An attempt to compare the performance of bioscrubbers and biotrickling filters for degradation of ethyl acetate in gas streams

This study presents a comparison of the efficiency of a bioscrubber and a biotrickling filter (BTF) for the removal of ethyl acetate (EA) vapour from a waste gas stream, under the same operating conditions. The maximum EA elimination capacity achieved in the bioscrubber was 550 g m^?3 h^?1 with removal efficiency higher than 96%. For higher EA loadings the bioscrubber was oxygen limited, which caused incomplete EA biodegradation. When pure oxygen was fed to the bioscrubber at a rate of 0.02 L min^?1, the bioscrubber recovered and could treat higher EA loadings without any oxygen limitation. The BTF achieved EA elimination capacity of 600 g m^?3 h^?1 with removal efficiency higher than 97% and the dissolved oxygen concentration remained substantially higher than in the bioscrubber. However, severe channelling and blockage of the spray nozzle occurred due to the excessive biomass growth. Overall, the bioscrubber system was easier to operate and control than the BTF, while an enhancement of the oxygen mass transfer in the bioscrubber could potentially increase its performance by up to three times. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

Criteria and methodology for the evaluation of conservation interventions on treated porous stone susceptible to salt decay

Susceptibility of stone to salt decay is directly related to its microstructural and mechanical characteristics. In the present work, a porous stone from a quarry in Cyprus was examined. Samples of this stone were consolidated and protected with certain conservation materials. The modification of microstructural characteristics of the stone was evaluated by mercury intrusion porosimetry, while its mechanical characteristics were measured by compressive and bending strength tests. From these data, the susceptibility of Cyprus stone to salt (NaCl) decay was estimated. The values of crystallization pressure of NaCl were calculated and compared to the experimentally measured compressive and tensile strength of the stone, in order to examine the probability of stone disruption due to salt crystallization. The development of the phenomenon after coarse pores’ filling with crystals, i.e. crystallization of salts in capillaries or mechanical failure of the stone, was determined by thermodynamic analysis. Additionally, artificial weathering tests of marine salt spray were performed for the evaluation of stone’s durability after the conservation. The treated stone proved to be resistant to salt decay, as it presented ameliorated microstructural and mechanical characteristics, concerning decay due to soluble salt crystallization. The most possible thermodynamic scenario was small pores repletion with crystals, avoiding mechanical failure of the stone.     

Towards a consolidated model for a collaborative courseware authoring system

Abstract In an effort to reduce the expensive resource requirements in courseware production and to allow effective management of, and communication and collaboration between authors, a model is needed to harmonize the diverse theoretical backgrounds such a process requires. To this end we look at five abstract models which where chosen for their apparent appropriateness within the general area of collaborative authoring and reuse of multimedia courseware. These models consist of a functional model of hypertext, an infrastructure model for an open collaborative authoring system, two object-oriented communication models, and a courseware production model. We attempt a consolidation of these models and ultimately make several conclusions, which are exposed during a conceptual harmonisation. The principal conclusion is that a hypermedia logical model is not by itself adequate to support collaboration and reuse. Our modeling conclusions have driven the design of a system which will be implemented and tested.     

Minimizing information disclosure to third parties in social login platforms

Over the past few years, a large and ever increasing number of Web sites have incorporated one or more social login platforms and have encouraged users to log in with their Facebook, Twitter, Google, or other social networking identities. Research results suggest that more than two million Web sites have already adopted Facebook’s social login platform, and the number is increasing sharply. Although one might theoretically refrain from such social login features and cross-site interactions, usage statistics show that more than 250 million people might not fully realize the privacy implications of opting-in. To make matters worse, certain Web sites do not offer even the minimum of their functionality unless users meet their demands for information and social interaction. At the same time, in a large number of cases, it is unclear why these sites require all that personal information for their purposes. In this paper, we mitigate this problem by designing and developing a framework for minimum information disclosure in social login interactions with third-party sites. Our example case is Facebook, which combines a very popular single sign-on platform with information-rich social networking profiles. Whenever users want to browse to a Web site that requires authentication or social interaction using a Facebook identity, our system employs, by default, a Facebook session that reveals the minimum amount of information necessary. Users have the option to explicitly elevate that Facebook session in a manner that reveals more or all of the information tied to their social identity. This enables users to disclose the minimum possible amount of personal information during their browsing experience on third-party Web sites.     

