Concentration and precipitation of NaCl and KCl from salt cake leach solutions by electrodialysis

Electrodialysis was investigated for cost-effective recovery of salt from salt cake leach solutions. (Salt cake is a waste stream generated by the aluminum industry during treatment of aluminum drosses and scrap.) We used a pilot-scale electrodialysis stack of 5 membrane pairs, each with an effective area of 0.02 m{sup 2}. The diluate stream contained synthetic NaCl, KCl,mixtures of NaCl and KCl, and actual salt cake leach solutions (mainly NaCl and KCl, with small amounts of MgCl{sub 2}). We concentrated and precipitated NaCl and KCl salts from the concentrate steam when the initial diluate stream concentration was 21.5 to 28.8 wt% NaCl and KCl. We found that water transferring through the membranes was a significant factor in overall efficiency of salt recovery by electrodialysis

Operation and performance of the ATLAS semiconductor tracker

The semiconductor tracker is a silicon microstrip detector forming part of the inner tracking system of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. The operation and performance of the semiconductor tracker during the first years of LHC running are described. More than 99% of the detector modules were operational during this period, with an average intrinsic hit efficiency of (99.74±0.04)%. The evolution of the noise occupancy is discussed, and measurements of the Lorentz angle, δ-ray production and energy loss presented. The alignment of the detector is found to be stable at the few-micron level over long periods of time. Radiation damage measurements, which include the evolution of detector leakage currents, are found to be consistent with predictions and are used in the verification of radiation background simulations

Curriculum corruption? : On the place of subjects in secondary school curriculum making

The production of a W boson in association with a single charm quark is studied using 4.6 fb-1 of pp collision data at 1as = 7TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. In events in which a W boson decays to an electron or muon, the charm quark is tagged either by its semileptonic decay to a muon or by the presence of a charmed meson. The integrated and differential cross sections as a function of the pseudorapidity of the lepton from the W-boson decay are measured. Results are compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD calculations obtained from various parton distribution function parameterisations. The ratio of the strange-to-down sea-quark distributions is determined to be 0.96+-00.30 at Q2 = 1.9 GeV, which supports the hypothesis of an SU(3)-symmetric composition of the light-quark sea. Additionally the cross-section ratio \u3c3(W+ + c)/\u3c3(W- +c) is compared to the predictions obtained using parton distribution function parameterisations with different assumptions about the s\u2013s quark asymmetry