2,455 research outputs found
Innovative materials for heavy metals and hydrocarbons removal from wastewater of oil industry
No full textRecovery of wastewater is one of the most important challenges for our future due to the endemic scarcity of this resource in many parts of the world. Wastewaters derived from petrochemical activities represent a large share of water linked to human activities. This is due to the centrality of oil for the global economy and the great water consumption for all the linked activities, that goes from extraction to refinery. The adsorption technologies providing zeolite materials, both microporous and mesoporous, present a good choice for water remediation due to their simplicity, effectiveness, long term stability and adaptability. The development of new materials for adsorption technology is the main goal of this thesis. In particular, some microporous materials for heavy metals uptake and several mesoporous materials for hydrocarbons confinement have been characterized by structural and process point of view. Kinetic and thermodynamic (adsorption isotherms) behaviour of all material with different organic and inorganic pollutants is deeply investigated. Mathematical models to describe adsorption kinetics and isotherms have also been developed in order to obtain important parameter useful for the transaction from bench-scale to the next pilot scale. Structural characterization has been carried out to understand which changes occurred in material structure after adsorption of contaminants, the host-guest interactions and thermal stability of materials. This double characterization work was planned to screen a set of known materials and compare their performances to those of a new mesoporous amorphous material: the mesoporous silica-alumina or MSA. Indeed, the ultimate aim is to use MSA as multitalented material for simultaneous removal of heavy metals and hydrocarbons from wastewater derived from oil extraction, oil refining or oil contamination
Letter from M.C. Morton, M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, to Whom It May Concern, July 24, 1958
No full textThis letter, issued by Morton, M.C., M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, Yokohama, Japan, explains that Tsugitada Kanamori has requested a certificate of ill health for the purpose of establishing dependency upon arrival to the Bluff Hospital in Yokohama. The letter describes his history of asthmatic attacks and the treatment for his cardiac asthma.This collection contains one box of documents belonging to Tsugitada Kanamori. Materials in this collection mostly pertain to Kanamori’s efforts regarding canceling his renunciation and reinstating his American citizenship
Letter from M.C. Morton, M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, to Whom It May Concern, July 22, 1958
No full textThis letter, issued by Morton, M.C., M.D., Director, Bluff Hospital, Yokohama, Japan, explains that Tsugitada Kanamori has requested a certificate of ill health for the purpose of establishing dependency upon arrival to the Bluff Hospital in Yokohama. His illness had not been not identified.This collection contains one box of documents belonging to Tsugitada Kanamori. Materials in this collection mostly pertain to Kanamori’s efforts regarding canceling his renunciation and reinstating his American citizenship
2000 Sub-Librarians Meeting: Ace Atkins and M.C. Beaton
No full textThe Sub-Librarians planned and advertised a program with renowned science fiction and fantasy author Philip Jose Farmer. George Scheetz was instrumental in making that introduction. However, due to ill health, Farmer was unable to travel and had to cancel close to the program date.
However, on very short notice, Ace Atkins agreed to come to Chicago and speak to the group. Atkins had spoken to a very appreciative group of Sub-Librarians the previous year in New Orleans, and he gave another stellar performance in Chicago. He talked about his new book, Leaving\u27 Trunk Blues, which is another Nick Travers mystery, this one set in Chicago, from St. Martin\u27s Press.
St. Martin\u27s also stepped up and offered to have author M.C. Beaton join Ace as a speaker. M.C. Beaton is a pseudonym of Marion Chesney, who may be best known as the author of romance novels set during the English Regency. Her first detective story as M.C. Beaton came out for St. Martin\u27s in 1985. She has two series-one set in Scotland with Hamish Macbeth and one set in the Cotswolds with Agatha Raisin.
St. Martin\u27s generously provided copies of both authors\u27 books for signing after the program.
Marsha Pollak chaired the program, welcomed the audience, explained the change in speakers, called for toasts and introduced the authors
Drag it together with Groupie: making RDF data authoring easy and fun for anyone
No full textOne of the foremost challenges towards realizing a “Read-write Web of Data” [3] is making it possible for everyday computer users to easily find, manipulate, create, and publish data back to the Web so that it can be made available for others to use. However, many aspects of Linked Data make authoring and manipulation difficult for “normal” (ie non-coder) end-users. First, data can be high-dimensional, having arbitrary many properties per “instance”, and interlinked to arbitrary many other instances in a many different ways. Second, collections of Linked Data tend to be vastly more heterogeneous than in typical structured databases, where instances are kept in uniform collections (e.g., database tables). Third, while highly flexible, the problem of having all structures reduced as a graph is verbosity: even simple structures can appear complex. Finally, many of the concepts involved in linked data authoring - for example, terms used to define ontologies are highly abstract and foreign to regular citizen-users.To counter this complexity we have devised a drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface that makes authoring Linked Data easy, fun, and accessible to a wide audience. Groupie allows users to author data simply by dragging blobs representing entities into other entities to compose relationships, establishing one relational link at a time. Since the underlying representation is RDF, Groupie facilitates the inclusion of references to entities and properties defined elsewhere on the Web through integration with popular Linked Data indexing services. Finally, to make it easy for new users to build upon others’ work, Groupie provides a communal space where all data sets created by users can be shared, cloned and modified, allowing individual users to help each other model complex domains thereby leveraging collective intelligence
