Determining the Optimal Location for Collocating a Louisiana Sugar Mill and a New Cellulosic Ethanol Plant

This paper examines the possibility of collocating a cellulosic ethanol processing plant with certain Louisiana sugar mills, chosen based on their strategic locations and cane grinding capacity. The prospective plants are compared based on transportation costs and overall economic performance.cellulosic ethanol, advanced biofuels, sugarcane, energy cane, bioenergy, Agribusiness, Production Economics, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, q16, q42,

A synthetic biochemistry platform for cell free production of monoterpenes from glucose.

Cell-free systems designed to perform complex chemical conversions of biomass to biofuels or commodity chemicals are emerging as promising alternatives to the metabolic engineering of living cells. Here we design a system comprises 27 enzymes for the conversion of glucose into monoterpenes that generates both NAD(P)H and ATP in a modified glucose breakdown module and utilizes both cofactors for building terpenes. Different monoterpenes are produced in our system by changing the terpene synthase enzyme. The system is stable for the production of limonene, pinene and sabinene, and can operate continuously for at least 5 days from a single addition of glucose. We obtain conversion yields >95% and titres >15 g l-1. The titres are an order of magnitude over cellular toxicity limits and thus difficult to achieve using cell-based systems. Overall, these results highlight the potential of synthetic biochemistry approaches for producing bio-based chemicals

The Juvenile Addiction Risk Rating For Use in Vocational Rehabilitation

The prevalence of substance use among adolescents warrants considerable concern since it often has detrimental effects on an individual’s physical and mental health, and correlates with worsened Social, physical, and employment outcomes. Research shows that adolescents with disabilities are especially susceptible to the development of substance use disorders. To address this concern and to ensure accurate rehabilitation service planning, effective screening for substance use risk is necessary. Unfortunately, the most common screening instruments for adolescent substance use rely on information obtained solely from self-report. This type of data, although useful, is also susceptible to inaccuracies due to such factors as client malingering, memory errors, and denial. These confounds propelled the development of the Juvenile Addiction Risk Rating, a 10-item instrument that rates the severity of an adolescent’s risk for substance addiction based on data collected from collateral sources as opposed to data collected solely from self-report. However, it had not been validated for use in vocational rehabilitation. This investigation presented 39 certified rehabilitation counselors with three vignettes depicting individuals of low, moderate, and high risk of substance use disorder with instructions to score a Juvenile Addiction Risk Rating (JARR) based on the information within the vignettes. This study also investigated whether statistical differences of JARR total scores were present between males and females, and ethnicities represented as Black/African American, White/Caucasian, Hispanic, and Other. Overall, the certified rehabilitation counselors scored with 95.73% accuracy, correctly scoring 112 of the 117 vignettes. An independent samples t-test found no statistical difference in mean total scores among males and females, but a one-way ANOVA, and post hoc Tukey HSD found a statistical difference of mean total scores between White/Caucasian and Hispanic ethnicities, but with a small effect size

Jumping to Conclusions: The Effects of Hydration Status on Kinetics and Electromyography in the Vertical Jump

Results: Significant differences were present between hypo- and euhydrated conditions for peak and mean force during the CMJ with no difference in jump height. Significant differences were present between conditions for jump height and jump velocity for the SJ. No differences were seen in any of the four muscles of interest in regard to muscle activation. Significant differences were present between jump height of the CMJ and SJ respectively, with high correlation coefficients to jump velocity in both jump techniques

Synthesis and Mechanical Properties of Metallic Multilayers

Compositionally modulated alloys and artificial superlattices are thin-layered structures where the layer thickness is on the order of a few 10s of lattice constants. These alloys have been shown to be unusually strong. Their overall thickness can be very large, in this study we have grown these to a thickness of 45 µm by 2.5 cm, in diameter, much greater than the average. We posit the reasons for this strength are that, during deformation, glissile dislocations are pinned at layer boundaries, the presence of image forces, and the formation of Lomer-Cottrell and Hirth dislocation locks. In this thesis we examine the fundamental reasons why layered alloys show such as high yield stress and compare our experimental data with our strength model using compositionally modulated copper-nickel as an example. We combine experimental synthesis with the molecular dynamics modelling using LAMMPS to compare this data with first principle modelling. LAMMPS shows dislocations pinning at alternate boundaries, consistent with literature observations. The consequences of this work bears directly on the fields of electrical contacts, sliding wear, and even enhancement of bulk materials strength. We have found that Cu-Ni compositionally modulated alloys can exhibit a hardness of over 500 Hv which corresponds to breaking stresses over 1.5 GPa. We have not observed a significant systematic modulus enhancement. We show that is it possible to produce these compositionally modulated alloys directly on copper coated silicon by electrodeposition through a mask to yield strong materials that can have consequences for new kinds of technological advances in integrated circuit processing that can be integrated into existing manufacturing methods. Because electrochemical deposition is widely used in the field of contacts, these results can have almost immediate practical application in this field. Electrodeposition is also an ambient temperature process, so interfaces can be made very compositionally sharp allowing components mounted on adjacent circuits to remain thermally undamaged. Using this process, it is possible to electrochemically place extremely strong metals anywhere on conductive substrate at essentially ambient temperature