Power dissipation and mixing time in a partially filled pharmaceutical reactor equipped with a retreat-blade impeller at different fill ratios

Glass-lined, stirred reactors and tanks are of significant industrial importance, especially in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries. These reactors are manufactured with a “glass-lining,” i.e., a glass layer applied to the agitator, the inside of the reactor/tank and to any of the surfaces in contact with its contents in order to maximize corrosion resistance, facilitate reactor cleaning, and minimize product contamination. Because of glass-lining fabrication issues, a retreat blade impeller with a low impeller clearance off the tank bottom is commonly used in glass-lined reactors. In addition, since wall baffles cannot be easily mounted on the wall of glass-lining reactors, a single baffle, such as a “beavertail” baffle, mounted from the top of the reactor is utilized instead. Despite its common use in the pharmaceutical industry, some of the most important mixing characteristics of this type of reactor have not been fully studied, such as the power dissipated by the impeller under different baffling conditions and blend time, i.e., the time required by a system to achieve a predetermined level of homogeneity. Therefore, this work was focused on the determination of the impeller power dissipation and the blend time in these reactors as a function of a number of variables commonly varied during the operation of these reactors, including different liquid levels (fill ratios), impeller agitation speed, and baffling configurations. In this study, a torispherical-bottomed, 61-L, scaled-down model of a commercial reactor (DeDietrich) similar to the type of glass-lined reactors frequently utilized in the pharmaceutical industry is used. The blend time and impeller power dissipation for this system are experimentally obtained as a function of liquid level (i.e., liquid height-to-tank diameter ratio, H/T), baffling configurations, and the agitation rates. Three baffling configurations are considered, i.e., a partially baffled system (where a single beavertail was used), a fully baffled system (i.e., four rectangular baffles) and an unbaffled system. The H/T ratio, corresponding to the ratio of the liquid level to the reactor diameter, is varied between 0.3 and 1. Six different agitation rates between 75 and 200 rpm are considered. The Power Number, Np, is found to be a function of the liquid level, baffling system, impeller type and impeller Reynolds Number. Larger values of Np are associated with more completely baffled systems. In addition, Np decreased with decreasing H/T ratios. The blend time to achieve 95% homogeneity of a tracer, 095, is found to be inversely proportional to the agitation rate for the partially and fully baffled systems, although large deviations are present at lower H/T ratios. The blend time is not always inversely proportional to the agitation rate for the unbaffled system. The dimensionless blending time, 095N, is also obtained for all baffling configurations, H/T ratios and agitation rates. 095N is found to be largely independent of the impeller Reynolds Number for the partially and fully baffled systems for H/T ratio between 0.7 and 1. The blend time and dimensionless blending time results indicate that they both are functions of the liquid level, impeller Reynolds Number and baffling configuration

MARKET STRUCTURE AND THE DYNAMICS OF RETAIL FOOD PRICES

The effect of retail grocery market structure on the speed of adjustment of retail food prices to changes in producer prices, real wages, and the cost of energy was examined for SMSAs. Evidence failed to support the implication of the Mason-Bain paradigm that increased concentration reduces market efficiency as reflected in speed of retail price adjustment. Evidence of strong intertemporal relationships between change in producer prices and retail prices found for the categories meat, poultry, fish, eggs and cereal and baker products provide support to the hypothesis of cost-push inflation.Marketing,

METABOLIC SYNDROME ASSOCIATED COMPLICATIONS

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is characterized by a cluster of disorders like obesity, insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, hypertension and dyslipidemia. All these disorders are responsible for the development of secondary morbid and co-morbid conditions. The current review focuses on the molecular pathogenesis of secondary late complications associated with metabolic syndrome including cognitive impairment, depressive disorder, neuropathy, arthritis and colorectal cancer.Â

Golgi localization and dynamics of hyaluronan binding protein 1 (HABP1/p32/C1QBP) during the cell cycle

Hyaluronan binding protein 1 (HABP1) is a negatively charged multifunctional mammalian protein with a unique structural fold. Despite the fact that HABP1 possesses mitochondrial localization signal, it has also been localized to other cellular compartments. Using indirect immunofluorescence, we examined the sub-cellular localization of HABP1 and its dynamics during mitosis. We wanted to determine whether it distributes in any distinctive manner after mitotic nuclear envelope disassembly or is dispersed randomly throughout the cell. Our results reveal the golgi localization of HABP1 and demonstrate its complete dispersion throughout the cell during mitosis. This distinctive distribution pattern of HABP1 during mitosis resembles its ligand hyaluronan, suggesting that in concert with each other the two molecules play critical roles in this dynamic process

