Flow and Flow Decay of Refractory Castables

Installation of refractory castables depend not only on flow,but also on how soon the flow is lost because of setting.The loss of flow(flow decay)has always been one of the main problems of refractory castable manufacturers,a problem that has not been too well described in literature.The flow decay has been studied for a castable system based on alumina,pointing out some general trends.The flow decay was found very temperature sensitive,being strongly accelerated by temperature increases.To compensate for excessive flow loss,a retarder like citric acid may be used.Thus flow decay was measured as a function of citric acid(retarder) addition at 35℃.     

A dual-affinity gene fusion system to express small recombinant proteins in a soluble form: expression and characterization of protein A deletion mutants

A novel gene fusion system to express and purify small recombinantproteins in Escherichia coli has been constructed. The conceptallows for affinity purification of soluble gene products bysequential albumin- and Zn²+-affinity chromatography. The dual-affinitysystem is well suited for expression of unstable proteins asonly full-length protein is obtained after purification andproteins gain proteolytic stability in the fusion protein. Herewe show that the dual-affinity approach can be used for theexpression of various unstable derivatives of a single IgG-bindingdomain based on staphylococcal protein A. Analysis of the proteolyticstabilities and the IgG-binding properties of the differentmutant proteins suggest that the model for the structure ofan IgG-binding domain must be re-evaluated.     

Microalgae growth for nutrient recovery from sludge liquor and production of renewable bioenergy

Proof-of-concept has been demonstrated for a process that will utilize nutrients from sludge liquor, natural light, and CO2 from biogas to grow microalgae at wastewater treatment plants. This process will reduce the impact of returning side-streams to the head of the plant. The produced algae will be fed to anaerobic digesters for increased biogas production. Dewatering of anaerobically digested sludge in centrifuges produces reject water with extremely low transmittance of light. A pretreatment procedure was developed that improved light transmittance for reject water from the FREVAR, Norway, wastewater treatment plant from 0.1% T to 77% T (670 nm, 1 cm path). Chlorella sp. microalgae were found to be suitable for growth in this pre-treated reject water. Typical nitrogen removal was 80-90 g N/kg TSS of produced microalgae. The microalgae were successfully harvested by chemically assisted flocculation followed by straining through a 33 microm sieve cloth, achieving up to 99% recovery. Harvested algae were anaerobically co-digested with wastewater sludge. The specific methane gas production (mL CH4/g VS fed) for the algae varied from less than 65% to 90% of the specific methane gas production for the wastewater sludge, depending on digester temperature, retention time and pre-treatment of the algae biomass.     

高炉出铁沟用Al2O3-SiC-C浇注料流动性和流动性衰减的研究

通过调整氧化硅微粉加入量和活性氧化铝微粉的类型 ,研究了Al2 O3-SiC -C浇注料的流动性和流动性衰减以及可工作时间的变化。结果表明 :在浇注料流动性相近的情况下 ,随着氧化硅微粉加入量的增加 ,加水量显著降低 ;浇注料的流动性与所引入的活性氧化铝微粉的特性密切相关 ;氧化硅微粉加入量的增加有助于延长浇注料的可工作时间 ;浇注料流动性的衰减呈现出先缓慢后迅速降低直至凝结的特点 ,一般在可工作时间之后迅速凝结     

Managing for Better Business-IT Alignment

Business-IT alignment is a complex and multidimensional problem that remains among the top-10 issues for many organizations. IT investment decisions usually fall to CIOs, and often the temptation is to base the decision to buy solely on superior technology. Clearly, organizations can gain a competitive advantage by such investments, but basing them only on the bells and whistles of a particular platform is foolhardy. Any competitive advantage would vanish as soon as the next platform enters the market, and the technological edge that the organization had briefly gained would evaporate. There are four themes in securing B-IT alignment: the role of IT, the business case, IT management intensity, and IT metrics, IT's role is important because not all organizations use IT in the same manner. The next three themes are natural intersections for business and IT investment. The business case is important because it determines how business and IT collaborate to justify the IT investment. The degree of IT management intensity both during and after the actual IT investment determines the organization's commitment to continuous process improvement. Finally, IT metrics are critical to demonstrate to business executives IT investment's value-generating potential     

Kinetic study on the alkaline degradation of cotton hydrocellulose

The kinetics of alkaline degradation of cotton hydrocellulose were determined in 5% NaOH at various temperatures. An activation energy of 24 kcal./mole was found for the endwise degradation reaction, while that of termination to a stable m-saccharinic acid endunit is 32 kcal./mole. Consequently, the DP_n of the degradable chain length is highly dependent on the reaction temperature, being 1000 at 65°C. and 140 at 132°C. At lower temperatures, the majority of degrading chains terminate to a normal reducing endgroup at the crystalline–amorphous transition region. From the data, the D P_n of cellulose chain segments participating in the amorphous regions of the original cotton fibril was calculated to be 143. This result strongly supports the classical micellar fibril structure over the folded model proposed by Manley.     

Iterative voting for inference of structural saliency and characterization of subcellular events.

Saliency is an important perceptual cue that occurs at different levels of resolution. Important attributes of saliency are symmetry, continuity, and closure. Detection of these attributes is often hindered by noise, variation in scale, and incomplete information. This paper introduces the iterative voting method, which uses oriented kernels for inferring saliency as it relates to symmetry. A unique aspect of the technique is the kernel topography, which is refined and reoriented iteratively. The technique can cluster and group nonconvex perceptual circular symmetries along the radial line of an object's shape. It has an excellent noise immunity and is shown to be tolerant to perturbation in scale. The application of this technique to images obtained through various modes of microscopy is demonstrated. Furthermore, as a case example, the method has been applied to quantify kinetics of nuclear foci formation that are formed by phosphorylation of histone gammaH2AX following ionizing radiation. Iterative voting has been implemented in both 2-D and 3-D for multi image analysis.