Designing the optimal geometry of a membrane reactor for hydrogen production from a pre-reformed gas mixture based on the extent of the reaction boundary layer
No full textA typical hydrogen-production system consisting of a pre-reformer catalytic reactor and a membrane reactor is considered: if equilibrium conditions are achieved in the pre-reformer, the reaction in the membrane reactor can only proceed once the hydrogen partial pressure has been reduced by effect of its permeation. An accurate transport-reaction-permeation model of methane steam reforming in catalytic membrane reactors suggests that, in these conditions, only a fraction of the catalyst volume is effectively active towards the advancement of the reaction and hydrogen production is confined to a reaction boundary layer (RBL) located in the near-membrane zone, whose extent is relatively insensitive to the thickness of the catalytic bed. Based on this observation, we developed a detailed study of the structure of the RBL in a wide range of operating parameters for different reactor geometries and showed that, for an assigned value of the total mass flow rate of the process stream, the optimal reactor performance is obtained whenever the thickness of the catalyst bed is comparable to that of the RBL
A Validated Framework for Measuring Interface Support for Interactive Information Seeking
No full textIn this paper we present the validation of an evaluation framework that models the support provided by search systems for different types of user and their expected types of seeking behavior. Factors determining the types of users include previous knowledge and goals. After an overview is presented, the framework is validated in two ways. First, the novel integration of the two existing information-seeking models used in the framework is validated by the correlation of multiple expert and novice analysis. Second, the framework is validated against the results produced by two separated user studies. Further, the refinements made by the first validation technique are shown to increase the accuracy of the framework through the second technique. The successful validation process has shown that the framework can identify both strong and weak areas of search interface design in only a few hours. The results produced can be used to either revise and strengthen designs or inform the structure of a user study
A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams
No full textWe create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Analisi tecnico-economica del processo di upgrading del biogas mediante Pressure Swing Adsorption
No full textLa Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) è una tecnologia diffusamente applicata l'upgrading del biogas a biometano, soprattutto per impianti di relativamente piccola potenzialità. In questo studio viene presentato un modello di simulazione dinamica che descrive il funzionamento di unità multibed di PSA, a partire dalla conoscenza dell'equilibrio e della cinetica di adsorbimento dei due componenti da separare (anidride carbonica e metano) sul materiale adsorbente utilizzzato, e consente di valutarne parametri sintetici di performance quali la purezza del biometano prodotto, il recupero di metano, la produttività, i consumi energetici. Il modello è stato utilizzato per analizzare diversi cicli e condizioni operative: in particolare, a partire da un ciclo base, con le classiche fasi di pressurizzazione, alimentazione/adsorbimento ad alta pressione (3-5 atm), blow-down e spurgo sotto vuoto (0.1 atm), sono stati studiati cicli
che includono step di equalizzazione della pressione, in modo da ridurre i consumi energetici e migliorare il recupero del metano; per ogni sequenza sono riportati i risultati di diversi test run, modificando le variabili di progetto in modo da ottenere una specifica di purezza >97% (come richiesto attualmente per il gas naturale immesso nella rete gas italiana) con un recupero elevato (>85%) e consumi energetici bassi.
Lo studio effettuato indica che, a partire da biogas al 50% di metano, è possibile ottenere la specifica di purezza richiesta con recuperi intorno al 90% e consumi di energia del 2.5-3% del contenuto energetico del biometano ottenuto; il recupero aumenta e il consumo energetico all'1.5-2% se il biogas ha un contenuto di metano del 65%. Sulla base dei dimensionamenti effettuati si è stimato un costo per un impianto di upgrading di circa 530 Nm3/h di biogas (potenzialità corrispondente all'ottenimento di 1 MWel ) intorno ai 1200-1600 k e, tenendo conto dell'ammortamento del capitale, degli oneri finanziari e dei costi di esercizio, un costo del biometano ottenuto di 0.25 /Nm3, per un biogas al 50% di metano, o inferiore a 0.2 /Nm3 se si alimenta l'impianto con un biogas al 65% di CH4. Questo costo deve essere aggiunto al costo di produzione del biogas, al costo del pretrattamento del biogas per la rimozione di umidità e inquinanti (in particolare H2S) e tutti i costi relativi all'immissione in rete. E' inoltre necessario considerare il problema della destinazione dell'olio-gas, che ha un contenuto di metano dall'8 al 18% e dal quale dovrebbe essere recuperata energia termica. Un confronto con la tecnologia a membrana, sviluppato facendo in particolare riferimento ai risultati ottenuti da ENEA Trisaia, indica che la PSA consente di ottenere recuperi maggiori
con consumi energetici più bassi; nel caso della separazione con membrana i consumi energetici vanno dal 4.4 % (recupero del 75%) al 5.8% se si vuole ottenere un recupero del 94.5% (in questo caso, però il biometano è reso alla pressione di 31 atm)
Adaptive Presentation Supporting Focus and Context
No full textThis paper focuses on how content adaptation is provided in adaptive and adaptable hypermedia systems. Questions that we investigate are: How focus and context can be supported by content-adaptation techniques? Are there any techniques that can be easily generalized to adapt the content of generic Web pages without requiring much effort from the author of the pages? How different adaptation techniques should be compared? We propose a new technique of adaptive presentation of Web content, which derives from fisheye views. This technique applies adaptation by modifying the scale of the visual elements in Web pages. We present an adaptable Web application that applies the technique to a set of real-world pages. We also identify existing adaptation techniques that relate to the proposed technique and examine their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we present and discuss the results of a pilot study which compared our fisheye technique against stretchtext adaptation. The results indicate that our technique is promising while they give valuable feedback about future work
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