Evaluation and optimization of chromium removal from tannery effluent by microemulsion in the Morris extractor

A multidisciplinary Road Accident Analysis Group with the objective of conducting in-depth investigations of specific types of accidents has existed in Denmark for some years. The group has analysed head-on collisions, left-turn accidents, truck accidents and single vehicle accidents. The data collection included police reports, the group's investigation of accident sites and vehicles involved, and interviews with the involved road users and witnesses. The main accident factors in the head-on collisions and in the single vehicle accidents were excessive speed, drunk driving and driving under the influence of illegal drugs. The primary accident factors in left-turn accidents were attention errors or misjudging the amount of time available to complete the left turn. In the truck accidents insufficient searching for visual information as well as speeding were major factors. For all the accident themes the primary injury factor was failure to wear seat- belts. The multidisciplinary approach has provided a rather precise knowledge of the contributing factors leading up to the accident. The method requires a lot of resources, which is a limiting factor for the number of accidents to be analysed in this way. However, the method is suitable for analysis of common occurring or very serious types of accidents.     

Flexible Multibody Systems Models Using Composite Materials Components

The use of a multibody methodology to describe the large motion of complex systems that experience structural deformations enables to represent the complete system motion, the relative kinematics between the components involved, the deformation of the structural members and the inertia coupling between the large rigid body motion and the system elastodynamics. In this work, the flexible multibody dynamics formulations of complex models are extended to include elastic components made of composite materials, which may be laminated and anisotropic. The deformation of any structural member must be elastic and linear, when described in a coordinate frame fixed to one or more material points of its domain, regardless of the complexity of its geometry. To achieve the proposed flexible multibody formulation, a finite element model for each flexible body is used. For the beam composite material elements, the sections properties are found using an asymptotic procedure that involves a two-dimensional finite element analysis of their cross-section. The equations of motion of the flexible multibody system are solved using an augmented Lagrangian formulation and the accelerations and velocities are integrated in time using a multi-step multi-order integration algorithm based on the Gear method.     

Removal of chromium from aqueous solutions by diatomite treated with microemulsion

In order to evaluate the sorption of heavy metals, a crude diatomite was impregnated with a microemulsion which showed remarkable increase in chromium sorption capacity as compared to untreated diatomite. Samples with two different granulometries were investigated, both yielding practically complete adsorption. The adsorption process is pH dependent and the best results for the initial Cr (III) concentration of 1.5 g/L were obtained at pH 2.95. The effect of the concentration of the chromium synthetic solution was also investigated. The adsorption isotherms were obtained (30. 40 and 50 degrees C) and the Freundlich and Langmuir models were used to determine the adsorption capacity of the adsorbent. Following the adsorption step, a desorption process was carried out using several eluant solutions. The best results were obtained using hydrochloric acid (100%) as eluant.     

EBG Enhanced Feeds for the Improvement of the Aperture Efficiency of Reflector Antennas

We describe the use of electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) super-layers to improve the shape of reflectors illumination function. Following an investigation of the leaky wave pole singularities of the EBG Green's function, the shape of the radiation patterns of small apertures in ground planes are optimized. The maximization of the reflector aperture efficiency can be obtained by properly tuning the super layers geometrical parameters. A prototype of such feed has been designed, manufactured and tested. The results indicate that the inclusion of the EBG, increases the aperture efficiency of the feed+reflector system to values higher than 80%, over a 10% bandwidth. These low profile feeds are compatible with printed circuit board and/or integrated technology.     

Influence of temperature and aging time on hardness and magnetic properties of the maraging steel grade 300

The magnetic properties and hardness of a Ni–Co–Mo–Ti maraging steel 300 grade were measured as function of aging temperature. The austenite and martensite phase quantifications in the different heat treatment conditions were carried out by X-ray diffraction using direct comparison method. The behavior of the hardening, magnetization saturation and coercive force against aging temperature and time were explained taking into account the variation of austenite volume fraction with aging time and temperature.     

Integration of beamforming and uncertainty-of-observation techniques for robust ASR in multi-source environments

This paper presents a new approach for increasing the robustness of multi-channel automatic speech recognition in noisy and reverberant multi-source environments. The proposed method uses uncertainty propagation techniques to dynamically compensate the speech features and the acoustic models for the observation uncertainty determined at the beamforming stage. We present and analyze two methods that allow integrating classical multi-channel signal processing approaches like delay and sum beamformers or Zelinski-type Wiener filters, with uncertainty-of-observation techniques like uncertainty decoding or modified imputation. An analysis of the results on the PASCAL-CHiME task shows that this approach consistently outperforms conventional beamformers with a minimal increase in computational complexity. The use of dynamic compensation based on observation uncertainty also outperforms conventional static adaptation with no need of adaptation data.     

Evaluation of the influence of polyoxide‐based surfactants on the separation process of model emulsions of asphaltenes using the FTIR‐ATR technique

During extraction of crude oil, water is generally present in the oil. This water‐in‐oil (w/o) mixture undergoes turbulent flow that promotes sheer forces, resulting in the appearance of emulsions. These emulsions can be highly stable due to the presence of compounds with polar characteristics such as asphaltenes, which act as natural emulsifiers and form resistant films at the oil–water interface. Nonionic surfactants based on polyoxides are widely used to prevent the formation or to break down w/o emulsions. To shed more light on the destabilization mechanism of w/o emulsions promoted by these surfactants, in this study the techniques of tensiometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance (FTIR‐ATR) were applied to study the interface formed by poly(ethylene oxide)‐poly(propylene oxide) (PEO‐PPO) block copolymers and asphaltenic petroleum fractions. Initially, the critical micelle concentration of the copolymers in aqueous solution was determined. The results agreed with those found by tensiometry. The bottle test was used to evaluate the break‐down of the w/o emulsions in the presence of the PEO‐PPO block copolymers, and the results presented good agreement with those obtained by tensiometry and FTIR‐ATR. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013