Removal of Fluoride from Mine Water via Adsorption for Land-Applied Soil Amendment

The team researched, designed, and economically analyzed a full-scale adsorption column system to be applied in mining processes that leave high amounts of fluoride in their effluent. This system was designed to remove fluoride from water saturated with calcium sulfate, as calcium sulfate is present in high amounts in certain mining processes. Currently, high density sludge (HDS) is commonly employed to reduce fluoride concentrations, but due to solubility limits the sludge treatment cannot lower fluoride below 10 mg/L (ppm). The current enforceable EPA standard for discharged water is at 4 mg/L (ppm), although mining companies anticipate that this standard will soon be lowered to 2 ppm. The team was tasked with designing a process to lower 10 ppm fluoride down to 2 ppm. The team investigated various methods such as precipitation, ion exchange, and reverse osmosis to remove fluoride from the system. These methods were not cost-effective and did not produce environmentally friendly byproducts. The team ultimately presented the solution of bone char as an adsorbent, with a byproduct that can be safely applied as a soil amendment. A full-scale facility with two adsorption columns was designed to treat 1000 gpm of water

Removal of Fluoride from Mine Water via Adsorption for Land-Applied Soil Amendment

The process of mining minerals and elements from ores and rocks creates acid rock drainage (ARD). This drainage is water that contains heavy metals and minerals that can be dangerous for human consumption or damaging to the environment. The mining industry has employed various water treatment methods to prevent these metals and minerals from being discharged into water sources such as ponds, lakes, and streams. Currently, the most used treatment process in the mining industry is a cost-effective highdensity sludge (HDS) process. This method reduces the concentration of metals and elements with the use of lime/limestone. However, the concentration of fluoride is not reduced to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards, and so it is necessary to design a fluoride removal system. Reverse osmosis (RO) was considered as well as precipitation, ion exchange, and adsorption by media such as biochars, bone char, and activated alumina. Although RO is perhaps the most obvious solution to reducing fluoride concentrations, this method was eliminated due to expensive overhead and maintenance costs. Many metals and compounds present in the mine water will lead to severe scaling and precipitates collecting in the membrane, requiring constant upkeep and high maintenance costs. Precipitation was eliminated because it produced a byproduct only suitable for landfilling, and ion exchange was eliminated due to its high cost and complications with competitive ions. Adsorption was chosen as a viable option for fluoride removal because of its low cost and environmentally friendly byproduct generation. The adsorption media was chosen based on a ranking system designed by our team. This system provided a way for our team to compare the adsorption capacity, rate of adsorption, byproduct application, and price per ton for each adsorbent. From this ranking system, Moo Pig Sooie is presenting a solution of cow bone char as a fluoride adsorbent. This type of biochar can be bought pre-charred and can be land applied as a fertilizer once the char is spent. A full-scale facility was designed to treat 1000 gallons per minute (GPM) of mine water 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight months out of the year. To achieve this flowrate and timeline, two packed beds with volumes of 8,900 ft3 each were designed to run in parallel to ensure loading does not occur until the 168-hour mark, the end of the work week. Once the bone char is loaded, the spent bone char will be hauled offsite to be land applied in soil that is naturally slightly acidic. Our experimental results indicate that minimal amounts of fluoride are stripped from bone char in acidic environments. Applying spent bone char to soil presented a desirable environmentally friendly solution for our byproduct. The overall capital cost of a full-scale facility is approximately $750,894 with a yearly operating cost of$4,778,840. Although this is high, the proposed solution will reduce the concentration of fluoride to EPA standards of 2ppm and the process will generate a land-applicable byproduct. Since consuming fluoride in excessive amounts can lead to health issues, public awareness is a necessary aspect of this solution. Citizens affected by the application of fluoride to their soil and water sources should be regularly involved in and aware of the fluoride levels in their environment. From our analysis of bone char adsorption, Moo Pig Sooie believes this type of treatment is a beneficial, cost effective, and sustainable solution for mining facilities that generate high concentrations of fluoride in their water

Removal of Fluoride from Mine Water via Adsorption for Land-Applied Soil Amendment

The Moo Pig Sooie’s researched, designed, and economically analyzed a full-scale adsorption column system to be applied in mining processes that leave high amounts of fluoride in their effluent. This system was designed to remove fluoride from water saturated with calcium sulfate, as calcium sulfate is present in high amounts in certain mining processes. Currently, high density sludge (HDS) is commonly employed to reduce fluoride concentrations, but due to solubility limits the sludge treatment cannot lower fluoride below 10 mg/L (ppm). The current enforceable EPA standard for discharged water is at 4 mg/L (ppm), although mining companies anticipate that this standard will soon be lowered to 2 ppm. The Moo Pig Sooie’s were tasked with designing a process to lower 10 ppm fluoride down to 2 ppm. Moo Pig Sooie investigated various methods such as precipitation, ion exchange, and reverse osmosis to remove fluoride from the system. These methods were not cost-effective and did not produce environmentally friendly byproducts. The team ultimately presented the solution of bone char as an adsorbent, with a byproduct that can be safely applied as a soil amendment. A full-scale facility with two adsorption columns was designed to treat 1000 gpm of water

