ChemArt Automated Packaging System

ChemArt is a Rhode Island based photochemical etching company that specializes in manufacturing Christmas Ornaments. Each Christmas ornament is handmade in the United States, and at this point in time each and every ornament is packaged by hand as well. Packing the ornaments into their retail boxes is labor intensive and time consuming work. The facility is equipped to make more ornaments than package ornaments at any given time, so packaging becomes a bottleneck in their process. Currently ChemArt hires temporary employees to package the surplus Christmas ornaments that the full time staff cannot package. The project proposed by ChemArt was to create an automatic or semiautomatic packaging system for some or all of the ornaments that ChemArt produces. During the first semester, the design team set forth to create an automated packaging system for ChemArts ornaments, focusing specifically on the White House ornaments. ChemArt is a custom design shop with customers ordering ornaments in quantities ranging from 250 ornaments to 950,000, with the White House being ChemArts largest customer. Because of the high volume of custom jobs that ChemArt does - making up sixty percent of the companys business - it is di cult to standardize a machine or system of machines. For this portion of the design project the team focuses on finding design solutions using the White House ornament packaging assembly, which makes up the remaining forty percent of ChemArts business. The second semester was spent focusing specifically on creating adjustable mechanisms that perform the jobs of placing the lid on the conveyor, placing the insert into the box, placing a pamphlet in the box, then sealing the box with the lid. All of these steps were redesigned for adjustability in order to ensure that they would work with any of ChemArts ornament boxes. Once the adjustable designs were created in SolidWorks the team built them and tested them to ensure their adjustability and functionality within the system. Team Pack-in-the-Boxs Capstone Design Project was a success. The team designed, built, tested, and accordingly modified a set of adjustable machines that accomplish the goal of packaging ChemArts Christmas ornaments. With minor modifications the modular apparatuses that the team created can be used with a conveyor system in ChemArts Lincoln, Rhode Island facilities on all of the types of boxes that they use to package the ornaments

Local Thermometry of Neutral Modes on the Quantum Hall Edge

Electrons in two dimensions and strong magnetic fields can form an insulating two-dimensional system with conducting one-dimensional channels along the edge. Electron interactions in these edges can lead to independent transport of charge and heat, even in opposite directions. Here, we heat the outer edge of such a quantum Hall system using a quantum point contact. By placing quantum dots upstream and downstream from the heater, we measure both the chemical potential and temperature of that edge to study charge and heat transport, respectively. We find that charge is transported exclusively downstream, but heat can be transported upstream when the edge has additional structure related to fractional quantum Hall (FQH) physics. Surprisingly, this can occur even when the bulk is in an integer quantum Hall state and the edge contains no signatures of FQH charge transport. We also find an unexpected bulk contribution to heat transport at ν = 1.Physic

The Path to Sustainable Water Resources Solutions

Water is essential both to human survival and to the ecosystems on which people depend. Although Maine is blessed with abundant water sources, managing them is crucial for both short and long-term uses. The authors describe the varying time and spatial scales involved in managing water resources, pointing out that policy decisions made at one time can have far-reaching consequences. They provide illustrations of water-resource projects from Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative, ranging in size from Sebago Laketo vernal pools on individual properties

Infiltration/cure modeling of resin transfer molded composite materials using advanced fiber architectures

A model was developed which can be used to simulate infiltration and cure of textile composites by resin transfer molding. Fabric preforms were resin infiltrated and cured using model generated optimized one-step infiltration/cure protocols. Frequency dependent electromagnetic sensing (FDEMS) was used to monitor in situ resin infiltration and cure during processing. FDEMS measurements of infiltration time, resin viscosity, and resin degree of cure agreed well with values predicted by the simulation model. Textile composites fabricated using a one-step infiltration/cure procedure were uniformly resin impregnated and void free. Fiber volume fraction measurements by the resin digestion method compared well with values predicted using the model

The State of the Sub-discipline : Mapping Parliamentary and Legislative Studies Using a Survey and Bibliometric Analysis of Three of Its Journals

