Wastewater Afterpurification of Chromium Compounds Production by the Ultrafiltration and Reverse Osmosis

Most often, reagent methods are used to treat wastewater from Cr (VI) compounds. This treatment technology allows reducing the concentration of Cr (VI) in wastewater only. Comparing the composition of wastewater after reagent treatment of chromium compounds using Ca(OH)2 with established standards, it can be concluded that it is necessary to purify a number of pollutants. In this study, wastewater afterpurification of chromium compounds production by the ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis was considered. Modelling processes using WAVE 1.72 software confirmed that the proposed post-treatment scheme was highly efficient and that wastewater could be discharged into a water body without harming it. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd

IMRT beam angle optimization using electromagnetism-like algorithm

The selection of appropriate beam irradiation directions in radiotherapy – beam angle optimization (BAO) problem – is very impor- tant for the quality of the treatment, both for improving tumor irradia- tion and for better organs sparing. However, the BAO problem is still not solved satisfactorily and, most of the time, beam directions continue to be manually selected in clinical practice which requires many trial and error iterations between selecting beam angles and computing fluence patterns until a suitable treatment is achieved. The objective of this pa- per is to introduce a new approach for the resolution of the BAO problem, using an hybrid electromagnetism-like algorithm with descent search to tackle this highly non-convex optimization problem. Electromagnetism- like algorithms are derivative-free optimization methods with the ability to avoid local entrapment. Moreover, the hybrid electromagnetism-like algorithm with descent search has a high ability of producing descent directions. A set of retrospective treated cases of head-and-neck tumors at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology of Coimbra is used to discuss the benefits of the proposed algorithm for the optimization of the BAO problem.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT