Maximizing the Educational Investment with a Required Personal and Professional Development Program for Business Majors

Higher-education institutions have been asked to go beyond the classroom and provide a better return on investment for students. With no line item in the budget, the Pamplin School of Business of the University of Portland linked both formation of the person and professional development by creating a mechanism of a credit-based program designed to marry theoretical, self-assessment, and experiential learning. Students engage in a series of holistic processes and professional development coursework challenging them to find and fulfill their potential while effectively exploring the core question of the university, “Who am I?” Between 2012 and 2016, 93 percent of business students acquired a vocational career position within six months of graduation, maximizing their education investment. This article is dedicated to the student workers who were instrumental in assisting in the development and implementation of the program. This program could not have been developed without them. These workers include Dani Remy Baker, Jasmine Dudley, Larissa Woods, Brooke Murphy, Cole Preece, and Amanda Stowe. The graphics in the paper are by Cole Preec

Water vapour sorption and humidity - a survey on measuring methods and standards

Under environmental conditions water exists in all three classical states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. The water molecule is non-linear and therefore polar. In comparison with other liq-uids water has anomalous features; about 63 exceptional properties are recorded. This article starts with reviewing properties of water, typical occurrences and definitions such as relative and absolute humidity and moisture content. Water is present everywhere in nature and engineering; it may be helpful or harmful. The survey concerns both: atmospheric hygrometry and usual measuring methods of the mois-ture content of solids and liquids as well as water sorption. The determination of the atmos-pheric humidity is among the more difficult problems in metrology. In contrast, humidity de-termination of materials is simple; however the definition of the dry state is difficult. Because water is bound at and in solids and liquids in many different ways it turns out that the humidi-ty content of materials is difficult to define and to measure accurately. We provide a survey on the measuring methods, describe the most important ones and discuss advantages and ac-curacy. In the search for extraterrestrial water special remote measuring methods have been developed analysing the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation either of natural sources or produced by a probe and reflected. Spacious deposits have been detected photographically. In situ investigations are made using conventional methods. With regard to the problems of measurements, standardisation of measuring methods and procedures is required. There exist many institutions, which are engaged in investigating the use of water and standardising measuring methods. In tabular form, we give a survey on existing standards

Impact of surface roughness on diffusion of confined fluids

Using event-driven molecular dynamics simulations, we quantify how the self diffusivity of confined hard-sphere fluids depends on the nature of the confining boundaries. We explore systems with featureless confining boundaries that treat particle-boundary collisions in different ways and also various types of physically (i.e., geometrically) rough boundaries. We show that, for moderately dense fluids, the ratio of the self diffusivity of a rough wall system to that of an appropriate smooth-wall reference system is a linear function of the reciprocal wall separation, with the slope depending on the nature of the roughness. We also discuss some simple practical ways to use this information to predict confined hard-sphere fluid behavior in different rough-wall systems

Certification of the Specific Micropore Volume and the Median Micropore Width of Two Microporous Reference Materials According to Draft-DIN 66135-4, BCR-704, BCR-705.

Abstract not availableJRC.D-Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (Geel

Biodiesel production from used cooking oil using a novel surface functionalised TiO2 nano-catalyst

A novel, efficient and recyclable mesoporous TiO2/PrSO3H solid acid nano-catalyst was synthesised by the post-synthetic grafting of propyl sulfonic acid groups onto a mixed phase of a TiO2 support. The synthesised nano-catalyst was characterised using FTIR, SEM, TEM, XPS, N2 adsorption–desorption isotherms, XRD, DSC, TGA, and CHNS analysis. The percentage of loading for propyl sulfonic acid on the TiO2 support was calculated using CHNS analysis and TGA. The catalytic performance of TiO2/PrSO3H on the production of the fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) via simultaneous esterification and transesterification reactions from used cooking oil (UCO) has been studied. The effects of different process parameters showed that 98.3% of FAME can be obtained after 9 hrs of reaction time with 1:15 molar ratio of oil to methanol, 60 °C reaction temperature and 4.5 wt% catalyst loading. It was also found that the one-pot post-surface functionalisation strategy with hydrophilic functional groups (-SO3H) enhanced the acid strengths of the nano-catalyst providing more acid sites for the reactants, and improving the accessibility of methanol to the triglycerides (TG)/free fatty acids (FFAs) by increasing the pore volumes/sizes of the nano-catalyst. The solid acid nano-catalyst was re-used in four consecutive runs without significant loss of catalytic efficiency. Finally, the synthesised biodiesel fuel satisfied ASTM and EN standards

An investigation on the evolution of granule formation by in-process sampling of a high shear granulator

Understanding the growth mechanisms in granulation process is an important topic, providing valuable insights and supports control strategies. Typically, observations in high shear granulators are made after stopping the process. In this work, an in-process sampling technique is described and applied to a high shear wet granulation process. Different samples can be collected over the cause of the high shear granulation process. This allowed observation of the evolution of granules during addition of water at a constant flowrate. For a typical pharmaceutical formulation, we observed that granules nucleate in the first 2 minutes after water addition starts and then grows in size and strength to an average size of 200–1200 μm at 12.5 minutes, corresponding to a sharp increase in torque. Longer water addition times lead to oversized granules and eventually a paste and highly fluctuating torque. Sampling was continued after stopping water addition which showed with time larger formed granules smoothen, whilst the smaller weaker ones disintegrate. The work shows the in-process sampling can facilitate the identification of the required binder quantity in high shear granulation