Flowsheet Synthesis and Development of Integrated Pressurized Catalytic Fluidized Gasification of Empty Fruit Bunch into Hydrogen

Renewable energy in the form of biomass has been used to produce heat, electricity, steam and petrochemicals due to the zero net carbon emission. With regards to the environmental concerns related to fossil fuel usage, hydrogen has the potential as an alternative clean energy. Currently, production of hydrogen from biomass using a pressurized system is not widely being analyzed and developed yet. Thus, process and flowsheet development of pressurized gasification process of biomass coupled with carbon dioxide adsorption for hydrogen production were investigated using a PETRONAS iCON simulation model. The effect of parameters such as pressure, temperature and steam-to-biomass ratio on the hydrogen yield was investigated. Hydrogen yield is predicted to be increasing with pressure, temperature, and steam-to-biomass ratio in this high pressure gasification system. Besides all these, investigation on a single gasification unit through iCON simulation at atmospheric pressure has also been investigated at the same time, kinetic of empty fruit bunch has also been investigated in the report

Towards a query language for annotation graphs

The multidimensional, heterogeneous, and temporal nature of speech databases raises interesting challenges for representation and query. Recently, annotation graphs have been proposed as a general-purpose representational framework for speech databases. Typical queries on annotation graphs require path expressions similar to those used in semistructured query languages. However, the underlying model is rather different from the customary graph models for semistructured data: the graph is acyclic and unrooted, and both temporal and inclusion relationships are important. We develop a query language and describe optimization techniques for an underlying relational representation.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Sex and discipline differences in empathising, systemising and autistic symptomatology : evidence from a student population

Baron-Cohenʹs (2002) theory of autism suggests that deficits in theory of mind and weak central coherence in autism can be explained as features of an ‘extreme male brain’ in which empathising is weak and systemising is strong. The two studies presented investigate this theory by examining the relationships between theory of mind, central coherence, empathising, systemising and autistic-like symptomatology in a sample of undergraduates. Study 1 used 48 undergraduates in four equal groups of male and female science and humanities students. Consistent with the theory, there were sex differences in the expected directions on all tasks in the first study. Differences according to discipline were found only on the Block Design task. Individuals with the ‘male brain’ profile also tended to show higher levels of autistic symptomatology. There was no evidence of a link between empathising and social skills on one hand and systemising and central coherence on the other. In the second study, performance on the Mechanical Reasoning and the Social Skills Inventory tasks was compared with performance on the Baron‐Cohen Empathising and Systemising Quotients in a sub‐sample of 20 students from Study 1. Moderately significant correlations were found between the Systemising Quotient and the Mechanical Reasoning task and between the Empathising Quotient and the Social Skills Inventory. Findings are largely consistent with the distinction between empathising and systemising but raise some questions concerning the tasks used to measure these abilities

Simulation of undular bores evolution with damping

Propagation of undular bores with damping is considered in the framework of perturbed extended Korteweg-de Vries (peKdV) equation. Two types of damping terms for the peKdV equation, namely linear and Chezy frictional terms, which describe the turbulent boundary layers in the fluid flow are considered. Solving the peKdV equation numerically using the method of lines shows that under the influence of damping, the lead-ing solitary wave of the undular bores will split from the nonlinear wavetrain, propagates and behaves like an isolated solitary wave. The amplitude of the leading wave will remain the same for some times before it starts to decay again at a larger time. In general the amplitude of the leading wave and the mean level across the undular bore decreases due to the effect of damping

Measurement of 18-Hydroxycorticosterone in Saliva

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Heats mixing and phase separation of polymer mixtures

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Isolation and Characterisation of Thionin Genes in Rice (Oryza Sativa)

Thionins are cysteine rich, basic and toxic proteins that are assumed to be involved in the defense against pathogens. Two partial cDNA clones encoding for putative thionin in rice were isolated from endosperm (Rth-l) and shoots (Rth-2). The nucleotide sequences encoding for thionin precursor were further identified from the amplification of the 3' -end of the cDNA. The amino acid sequence for JRth-l isolated from endosperm showed 72% homology to barley leaf thionins DB4 (Bohlmann and Apel, 1987), 68% to pKG1940 (Gausing, 1987), 51% to hordothionin Hth-1 (Rodriguez-Palenzuela et 01., 1988), 50% to purothionin Pur-AI (Ohtani et 01., 1977), 33% to crambin Thi2Ca1 (Teeter et 01., 1981) and viscotoxin Vis A3 (Samuelsson et 01., 1974). The homologies for JRth-2 at the amino acid level were 83% to barley leaf thionins DB4 (Bohlmann and Apel, 1987), 71% to pKG1940 (Gausing, 1987), 46% to the hordothionin Hth-l (Rodriguez-Palenzuela et 01., 1988) and purothionin Pur-AI (Ohtani et 01., 1977), 41% to crambin Thi2CaI (Teeter et 01., 1981) and 33% to the viscotoxin Vis A3 (Samuelsson et 01., 1974). Like other thionin precursors, the putative rice thionin has an N-terminal domain characteristic of a signal peptide and an acidic C-terminal extension. In the expression studies, rice thionins mRNA were found to accumulate abundantly in endosperm and shoots only with a transcript size of around 600-700 bp. In both of these tissues, the expression of the thionin genes was strongly repressed by the exposure to light. Southern analysis showed that the rice thionin seemed to be coded by 1-2 genes