Electrocoagulation of fermentation wastewater by low carbon steel (Fe) and 5005 aluminium (Al) electrodes

Successful application of electrocoagulation technology requires a thorough evaluation of electrode behaviour. This study is concerned with the treatment of fermentation wastewater, generated by molasses-fed biorefineries in large volumes and containing high concentrations of biorecalcitrant, coloured organic melanoidins that form a highly dispersed colloid. The polarisation behaviour, surface morphology and current efficiency of both hot rolled coil steel and 5005 aluminium electrodes were investigated. The steel electrodes were found to be susceptible to aggressive anodic pitting which is attributed to the high chloride content of the wastewater, while the aluminium exhibited anomalous corrosion of the anode and cathode. The redox potential of the wastewater has a significant effect on Fe²⁺/Fe³⁺ speciation with steel electrodes and thus on the decolourising efficiency of electrocoagulation. The practical implications of the corrosion characteristics are discussed.     

Distribution of organic pollutants and natural organic matter in urban storm water sediments as a function of grain size

The sealing of surfaces in urban areas makes storm water management compulsory. Contaminated particles carried from urban surfaces are deposited in infiltration ponds. This gives rise to a highly organic (11% DW) contaminated sedimentary layer (Zn:1.2 mg/g, Cd:15 mg/kg) that could threaten groundwater quality. During infiltration, particle arrangement impacts infiltrating water and sediment exchanges. In this context, understanding particle arrangement and leachable components is essential. This study investigates Organic Matter (OM) not only as a pollutant but also as a substrate and a structuring element. The leachable fraction was collected and grain size fractionation was performed. OM of sediments and isolated fractions were characterized by measuring organic carbon content, isolating aromatic hydrocarbons, saturated hydrocarbons and polar compounds after dichloromethane extraction, and by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) molecular analyses. The organic compounds observed were petroleum byproducts (steranes and terpanes, unresolved complex mixture (UCM) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)), but plant and bacteria biomarkers were also found (phytol and derivatives, sterols). Leachable OM consisted of 6% of sediment OM (associated with particles >0.45 microm). This leachable OM is easily extractable by dichloromethane (96%) and contains fewer macromolecules than other fractions. Isolated grain size fractions showed dissimilarities (total organic carbon from 3.5 mg/g to 88.6 mg/g, extraction rate from 24 to 96%, aromatic hydrocarbon distribution) and similarities (proportions of aromatic and saturated hydrocarbons and polar compounds, molecular distribution of saturated hydrocarbons and polar compounds). The results suggest that organic macromolecules take part in the aggregation of sediments and prevent fine particles (<10 microm) from being leached. On the other hand, leachable particles (20 microm grain size mode) could carry low molecular weight organic molecules. The physical structure of the sediments and the leaching of particles containing contaminants are considerably affected by the presence of OM.     

Coagulation of Concentrated Suspensions of Ultrafine Alumina Powders by pH Shift

Highly concentrated suspensions of ultrafine alumina powders are prepared using 2-phosphonobutane-1,2,4-tricarboxylic acid as dispersant. The coagulation of these suspensions is carried out at around 278 K by adding a blend of acetic anhydride plus ethylene glycol. Coagulation takes place through a pH shift because of a time-delayed hydration of the acetic anhydride. The coagulation kinetics are studied by viscosity measurements with respect to the temperature and composition of the coagulant blend. Finally, the method is used to produce complex 3D parts of large dimensions for bio-applications by direct coagulation casting and the fired bodies are characterized.     

Stochastic and deterministic models for nucleation and growth in non-isothermal and/or non-isobaric powder transformations

The calculation of fractional conversion can be very difficult in certain cases of nucleation and growth transformations (Mampel assumptions): it has only been developed for a few shapes of grains (spheres, cylinders) and only in isobaric and isothermal conditions. Here, a stochastic model which is intrinsically independent on geometry and which stands for non-isobaric and/or non-isothermal reactions is presented. The numerical evaluation of this model can be carried out in two different ways. First a slow Monte Carlo approach which is valid for all kinds of shapes and external conditions is presented, then, a faster, more classical approach is given which allows changing external conditions but only for well-known shapes.     

Effect of pulsed delivery and bouillon base on saltiness and bitterness perceptions of salt delivery profiles partially substituted with KCl

Reducing salt levels in processed food is an important target for a growing numbers of food manufacturers. The effects of pulsed delivery (Dynataste) and bouillon base on saltiness and bitterness perception of partially substituted solutions (KCl) were investigated. Pulsed delivery did not enhance salt perception and resulted in greater Overall Bitterness Scores for the same level of substitution with KCl. The presence of the bouillon base masked to a certain extent the loss of saltiness induced by the substitution and resulted in lower Overall Bitterness Scores of the substituted profiles.     

Correlation between saltiness perception and shear flow behaviour for viscous solutions

Salt plays a major role in the human diet and food as tastant, flavour enhancer, nutrient, preservative and structuring aid. While intake of salt is part of a healthy diet, the vast majority of people in the developed world consume salt at a level high enough to place them at risk of developing diet induced illnesses. Salt intake is predominantly from processed foods. In this study it has been investigated whether careful choice of the viscosity behaviour of food thickeners, as used in processed foods, is exploitable to enhance saltiness perception and therefore allows reducing the content of salt in processed foods without compromising flavour.     

A French clinical corpus with comprehensive semantic annotations: development of the Medical Entity and Relation LIMSI annOtated Text corpus (MERLOT)

Quality annotated resources are essential for Natural Language Processing. The objective of this work is to present a corpus of clinical narratives in French annotated for linguistic, semantic and structural information, aimed at clinical information extraction. Six annotators contributed to the corpus annotation, using a comprehensive annotation scheme covering 21 entities, 11 attributes and 37 relations. All annotators trained on a small, common portion of the corpus before proceeding independently. An automatic tool was used to produce entity and attribute pre-annotations. About a tenth of the corpus was doubly annotated and annotation differences were resolved in consensus meetings. To ensure annotation consistency throughout the corpus, we devised harmonization tools to automatically identify annotation differences to be addressed to improve the overall corpus quality. The annotation project spanned over 24 months and resulted in a corpus comprising 500 documents (148,476 tokens) annotated with 44,740 entities and 26,478 relations. The average inter-annotator agreement is 0.793 F-measure for entities and 0.789 for relations. The performance of the pre-annotation tool for entities reached 0.814 F-measure when sufficient training data was available. The performance of our entity pre-annotation tool shows the value of the corpus to build and evaluate information extraction methods. In addition, we introduced harmonization methods that further improved the quality of annotations in the corpus.     

Crossdock truck scheduling with time windows: earliness,tardiness and storage policies

This article proposes to simultaneously plan inbound and outbound truck arrivals and departures in a cross-docking platform, as well as the internal pallet handling. The objective is to minimize both the total number of pallets put in storage and the dissatisfaction of the transportation providers, by creating a truck schedule as close as possible to the wished schedule they communicate in advance. The problem is modeled with an integer program tested on generated instances to assess its performance, especially regarding the computation time. The problem is proven to be np-hard in the strong sense. Since the execution takes too long to be used on a daily basis by platform managers, three heuristics are also proposed and tested. Two are based on integer programs solved sequentially, the third one is a tabu search in which the storage part of the objective function is evaluated by a maximum flow model in a graph. Numerical experiments show in which conditions each heuristic performs best, which can help choosing a solution method when confronted to a real-life problem.