MILLING PERFORMANCE OF COATED INSERTS WITH VARIABLE COATING THICKNESS ON THEIR RAKE AND FLANK

During the Physical Vapour Deposition of coatings, the orientation of cemented carbides insert surfaces to the plasma flux direction affects the occurring film thickness distribution on the rake and flank, which in turn might influence the wear propagation in cutting processes. In the present paper the cutting performance in milling of PVD coated cemented carbides inserts with variable film thickness on the rake and flank is introduced and with the aid of FEM-supported calculations explained. The investigation results revealed that a thicker film on the tool rake in comparison to the existing one on the flank and moreover a thick and uniformly deposited film in the cutting wedge region significantly enhances the cutting performance in milling.     

Worker Exposure Monitoring of Suspended Particles in a Thermal Spray Industry

The purpose of the present work was the investigation and characterization of the quality of air in a thermal spray industry, in Greece. The activities that take place in the specific facility, as well as in most other similar industries, include thermal spraying and several mechanical and metallurgical tasks that generate airborne particles, such as grit-blasting, cutting and grinding of metallic components. Since the main focus of this work was the workers exposure to airborne particles and heavy metals, portable air samplers with quartz fiber filters, were used daily for 8 h. Three samplers, carried from different employees, were used for a period of 1 month. Results showed that both particles and heavy metals concentrations were low, even in the production site, which was the most susceptible area. The only exceptions were observed in the case of cleaning and maintenance activities in the thermal spray booth and in the case of spraying outside the booth. The main reason for the low concentrations is the fact that most of the activities that could produce high-particle concentrations are conducted in closed, well-ventilated systems. Statistical elaboration of results showed that particles are correlated with Ni, Cu, Co. The same conclusion is extracted for Fe, Mn. These correlations indicate possible common sources.     

Thickness control in structural optimization via a level set method

In the context of structural optimization via a level-set method we propose a framework to handle geometric constraints related to a notion of local thickness. The local thickness is calculated using the signed distance function to the shape. We formulate global constraints using integral functionals and compute their shape derivatives. We discuss different strategies and possible approximations to handle the geometric constraints. We implement our approach in two and three space dimensions for a model of linearized elasticity. As can be expected, the resulting optimized shapes are strongly dependent on the initial guesses and on the specific treatment of the constraints since, in particular, some topological changes may be prevented by those constraints.     

Ant colony optimization with immigrants schemes for the dynamic travelling salesman problem with traffic factors

Traditional ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have difficulty in addressing dynamic optimization problems (DOPs). This is because once the algorithm converges to a solution and a dynamic change occurs, it is difficult for the population to adapt to a new environment since high levels of pheromone will be generated to a single trail and force the ants to follow it even after a dynamic change. A good solution to address this problem is to increase the diversity via transferring knowledge from previous environments to the pheromone trails using immigrants schemes. In this paper, an ACO framework for dynamic environments is proposed where different immigrants schemes, including random immigrants, elitism-based immigrants, and memory-based immigrants, are integrated into ACO algorithms for solving DOPs. From this framework, three ACO algorithms, where immigrant ants are generated using the aforementioned immigrants schemes and replace existing ants in the current population, are proposed and investigated. Moreover, two novel types of dynamic travelling salesman problems (DTSPs) with traffic factors, i.e., under random and cyclic dynamic environments, are proposed for the experimental study. The experimental results based on different DTSP test cases show that each proposed algorithm performs well on different environmental cases and that the proposed algorithms outperform several other peer ACO algorithms.     

A memetic ant colony optimization algorithm for the dynamic travelling salesman problem

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been successfully applied for combinatorial optimization problems, e.g., the travelling salesman problem (TSP), under stationary environments. In this paper, we consider the dynamic TSP (DTSP), where cities are replaced by new ones during the execution of the algorithm. Under such environments, traditional ACO algorithms face a serious challenge: once they converge, they cannot adapt efficiently to environmental changes. To improve the performance of ACO on the DTSP, we investigate a hybridized ACO with local search (LS), called Memetic ACO (M-ACO) algorithm, which is based on the population-based ACO (P-ACO) framework and an adaptive inver-over operator, to solve the DTSP. Moreover, to address premature convergence, we introduce random immigrants to the population of M-ACO when identical ants are stored. The simulation experiments on a series of dynamic environments generated from a set of benchmark TSP instances show that LS is beneficial for ACO algorithms when applied on the DTSP, since it achieves better performance than other traditional ACO and P-ACO algorithms.