RAPID PYROLYSIS OF EASTERN CANADIAN COALS BY FREE FALL REACTORS

The effect of temperature was investigated on the rapid pyrolysis of Prince, Lingan and No. 26 coals in the temperature range of 525^° to 750^°C using a 600 cm high stainless-steel free fall reactor at atmospheric pressure.

The yields of char, condensibles and gaseous products were determined at 25^°C intervals. Gaseous products were analysed for H₂, CO, CO₂, CH₄ and C₂+.

Volatile product (condensible and gas) yields exceeded the volatile product in the A.S.T.M. methods at and above 700^°C.

Some experiments using Prince coal were repeated at reduced pressure (50 mm mercury) in both the 600 cm height stainless-steel and a 140 cm height quartz reactor in order to find out the effect of pressure and retention time.

The experimental results indicated that the condensable yield was higher at the lower pressure and at the shorter retention time. The effect of retention time was far more pronounced.     

SOLVENT EXTRACTION OF PAKISTANI COALS (ii): EXTRACTION AND CHARACTERIZATION OF METHANOL-BENZENE EXTRACTS

Structural characterization of the solvent extracts from four different Pakistani lignitic coals has been carried out by their proximate, elemental analysis and FT-Infrared and ¹H n.m.r. spectra. The yield of each extracts was greater with 1:1 benzene-methanol mixture in comparison to the total yield obtained by separate extractions with benzene and methanol. The extracts contained significantly less amount of ash and fixed carbon along with an increase in the percentage of volatile matter. The FTIR and ¹H n.m.r. spectra indicated that basically all the extracts contained less condensed aromatic rings in comparison to the coal. The FTIR spectra showed sharp well resolved peaks which have been assigned to various functional groups.

The ¹H n.m.r. spectra were used to obtain average structural parameters for all the extracts. A detailed analysis of the FTIR and n.m.r. spectra of the coal and their extracts provided an important in-sight into the differences between various extracts and also between various coals and their corresponding extracts.     

Use of Palm Mid-Fraction in White Chocolate Formulation

Samples of two types of palm mid-fraction (PMF I, a commercial sample and PMF II, from a laboratory-scale acetone fractionation of PMF I) and a Malaysian deodorised cocoa butter sample were used as the main components in the fat phase for white chocolate formulation. The monounsaturatedtriacylglycerol contents of these fats were 853, 899 and 903 g kg⁻¹, respectively.All the fats had free fatty acid contents of less than 10 g kg⁻¹ and melting points in the range of 34·0–34·5°C. The solid fat content profiles for the three fats were very steep. Differential scanning calorimeter analyses showed that all the fats had two melting peaks, T1 and T2. Results of the study showed that the tempering time to produce a well-tempered chocolate using PMF I was longer than that using PMF II, whereas, the time to produce a well-tempered cocoa butter chocolate increased with increase in the tempering temperature. Chocolates made with PMF I and II were well tempered between 17 and 19°C and with cocoa butter at 23°C. Thermal analyses, carried out on the chocolate showed that PMF I and II produced three melting peaks, T1, T2′ and T2 whereas most of the cocoa butter chocolates exhibited only one melting peak, T2. Storage studies showed that most of the chocolates had good bloom resistance for up to 12 weeks storage.     

Hybrid Organic/Inorganic Nanostructures for Highly Sensitive Photoelectrochemical Detection of Dissolved Oxygen in Aqueous Media

Precise, reliable, and remote measurement of dissolved oxygen in aqueous media is of great importance for many industrial, environmental, and biological applications. In particular, photoelectrochemical sensors working in differential mode have recently demonstrated promising properties, in terms of stability, sensitivity, and application potential. Here, a new approach is presented, combining visible light sensitivity, efficient photocurrent generation, and solution‐processed fabrication methods of conjugated polymers, with charge carriers selectivity, energetic alignment favorable to efficient interfacial charge transfer and high surface area achievable by using metal oxide nanostructures. Extensive characterization and optimization of the hybrid organic/inorganic system are carried out, leading to the realization of an oxygen sensor device, based on nanostructured palladium oxide/poly[(9,9‐dioctylfluorenyl‐2,7‐diyl)‐alt‐5,5‐(4′,7′‐di‐2‐thienyl‐2′,1′,3′‐benzothiadiazole]/[6,6]phenyl‐C61‐butyric acid methyl ester (PdO/APFO‐3:PCBM) as materials of choice. State‐of‐the‐art sensitivity, amounting at ?5.87 μA cm^?2 ppm^?1, low background signal, in the order of ?4.85 μA cm^?2, good electrochemical stability for more than 2 h of continuous functioning and high reproducibility of the signal over the pH 1 to 10 range, are reported, making the hybrid device suitable for several practical uses. The results fully validate the mixed organic/inorganic approach for photoelectrochemical applications, and pave the way for its further exploitation in fields like waste water treatment, environmental monitoring, and water splitting.     

FPGA Based Implementation and Comparison of Beamformers for CDMA2000

For the integration of smart antennas into third generation code division multiple access (CDMA) base stations, it still remains as a challenging task to implement smart antenna algorithms on programmable processors. In this paper, we study implementations of some CDMA compatible beamforming algorithms, namely least mean square (LMS), constant modulus (CM), and space code correlator (SCC) algorithms, using Xilinx??s Virtex family FPGAs. This study exhibits feasibility of implementing even simple, practical, and computationally small algorithms based on today??s most powerful FPGA technologies. 16 and 32 bits floating point implementations of the algorithms are investigated using both Virtex II and Virtex IV FPGAs. CDMA2000 reverse link baseband signal format is used in the signal modeling. Randomly changing fading and Direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) of multipaths are considered as a channel condition. The implementation results in terms of beamforming accuracy, FPGA resource utilization, weight vector computation time, and DOA estimation error are presented. Beamformer weight vectors using LMS and CM can be computed within less than 20 ??s on Virtex II FPGA and 10 ??s on Virtex IV FPGA, and using SCC it can be achieved within less than 22 ??s on Virtex IV FPGA. These results show that FPGAs provide approximately 500 times faster speed in implementations than our previous work with DSPs.     

Security anomaly detection in software‐defined networking based on a prediction technique

Nowadays, software‐defined networking (SDN) is regarded as the best solution for the centralized handling and monitoring of large networks. However, it should be noted that SDN architecture suffers from the same security issues, which are the case with common networks. As a case in point, one of the shortcomings of SDNs is related to its high vulnerability to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and other similar ones. Indeed, anomaly detection systems have been considered to deal with these attacks. The challenges are related to designing these systems including gathering data, extracting effective features, and selecting the best model for anomaly detection. In this paper, a novel combined approach is proposed; this method uses NetFlow protocol for gathering information and generating dataset, information gain ratio (IGR), in order to select the effective and relevant features and ensemble learning scheme (Stacking) for developing a structure with desirable performance and efficiency for detecting anomaly in SDN environment. The results obtained from the experiments revealed that the proposed method performs better than other methods in terms of enhancing accuracy (AC) and detection rate (DR) and reducing classification error (CE) and false alarm rate (FAR). The AC, DR, CE, and FAR of the proposed model were measured as 99.92%, 99.83%, 0.08%, and 0.03%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method prevents the occurrence of excessive overload on the controller and OpenFlow.