water network

This work addresses the problem of synthesising cost-effective batch water networks where a number of process sources along with fresh water are mixed, stored, and assigned to process sinks. In order to address the complexity of the problem, a three-stage hierarchical approach is proposed. In the first stage, global targets are identified by formulating and solving a linear transportation problem for minimum water usage, maximum water recycle, and minimum wastewater discharge. These targets are determined a priori and without commitment to the network configuration. Next, a network with minimum number of tanks is synthesised by solving a mixed-integer non-linear program. The bilinear constraints are relaxed to transform the program into a mixed-integer linear program that is globally solvable. The third stage is aimed at simplifying the network configuration by minimising the number of network inter-connections. Insights gained from the water pinch analysis are also incorporated into the approach to further reduce the water flows via the placement of water regeneration unit. A case study is solved to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.     

Experimental evaluation of quinolinium and isoquinolinium derivatives as corrosion inhibitors of mild steel in 0.5 M H<Subscript>2</Subscript>SO<Subscript>4</Subscript> solution

The 1-methylquinolinium iodide (I) Qui⁺, I^– and 2-methylisoquinolinium iodide isoQui⁺, I^– were investigated as a corrosion inhibitors for mild steel in sulfuric acid using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentiodynamic polarization techniques. The results indicated that the corrosion inhibition efficiency and extent of surface coverage were increased with increase in inhibitors concentrations. Polarization curves revealed that both inhibitors acted as a mixed-type inhibitor. The thermodynamic parameters were evaluated for corrosion inhibition process. The adsorption of both inhibitors on mild steel surface obeyed Langmuir adsorption isotherm.     

Comparison of Oxidation Stability and Quenchant Cooling Curve Performance of Soybean Oil and Palm Oil

The potential use of vegetable oil-derived industrial oils continues to be of great interest because vegetable oils are relatively non-toxic, biodegradable, and they are a renewable basestock alternative to petroleum oil. However, the fatty ester components containing conjugated double bonds of the triglyceride structure of vegetable oils typically produce considerably poorer thermal-oxidative stability than that achievable with petroleum basestocks under typical use conditions. Typically, these conditions involve furnace loads of hot steel (850 °C), which are rapidly immersed and cooled to bath temperatures of approximately 50-60 °C. This is especially true when a vegetable oil is held in an open tank with agitation and exposed to air at elevated temperatures for extended periods of time (months or years). This paper will describe the thermal-oxidative stability and quenching performance of soybean oil and palm oil and the resulting impact on the heat transfer coefficient. These results are compared to typical fully formulated, commercially available accelerated (fast) and an unaccelerated (slow) petroleum oil-based quenchants.     

Eco-friendly Geopolymer Composite Based on Non-heat-treated Phosphate Sludge Reinforced With Polypropylene Fibers

Silicon - Geopolymers produced with metakaolin (MK) and thermally untreated phosphate sludge (PS) are beneficial and environmentally advantageous materials, but their fragility limits its...     

In Vivo Analysis of the Biocompatibility and Bone Healing Capacity of a Novel Bone Grafting Material Combined with Hyaluronic Acid

The present in vivo study analyses both the inflammatory tissue reactions and the bone healing capacity of a newly developed bone substitute material (BSM) based on xenogeneic bone substitute granules combined with hyaluronate (HY) as a water-binding molecule. The results of the hyaluronate containing bone substitute material (BSM) were compared to a control xenogeneic BSM of the same chemical composition and a sham operation group up to 16 weeks post implantationem. A major focus of the study was to analyze the residual hyaluronate and its effects on the material-dependent healing behavior and the inflammatory tissue responses. The study included 63 male Wistar rats using the calvaria implantation model for 2, 8, and 16 weeks post implantationem. Established and Good Laboratory Practice (GLP)-conforming histological, histopathological, and histomorphometrical analysis methods were conducted. The results showed that the new hyaluronate containing BSM was gradually integrated within newly formed bone up to the end of the study that ended in a condition of complete bone defect healing. Thereby, no differences to the healing capacity of the control BSM were found. However, the bone formation in both groups was continuously significantly higher compared to the sham operation group. Additionally, no differences in the (inflammatory) tissue response that was analyzed via qualitative and (semi-) quantitative methods were found. Interestingly, no differences were found between the numbers of pro- and anti-inflammatory macrophages between the three study groups over the entire course of the study. No signs of the HY as a water-binding part of the BSM were histologically detectable at any of the study time points, altogether the results of the present study show that HY allows for an optimal material-associated bone tissue healing comparable to the control xenogeneic BSM. The added HY seems to be degraded within a very short time period of less than 2 weeks so that the remaining BSM granules allow for a gradual osteoconductive bone regeneration. Additionally, no differences between the inflammatory tissue reactions in both material groups and the sham operation group were found. Thus, the new hyaluronate containing xenogeneic BSM and also the control BSM have been shown to be fully biocompatible without any differences regarding bone regeneration.     