A hybrid approach for transliterated word-level language identification: CRF with post processing heuristics

© {Owner/Author | ACM} {Year}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in FIRE '14 Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2824864.2824876[EN] In this paper, we describe a hybrid approach for word-level language (WLL) identification of Bangla words written in Roman script and mixed with English words as part of our participation in the shared task on transliterated search at Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) in 2014. A CRF based machine learning model and post-processing heuristics are employed for the WLL identification task. In addition to language identification, two transliteration systems were built to transliterate detected Bangla words written in Roman script into native Bangla script. The system demonstrated an overall token level language identification accuracy of 0.905. The token level Bangla and English language identification F-scores are 0.899, 0.920 respectively. The two transliteration systems achieved accuracies of 0.062 and 0.037. The word-level language identification system presented in this paper resulted in the best scores across almost all metrics among all the participating systems for the Bangla-English language pair.We acknowledge the support of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India, through the project “CLIA System Phase II”. The research work of the last author was carried out in the framework of WIQ-EI IRSES (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie, DIANA-APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) projects and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Banerjee, S.; Kuila, A.; Roy, A.; Naskar, SK.; Rosso, P.; Bandyopadhyay, S. (2014). A hybrid approach for transliterated word-level language identification: CRF with post processing heuristics. En FIRE '14 Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation. ACM. 170-173. https://doi.org/10.1145/2824864.2824876S170173Y. Al-Onaizan and K. Knight. Named entity translation: Extended abstract. In HLT, pages 122--124. Singapore, 2002.P. J. Antony, V. P. Ajith, and K. P. Suman. Feature extraction based english to kannada transliteration. In In hird International conference on Semantic E-business and Enterprise Computing. SEEC 2010, 2010.P. J. Antony, V. P. Ajith, and K. P. Suman. Kernel method for english to kannada transliteration. In International conference on-Recent trends in Information, Telecommunication and computing. ITC2010, 2010.M. Arbabi, S. M. Fischthal, V. C. Cheng, and E. Bart. Algorithms for arabic name transliteration. In IBM Journal of Research and Development, page 183. TeX Users Group, 1994.S. Banerjee, S. Naskar, and S. Bandyopadhyay. Bengali named entity recognition using margin infused relaxed algorithm. In TSD, pages 125--132. Springer International Publishing, 2014.U. Barman, J. Wagner, G. Chrupala, and J. Foster. Identification of languages and encodings in a multilingual document. page 127. EMNLP, 2014.K. R. Beesley. Language identifier: A computer program for automatic natural-language identification of on-line text. pages 47--54. ATA, 1988.P. F. Brown, S. A. D. Pietra, V. J. D. Pietra, and R. L. Mercer. Mercer: The mathematics of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. pages 263--311. Computational Linguistics, 1993.M. Carpuat. Mixed-language and code-switching in the canadian hansard. page 107. EMNLP, 2014.G. Chittaranjan, Y. Vyas, K. Bali, and M. Choudhury. Word-level language identification using crf: Code-switching shared task report of msr india system. pages 73--79. EMNLP, 2014.A. Das, A. Ekbal, T. Mandal, and S. Bandyopadhyay. English to hindi machine transliteration system at news. pages 80--83. Proceeding of the Named Entities Workshop ACL-IJCNLP, Singapore, 2009.A. Ekbal, S. Naskar, and S. Bandyopadhyay. A modified joint source channel model for transliteration. pages 191--198. COLING-ACL Australia, 2006.I. Goto, N. Kato, N. Uratani, and T. Ehara. Transliteration considering context information based on the maximum entropy method. pages 125--132. MT-Summit IX, New Orleans, USA, 2003.R. Haque, S. Dandapat, A. K. Srivastava, S. K. Naskar, and A. Way. English to hindi transliteration using context-informed pb-smt:the dcu system for news 2009. NEWS 2009, 2009.S. Y. Jung, S. Hong, and E. Paek. An english to korean transliteration model of extended markov window.S. Y. Jung, S. L. Hong, and E. Paek. An english to korean transliteration model of extended markov window. pages 383--389. COLING, 2000.B. J. Kang and K. S. Choi. Automatic transliteration and back-transliteration by decision tree learning. LERC, May 2000.B. King and S. Abney. Labeling the languages of words in mixed-language documents using weakly supervised methods. pages 1110--1119. 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Strategic placement of urban agriculture: A spatial optimization approach

