Alternative sweetener from curculigo fruits

This study gives an overview on the advantages of Curculigo Latifolia as an alternative sweetener and a health product. The purpose of this research is to provide another option to the people who suffer from diabetes. In this research, Curculigo Latifolia was chosen, due to its unique properties and widely known species in Malaysia. In order to obtain the sweet protein from the fruit, it must go through a couple of procedures. First we harvested the fruits from the Curculigo trees that grow wildly in the garden. Next, the Curculigo fruits were dried in the oven at 50 0C for 3 days. Finally, the dried fruits were blended in order to get a fine powder. Curculin is a sweet protein with a taste-modifying activity of converting sourness to sweetness. The curculin content from the sample shown are directly proportional to the mass of the Curculigo fine powder. While the FTIR result shows that the sample spectrum at peak 1634 cm–1 contains secondary amines. At peak 3307 cm–1 contains alkynes

Seeing the invisible: from imagined to virtual urban landscapes

Urban ecosystems consist of infrastructure features working together to provide services for inhabitants. Infrastructure functions akin to an ecosystem, having dynamic relationships and interdependencies. However, with age, urban infrastructure can deteriorate and stop functioning. Additional pressures on infrastructure include urbanizing populations and a changing climate that exposes vulnerabilities. To manage the urban infrastructure ecosystem in a modernizing world, urban planners need to integrate a coordinated management plan for these co-located and dependent infrastructure features. To implement such a management practice, an improved method for communicating how these infrastructure features interact is needed. This study aims to define urban infrastructure as a system, identify the systematic barriers preventing implementation of a more coordinated management model, and develop a virtual reality tool to provide visualization of the spatial system dynamics of urban infrastructure. Data was collected from a stakeholder workshop that highlighted a lack of appreciation for the system dynamics of urban infrastructure. An urban ecology VR model was created to highlight the interconnectedness of infrastructure features. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102559Published versio

Applications of dynamic simulations in the process industries : a safety case study using Texas City refinery explosion

Although process safety performance in petroleum refineries is much better today compared to several decades ago, major accidents still occur occasionally. The explosion and fires at Texas City refinery on 23 March 2005 is regarded as one of the worst industrial accidents in US history to date. Dynamic process simulation provides an effective means to collect, collate and analyze data from previous incidents and offer recommendations of good practice to further improve process safety outcomes.A simulation of the sequence of events that led to the catastrophic explosions at Texas City refinery is presented in Aspen HYSYS. An initial steady state simulation of the operation of the raffinate splitter column at Texas City forms the basis for a subsequent dynamic simulation of the filling of the distillation column from 0213hrs until 1313hrs when the explosion occurred. A PID (proportional, integral, derivative) control scheme is implemented with appropriate tuning parameters.The dynamic simulation of the overall tower filling dynamics from 1000hrs to 1320hrs when the explosion occurred revealed that the feed to the column vaporised at approximately 1310 hrs. This happened as a result of the additional heat input into the column through the feed-product heat exchanger. Subsequently, thermal expansion of the liquid in the column led to the filling of the overhead vapour line with hydrocarbon liquids and an increase in pressure as a result of the hydrostatic liquid head. Flammable hydrocarbon vapours subsequently flowed from the overhead line through the collection headers into the blowdown drum. An alternative accident pathway is presented as the basis for a quantitative hazard and operability study, HAZOP

Shipboard Crisis Management: A Case Study.

The loss of the "Green Lily" in 1997 is used as a case study to highlight the characteristics of escalating crises. As in similar safety critical industries, these situations are unpredictable events that may require co-ordinated but flexible and creative responses from individuals and teams working in stressful conditions. Fundamental skill requirements for crisis management are situational awareness and decision making. This paper reviews the naturalistic decision making (NDM) model for insights into the nature of these skills and considers the optimal training regimes to cultivate them. The paper concludes with a review of the issues regarding the assessment of crisis management skills and current research into the determination of behavioural markers for measuring competence

Human Factors, Ergonomics and Industry 4.0 in the Oil & Gas Industry: A Bibliometric Analysis

Over the last few years, the Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF/E) discipline has significantly benefited from new human-centric engineered digital solutions of the 4.0 industrial age. Technologies are creating new socio-technical interactions between human and machine that minimize the risk of design-induced human errors and have largely contributed to remarkable improvements in terms of process safety, productivity, quality, and workers’ well-being. However, despite the Oil&Gas (O&G) sector is one of the most hazardous environments where human error can have severe consequences, Industry 4.0 aspects are still scarcely integrated with HF/E. This paper calls for a holistic understanding of the changing role and responsibilities of workers in the O&G industry and aims at investigating to what extent, what type of, and how academic publications in the O&G field integrate HF/E and Industry 4.0 in their research. Bibliometric analysis has been conducted to provide useful insights to researchers and practitioners and to assess the status quo. Our findings show that academic publications have mainly focused on simulation-based training to increase process safety whereas revealed the lack of specific studies on the application of cognitive solutions, such as Augmented Reality-enabled tools or Intelligent Fault Detection and Alarm Management solutions