A Generalized Formula for Estimating Pure Alkenes Viscosity

Abstract

The importance of liquid viscosity in chemical process design makes it one of the most measured transport properties. Nevertheless, in the pure-component database, no experimental data on liquid viscosity for nearly 50% of the compounds are available. Therefore, prediction methods for liquid viscosity of alkenes over a wide range of absolute temperature for each components are necessary. Moreover, experimental data measured at lower temperatures are often extrapolated to higher temperatures with erroneous results. To improve liquid viscosity prediction of experimental data to temperatures and carbon numbers, we propose an empirical rule for estimating the viscosity of alkenes compounds. A predictive method, based physical properties (absolute temperature and carbon numbers) as its inputs, to correlate liquid viscosity by the statistical analysis is proposed. For a group of 19 compounds, the mean average absolute deviation was 4.6% for 118 data points. These values are better than other predictive methods and show that the statistical analysis model is stable and can be used to obtain good predictions for compounds that were not used in the model calibration.     

Physicochemical Properties of Different Types of Starch Phosphate Monoesters

Different types of starch were phosphorylated to different degrees of substitution using monosodium and disodium hydrogen orthophosphate at 160 °C under vacuum. Generally, phosphation enhanced the physicochemical properties of the modified starches compared to their native counterparts. Solubility and swelling power greatly increase when phosphorylation was carried out to a low degree of substitution, while the solubility and swelling power decreased gradually by increasing the degree of substitution. However, the values of the monoesters were still higher than those of the corresponding native polysaccharides. Viscosities of different starch types except corn amylose showed the highest values at the lowest degree of substitution, when the degree of phosphation increased the viscosity values decreased. Native potato starch formed a clear paste (96% transmittance) due to the presence of phosphate groups while the paste clarity of potato starch decreased gradually by increasing the degree of phosphation. Generally, phosphorylation increased the light transmittance of the other starches investigated at the lowest degree of substitution but the clarity decreased by increasing the degree of substitution.     

Intrusion detection and prevention system for an IoT environment

Internet of Things (IoT) security is the act of securing IoT devices and networks. IoT devices, including industrial machines, smart energy grids, and building automation, are extremely vulnerable. With the goal of shielding network systems from illegal access in cloud servers and IoT systems, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) and Network-based Intrusion Prevention Systems (NBIPSs) are proposed in this study. An intrusion prevention system is proposed to realize NBIPS to safeguard top to bottom engineering. The proposed NBIPS inspects network activity streams to identify and counteract misuse instances. The NBIPS is usually located specifically behind a firewall, and it provides a reciprocal layer of investigation that adversely chooses unsafe substances. Network-based IPS sensors can be installed either in an inline or a passive model. An inline sensor is installed to monitor the traffic passing through it. The sensors are installed to stop attacks by blocking the traffic using an IoT signature-based protocol.     

Instruction-Level Fault Tolerance Configurability

Due to modern technology trends such as decreasing feature sizes and lower voltage levels, fault tolerance (FT) is becoming increasingly important in computing systems. Several schemes have been proposed to enable a user to configure the FT at the application level, thereby enabling the user to trade stronger FT for performance or vice versa. In this paper, we propose supporting instruction-level rather than application-level configurability of FT, since different parts of some applications (e.g., multimedia) can have different reliability requirements. Weak or no FT will be applied to less critical parts, resulting in time and/or resource gains. These gains can be used to apply stronger FT techniques to the more critical parts; hence increasing the overall reliability. The paper shows how some existing FT techniques can be adapted to support instruction-level FT configurability, how a programmer can specify the desired FT level of the instructions, and how the compiler can manage it automatically. A comparison between the existing FT scheme EDDI (which duplicates all instructions) and the proposed approach is performed both at the kernel and at full application levels. The simulation results show that both the performance and the energy consumption are significantly improved (up to 50% at the kernel and up to 16% at full application level), while the fault coverage depends on the application. For the full application (JPEG encoder), our approach is only applied to one kernel in order to avoid increasing the programming effort significantly.