Strategic placement of urban agriculture such as community gardens can expand alternate food supply, support physical activity, and promote social interactions. While social and health benefits are critical priorities when planning new urban agriculture locations, no widely accepted site selection methods have been established. We developed a spatial optimization model to identify new urban agriculture locations in the City of Indianapolis, Marion County, Indiana. Considering block groups with vacant parcels as potential locations, the study uses p-median optimization to identify the 25 best locations that would minimize travel from any block group in the city to potential garden locations. We weighted each block group based on food access and prevalence of obesity, where food access was characterized on three dimensions: economic, geographical, and informational. The model was simulated for three policy scenarios with equal, stakeholder-driven, and obesity-driven weights, and the results were compared with randomly selected locations. We found that optimally selected locations were 52% more efficient than randomly chosen locations in terms of the average distance traveled by residents based on the p-median solution. However, there was no significant difference in travel distance among the three policy scenarios. The spatial optimization model can help policymakers and practitioners strategically locate urban agriculture sites

Female Blow Flies As Vertebrate Resource Indicators

Rapid vertebrate diversity evaluation is invaluable for monitoring changing ecosystems worldwide. Wild blow flies naturally recover DNA and chemical signatures from animal carcasses and feces. We demonstrate the power of blow flies as biodiversity monitors through sampling of flies in three environments with varying human influences: Indianapolis, IN and two national parks (the Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone). Dissected fly guts underwent vertebrate DNA sequencing (12S and 16S rRNA genes) and fecal metabolite screening. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) was used to determine the most important abiotic factor influencing fly-derived vertebrate richness. In 720 min total sampling time, 28 vertebrate species were identified, with 42% of flies containing vertebrate resources: 23% DNA, 5% feces, and 14% contained both. The species of blow fly used was not important for vertebrate DNA recovery, however the use of female flies versus male flies directly influenced DNA detection. Temperature was statistically relevant across environments in maximizing vertebrate detection (mean = 0.098, sd = 0.048). This method will empower ecologists to test vertebrate community ecology theories previously out of reach due practical challenges associated with traditional sampling

An Open-Label Observational Trial to Evaluate the Possible Effects of Individualized Homoeopathic Medicines in Symptomatic Nasal Polyp

Introduction: Nasal polyps presenting with chronic rhino-sinusitis (CRS) is a commonly encountered condition characterized by nasal obstruction, loss of sense of smell (anosmia), postnasal drip, headache, and sleep disorders. Possibly 60-65% of the populations suffering from CRS has predisposition to nasal polyps. Homoeopathic literature claims to offer successful treatment of nasal polyps; but scarcely subjected to systematic research. Materials and Methods: A prospective, open, non-randomized, single arm, observational trial of pre-post comparison design was conducted on 44 patients suffering from symptomatic nasal polyps. Sino-nasal outcome test (SNOT-20) and European Quality of Life (EQ-5D-5L) questionnaires were taken as the primary and secondary outcome measures respectively; assessed at baseline and after 3 months. Individualized homoeopathic medicines were prescribed on ‘totality of symptoms’. Intention to treat sample was subjected to statistical analysis. Data distribution was examined. Non-parametric Wilcoxon signed rank test and post hoc parametric paired t test were used accordingly. P values less than 0.05 were considered as statistically significant. Results: Forty four patients were enrolled; 4 dropped out. Skiagrams revealed complete regressions of polyps in 23 (58%) cases. Statistically significant improvements were observed in both the subjective patient-rated outcomes – mean reduction of SNOT-20 scores by 19.9 [sd 15.5; 95% CI 15.5 to 24.2; P < 0.001], EQ-5D-5L questionnaire score by 0.9 [sd 2.6; 95% CI 0.1 to 1.7; P = 0.029]; and EQ-5D-5L VAS by 14.4 [sd 4.7; 95% CI 12.9 to 15.9; P < 0.001]. Conclusion: Homoeopathic medicines showed promising treatment effect in symptomatic nasal polyps. Randomized trials are warranted