Students and academics working in partnership to embed cultural competence as a graduate quality

Since 2014, the University of Sydney has been experimenting with a new initiative motivated by the research on “students as partners”. In 2014, six students were selected as Ambassadors of the Sydney Teaching Colloquium (STC)-the University’s annual learning and teaching conference-as undergraduate researchers. In that year, the focus was on assessment standards

Returning to Text: Affect, meaning making and literacies

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence—ways that can be unpredictable and poorly understood. Adopting a sociomaterial sensibility that foregrounds the relations between bodies (people and things), the authors provide conceptual tools for considering how texts affect and are affected by the heterogeneous entanglements from which they emerge. In situating their argument, the authors outline influential readings of Spinoza’s theories of affect, explore how these have been mobilized in literacy research, and identify how text has been accommodated within such research. Using texts from a political episode in the United Kingdom, the authors explore the idea of social-material-textual affects to articulate relationships among humans, nonhumans, meaning making, and literacies. The authors conclude by identifying four ways in which text participates in what happens, raising questions about how different materializations of text (or indeed “not text”) are significant to the diversifying communicative practices that inflect social, cultural, economic, and political life

Improvement of Agarwood Oil Extraction by Heat Transfer Control in Multiple Hydrodistillation Systems

Quantity of oil, and chemical composition of the Agarwood essential oil should be evaluated to determine the performance of an extraction system. The aim of this work was to investigate the effects of heat transfer control (HTC), applied at three hydrodistillation systems simultaneously, on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of extracted essential oil from inoculated Agarwood, compared to a conventional hydrodistillation (HD). The extractions by conventional and HTC-ed HD procedures were done by supplying heat from liquefied petroleum gas (LPG); the ratio of the raw material to be extracted and the solvent was 0.1 g·mL-1 and the extraction time was 72 hours. The compositions of the extracted essential oils (using HTC-ed HD and conventional HD) were assessed using gas chromatography with flame ionization detector (GC–FID). The results of the extraction processes show that the extraction of inoculated Agarwood essential oil by HTC-ed HD is faster and produces higher yields compared to the extraction by conventional HD method. Further, the testing of the chemical properties of the Agarwood oil shows that essential oil obtained by HTC-ed HD has better quality compared to the oil obtained by conventional HD. The implementation of optimum thermal management in HTC-ed HD technology in Agarwood essential oil production industry is therefore of great importance

Production of hydrocarbon based solvent with low aromatic content using ASPEN Plus

The solvent is a liquid that can dissolve or extract specific materials. Solvents are needed for most chemical transformations to increase contact between reagents and catalysts. It also holds an important role in many studies, industrial chemical processes, coatings, and formulations of consumer products, however, most of the hydrocarbon-based solvents based still contain high aromatic content of benzene, toluene, and xylene which are carcinogenic chemicals. The separation of aromatic hydrocarbons from a mixture of C4-C10 aliphatic hydrocarbons is a complex process, due to its close boiling points and some combinations can form azeotropes. The general distillation process is not the right choice for the separation of aromatic hydrocarbons from a mixture of C4-C10 aliphatic hydrocarbons. Possible processes are liquid-liquid extraction, extractive distillation, and azeotropic distillation. In this study, extractive distillation using ASPEN Plus was performed to simulate the process. The crude feed composition used contains 77.13% aromatic compounds so that the separation technology used uses the extractive distillation process using sulfolane as a solvent. The variables used are the ratio of the crude feed to sulfolane (1:10, 1:15, 1:20), the number of stages (30, 40, 50), feed stage (15,20,25). Based on the simulation results, the best result was obtained by using the ratio of the crude feed to sulfolane of 1:10, with the number of stages 30, and the feed stage on the 25th stage