Produktionsintegrierter Umweltschutz – Verwertung von Reststoffen

Production-integrated environmental protection – Utilization of residues . Chemical plants as well as coal-fired powerstations utilize chemical reactions in order to produce materials or energy. Most of these reactions additionally produce gaseous, liquid, or solid residues. It is the main objective of production-integrated environmental protection to use these residues as suitable feedstocks in order to reduce environmental pollution and lower the consumption of raw materials. Several examples from the BASF Group will show how, by crossing the borders of the respective plant, reasonable solutions for material, or at least energetic, utilization of residues can be achieved. As a result of permanent efforts in production-integrated environmental protection over many years and despite increasing outputs the emissions of the chemical industry have been continuously reduced.     

Detailed Molecular Structure Modeling – A Path Forward to Designing Application Properties of ldPE

Summary: This paper describes a step on the ambitious aim to “design” application properties of ldPE by first simulating the detailed molecular structure of a high‐pressure tubular reactor product. The reactor of a certain configuration produces under well‐defined operating conditions. The next step is to correlate the structure with the application properties. Finally, the sequence will be reversed in order to deduce the operating conditions, which lead to the desired product quality. Two‐dimensional distributions, in molecular weight and branching frequency, as well a two compartment models with a core and a shell stream were simulated and compared with experimental results. Therefore, CFD simulations were carried out to discretize the reaction medium. Samples were taken from both pilot and commercial plants. The TREF‐SEC analytical method was successfully applied in order to measure the microscopic structure of the material. The tremendous numerical problems were solved with the help of the software PREDICI .

Detailed MWD for a pilot scale reactor product.     

A Unified Model for the Mixing of Non‐Newtonian Fluids in the Laminar,Transition, and Turbulent Region

Summary: Non‐Newtonian fluid behavior has significant influence on quantities in chemical engineering like power input, mixing time, heat transfer etc. In the laminar flow region, the concept of effective viscosity by Metzner and Otto is well established. In the transition region between laminar and turbulent flow, the existing concepts use three and even more empirical parameters to determine the specific power input. Here, a unified and general but simple approach is introduced to calculate the power input for shear thinning fluids over the whole flow region using just one empirical parameter. The Metzner‐Otto relation is obtained as a limiting case for the laminar region. The empirical parameter of the new approach is related to the Metzner‐Otto constant. The concept is validated for eight different stirrer systems. Mixing time and maximum shear rate and heat transfer can also be calculated using this approach. The new concept presented should also be applicable for other apparatuses, e.g., static mixers.

Comparison of experimental data and a curve calculated according to the new method (solid line).     

Thermolysis of the polyyne C8H2 in hexane and methanol: Experimental and theoretical study

The mean lifetimes of polyyne C₈H₂ in hexane were determined at 50, 60, 80, and 100 °C and in methanol at 60 °C. The reactions are second order at all temperatures: ln k₂ = 20.5 ± 1.5-10303 ± 520T⁻¹ and the corresponding activation energy is 85.7 ± 6.3 kJ mol⁻¹ (7164 cm⁻¹). Extrapolation suggests that solutions at 1 mM concentration are significantly unstable at room temperature. Quantum chemical calculations show that polyynes C_mH₂ + C_nH₂ (m + n = 16) could be products, but these were not detected. Alternatively, C₁₆H₂ isomers could form. IR spectra of the solid residues from hexane and methanol solutions were obtained.     

Patientenverfügungen und Advance Care Planning bei Demenz und anderen kognitiven Beeinträchtigungen

Definition of the problem

Advance directives for later states of grave cognitive impairment that are typical for late stages of dementia meet with more far-reaching reservations than advance directives for other states of reduced competence. One of the reasons seems to lie in the ethical and psychological conflicts arising from advance directives demanding nontreatment of additional diseases or the abstention from artificial nutrition in situations in which patients show no signs of suffering from their condition.

Arguments

In this article, it is argued that a “mixed” ethical strategy be used for these cases.

Conclusion

Advance directives in the legally defined sense, especially if drawn up in a process of advance care planning, should be followed in order to avoid that advance directives as an instrument of patient autonomy are rendered futile to a degree incompatible with confidence that wishes for terminating medical treatment will be followed. In contrast, the authority of “care directives” without recognized legal status should be restricted to cases in which there is concordance between the patient’s will as expressed in the directive and the patient’s “natural” will in the relevant situation.

     

Performance Evaluation of a Multi-Zone Application in Different OpenMP Approaches

We describe a performance study of a multi-zone application benchmark implemented in several OpenMP approaches that exploit multi-level parallelism and deal with unbalanced workload. The multi-zone application was derived from the well-known NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) suite that involves flow solvers on collections of loosely coupled discretization meshes. Parallel versions of this application have been developed using the Subteam concept and Workqueuing model as extensions to the current OpenMP. We examine the performance impact of these extensions to OpenMP and compare with hybrid and nested OpenMP approaches on several large parallel systems.     

Characterization of laser hardened steels by laser induced ultrasonic surface waves

Ultrasonic surface waves are suitable for the characterization of surface hardened materials. This is shown on laser hardened turbine blades. The martensitic microstructure within the surface layer of surface hardened steels has a lower surface wave propagation velocity than the annealed or normalized substrate material. Because the propagation velocity depends on the ratio of layer thickness to wavelengthd/, its measurement allows the determination of the hardening depth. If the surface wave frequency is high enough, the surface wave propagates mainly within the hardened layer. A correlation of the surface wave velocity to the surface hardness has been found. Because the variation of the surface velocity in hardened steels is small, a high measurement accuracy is necessary to obtain the interesting hardening parameters with sufficient certainty. Therefore, a measuring arrangement has been developed where laser pulses, guided by optical fibers to the surface hardened structure, generate simultaneously surface wave pulses at two different positions. The two ultrasonic pulses are received by a piezoelectric transducer. The surface wave velocity is obtained from the time delay between these pulses which is determined by the cross-correlation method. To evaluate simultaneously surface waves with different penetration depths from the same signal acquisition, digital filtering has been used in connection with the cross-correlation.     

A non-autonomous optimal control model of renewable energy production under the aspect of fluctuating supply and learning by doing

Given the constantly raising world-wide energy demand and the accompanying increase in greenhouse gas emissions that pushes the progression of climate change, the possibly most important task in future is to find a carbon-low energy supply that finds the right balance between sustainability and energy security. For renewable energy generation, however, especially the second aspect turns out to be difficult as the supply of renewable sources underlies strong volatility. Further on, investment costs for new technologies are so high that competitiveness with conventional energy forms is hard to achieve. To address this issue, we analyze in this paper a non-autonomous optimal control model considering the optimal composition of a portfolio that consists of fossil and renewable energy and which is used to cover the energy demand of a small country. While fossil energy is assumed to be constantly available, the supply of the renewable resource fluctuates seasonally. We further on include learning effects for the renewable energy technology, which will underline the importance of considering the whole life span of such a technology for long-term energy planning decisions.     

Marking student programs using graph similarity

We present a novel approach to the automated marking of student programming assignments. Our technique quantifies the structural similarity between unmarked student submissions and marked solutions, and is the basis by which we assign marks. This is accomplished through an efficient novel graph similarity measure (AssignSim). Our experiments show good correlation of assigned marks with that of a human marker.