We map the current state of parliamentary and legislative studies through a survey of 218 scholars and a bibliometric analysis of 25 years of publications in three prominent sub-field journals. We identify two groupings of researchers, a quantitative methods, rational choice-favouring grouping and a qualitative methods, interpretivism-favouring grouping with a UK focus. Upon closer examination, these groupings share similar views about the challenges and future of the sub-discipline. While the sub-discipline is becoming more diverse and international, US-focused literature remains dominant and distinct from UK-focused literature, although there are emerging sub-literatures which are well placed to link them together.Peer reviewe

Accurate and precise viral quantification for rapid vaccine development in- process production monitoring using Radiance® Laser Force Cytology\u3csup\u3eTM

The biopharmaceutical world is evolving rapidly, bringing with it the need for technologies to support this fast-paced and changing environment. Trends in biomanufacturing are moving towards shortened development cycles as companies balance increased productivity requirements with the goal of reducing costs while at the same time ensuring production consistencies are met and batch out of specification (OOS) and failure events are minimized. LumaCyte’s Radiance® instrument using Laser Force Cytology™ (LFC), a combination of advanced optics and microfluidics to rapidly analyze single cells based upon their intrinsic biochemical and biophysical cellular properties and without the need for antibodies or labels. Subtle cellular changes can be precisely captured with Radiance’s automated workflow enabling new capabilities for measuring real-time product quality attributes to support R&D, process development and manufacturing needs across the biopharmaceutical industry. In this poster, LumaCyte demonstrates how tedious infectivity assays such as plaque and TCID50 can be replaced by Radiance’s rapid viral infectivity quantification assay to provide significant shorter time to result (TTR), reduced labor, and improved data quality and consistency. In addition, the bioproduction of vaccines, viral vectors or VLPs can be monitored in real-time, enabling rapid optimization of key processes and increasing process knowledge. As a result, product yield can be increased using the same inputs and the likelihood of OOS events can be reduced. Radiance applications in oncolytic virus research and neutralization assays are presented as well. Overall, LFC delivers faster TTR and improved data quality for vaccine analytics from R&D to manufacturing

Hydrogenation and dehydrogenation of Tetralin and Naphthalene to explore heavy oil upgrading using NiMo/Al₂O₃ and CoMo/Al₂O₃ catalysts heated with steel balls via induction

This paper reports the hydrogenation and dehydrogenation of tetralin and naphthalene as model reactions that mimic polyaromatic compounds found in heavy oil. The focus is to explore complex heavy oil upgrading using NiMo/Al2O3 and CoMo/Al2O3 catalysts heated inductively with 3 mm steel balls. The application is to augment and create uniform temperature in the vicinity of the CAtalytic upgrading PRocess In-situ (CAPRI) combined with the Toe-to-Heel Air Injection (THAI) process. The effect of temperature in the range of 210–380 °C and flowrate of 1–3 mL/min were studied at catalyst/steel balls 70% (v/v), pressure 18 bar, and gas flowrate 200 mL/min (H2 or N2). The fixed bed kinetics data were described with a first-order rate equation and an assumed plug flow model. It was found that Ni metal showed higher hydrogenation/dehydrogenation functionality than Co. As the reaction temperature increased from 210 to 300 °C, naphthalene hydrogenation increased, while further temperature increases to 380 °C caused a decrease. The apparent activation energy achieved for naphthalene hydrogenation was 16.3 kJ/mol. The rate of naphthalene hydrogenation was faster than tetralin with the rate constant in the ratio of 1:2.5 (tetralin/naphthalene). It was demonstrated that an inductively heated mixed catalytic bed had a smaller temperature gradient between the catalyst and the surrounding fluid than the conventional heated one. This favored endothermic tetralin dehydrogenation rather than exothermic naphthalene hydrogenation. It was also found that tetralin dehydrogenation produced six times more coke and caused more catalyst pore plugging than naphthalene hydrogenation. Hence, hydrogen addition enhanced the desorption of products from the catalyst surface and reduced coke formation