Removal of Fluoride from Mine Water via Adsorption for Land-Applied Soil Amendment

The process of mining minerals and elements from ores and rocks creates acid rock drainage (ARD). This drainage is water that contains heavy metals and minerals that can be dangerous for human consumption or damaging to the environment. The mining industry has employed various water treatment methods to prevent these metals and minerals from being discharged into water sources such as ponds, lakes, and streams. Currently, the most used treatment process in the mining industry is a cost-effective highdensity sludge (HDS) process. This method reduces the concentration of metals and elements with the use of lime/limestone. However, the concentration of fluoride is not reduced to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards, and so it is necessary to design a fluoride removal system. Reverse osmosis (RO) was considered as well as precipitation, ion exchange, and adsorption by media such as biochars, bone char, and activated alumina. Although RO is perhaps the most obvious solution to reducing fluoride concentrations, this method was eliminated due to expensive overhead and maintenance costs. Many metals and compounds present in the mine water will lead to severe scaling and precipitates collecting in the membrane, requiring constant upkeep and high maintenance costs. Precipitation was eliminated because it produced a byproduct only suitable for landfilling, and ion exchange was eliminated due to its high cost and complications with competitive ions. Adsorption was chosen as a viable option for fluoride removal because of its low cost and environmentally friendly byproduct generation. The adsorption media was chosen based on a ranking system designed by our team. This system provided a way for our team to compare the adsorption capacity, rate of adsorption, byproduct application, and price per ton for each adsorbent. From this ranking system, Moo Pig Sooie is presenting a solution of cow bone char as a fluoride adsorbent. This type of biochar can be bought pre-charred and can be land applied as a fertilizer once the char is spent. A full-scale facility was designed to treat 1000 gallons per minute (GPM) of mine water 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight months out of the year. To achieve this flowrate and timeline, two packed beds with volumes of 8,900 ft3 each were designed to run in parallel to ensure loading does not occur until the 168-hour mark, the end of the work week. Once the bone char is loaded, the spent bone char will be hauled offsite to be land applied in soil that is naturally slightly acidic. Our experimental results indicate that minimal amounts of fluoride are stripped from bone char in acidic environments. Applying spent bone char to soil presented a desirable environmentally friendly solution for our byproduct. The overall capital cost of a full-scale facility is approximately $750,894 with a yearly operating cost of$4,778,840. Although this is high, the proposed solution will reduce the concentration of fluoride to EPA standards of 2ppm and the process will generate a land-applicable byproduct. Since consuming fluoride in excessive amounts can lead to health issues, public awareness is a necessary aspect of this solution. Citizens affected by the application of fluoride to their soil and water sources should be regularly involved in and aware of the fluoride levels in their environment. From our analysis of bone char adsorption, Moo Pig Sooie believes this type of treatment is a beneficial, cost effective, and sustainable solution for mining facilities that generate high concentrations of fluoride in their water

Topological character of hydrodynamic screening in suspensions of hard spheres: an example of universal phenomenon

Although in the case of polymer solutions the existence of hydrodynamic screening is considered as established, use of the same methods for suspensions of hard spheres so far have failed to produce similar results. In this work we reconsider this problem. Using superposition of topological, combinatorial and London-style qualitative arguments, we prove the existence of screening in suspensions. We show that the nature of hydrodynamic screening in suspensions is analogous to that known for the Meissner effect in superconductors. The extent of screening depends on volume fraction of hard spheres. The zero volume fraction limit corresponds to the normal state. The case of finite volume fractions-to the mixed state typical for superconductors of the second kind. Such a state is becoming fully "superconducting" at some critical volume fraction for which the (zero frequency) relative viscosity diverges. Our analytical results describing this divergence are in accord with known scaling results obtained by Brady and Bicerano et al which are well supported by experimental data. We provide theoretical explanation of the divergence of relative viscosity in terms of a topological-type transition which mathematically can be made isomorphic to the more familiar Bose-Einstein condensation transition. Because of this, the methods developed in this work are not limited to suspensions only. In concluding section we mention other applications of the developed formalism ranging from turbulence and magnetohydrodynamics to high temperature superconductors, QCD, string models, etc.Comment: 49 page

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Biological origins as discursive truth : exploring Singapore's knowledge edifice.

This paper seeks to understand the phenomenon of silence in Singapore through an analysis at the level of rhetoric, discourse and ideology.Bachelor of Communication Studie