Development of a lewis-based catalytic system for biodiesel production: from a batch laboratory scale to a continuous pilot plant

The development of an industrial process or product involves different steps: (i) identify the necessity of a new product or process; (ii) research in glassware scale to find a way that leads to the desired product or process; (iii) build up and optimize a laboratory pilot plant; (iv) scale up one or more times the pilot plant; (v) build up an industrial plant and start up a commercial production. From the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2011, the Laboratory of Materials and Fuels (Institute of Chemistry, University of Brasília) has focused in the development of an alternative process to produce biodiesel. The aim of this account paper is to describe all this development in order to show the long way to achieve a laboratory pilot plant scale.O desenvolvimento de um processo ou produto industrial envolve diferentes passos: (i) identificar a necessidade de um novo produto ou processo; (ii) pesquisar no laboratório, em escala de vidraria, um caminho que leve ao produto ou processo desejado; (iii) construir uma planta piloto em escala de laboratório; (iv) scale up uma ou mais vezes a planta piloto; (v) construir e iniciar a produção industrial. Do início de 2002 até o fim de 2011, o Laboratório de Materiais e Combustíveis (Instituto de Química, Universidade de Brasília) dedicou-se ao desenvolvimento de um processo alternativo para produzir biodiesel. O objetivo deste trabalho é descrever todo este desenvolvimento, a fim de mostrar o longo caminho para se construir uma planta piloto em escala de laboratório

Synthesis, Characterization and use of Nb2 O5 based Catalysts in Producing Biofuels by Transesterification, Esterification and Pyrolysis

Nb2O5/HX (X = HSO4-, H2PO4-, NO3-) compounds were obtained from the treatment of niobium acid (Nb2O5·xH2O) with sulfuric, phosphoric, and nitric acids as well as Nb2O5 and Nb2O5·xH2O have been investigated as catalysts for the transesterification, esterification and pyrolysis of vegetable oils. The compounds were characterized by thermal analysis (DTA-TGA), spectroscopy (DRX, FT-IR and FT-Raman), surface area (BET) and the acidity (Ho) determined by n-butylamine titration using the Hammet´s indicator method. It was observed that after the acid treatment both the surface area and the acidity decreased as compared to the starting Nb2O5·xH2O. The only exception was a higher acidity verified when nitric acid was used. Among the catalyst investigated, the Nb2O5/H3PO4 presented the highest activity in the alcoholysis of soybean oil with different mono-alcohols (methanol, ethanol, 2-propanol, n-butanol). All tested solids seemed to stabilize the carboxylic acids formed during the pyrolysis, yielding higher acid numbers for the obtained products. Finally, the use of Nb2O5/H3PO4 and Nb2O5/H2SO4 as catalysts for the esterification showed better activity than Nb2O5·xH2O and Nb2O5

Selective hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene by transition metal compounds immobilized in 1-butyl-3-methyl imidazolium room temperature ionic liquids

The compounds [Co(acac)2], [Co(acac)3], [Fe(acac)3] and [Ni(acac)2] (acac = acetylacetonate) dissolved in 1-butyl-3-methyl imidazolium tetrafluoroborate (1), trifluoromethanesulphonate (2) or hexafluorophosphate (3) catalyze the reduction of 1,3-butadiene into butenes in a typical two-phase catalytic reaction. The 1,3-butadiene conversion, the selectivity and turnover frequencies (TOF) are strongly dependent on the nature of the transition metal catalyst precursor and the ionic liquid. For [Co(acac)2] dissolved in 1, kinetic studies strongly suggest that the reaction takes place in the ionic solution bulk, having an apparent activation energy for the overall process of 33.8 kJ mol-1. The recovered ionic catalyst solution can be reused several times without any significant changes on activity and selectivity.Os complexos [Co(acac)2], [Co(acac)3], [Fe(acac)3] e [Ni(acac)2] (acac = acetilacetonato) dissolvidos em tetrafluoroborato de 1-butil-3-metilimidazônio (1), trifluorometanosulfonato de 1-butil-3-metilimidazólio (2) ou hexafluorofosfato de 1-butil-3-metilimidazólio (3), catalisam a hidrogenação de 1,3-butadieno em butenos em sistema catalítico tipicamente bifásico. A conversão do 1,3-butadieno, a seletividade e a freqüência de rotação (TOF) são fortemente dependentes do metal de transição e do líquido iônico. Para [Co(acac)2] dissolvido em 1, estudos cinéticos sugerem que a reação ocorre no meio líquido iônico, com uma energia aparente de ativação de of 33.8 kJ mol-1. A solução iônica do catalisador pode ser recuperada e reutilizada várias vezes sem mudanças perceptíveis na atividade e seletividade da reação

Global, regional, and national under-5 mortality, adult mortality, age-specific mortality, and life expectancy, 1970–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

BACKGROUND: Detailed assessments of mortality patterns, particularly age-specific mortality, represent a crucial input that enables health systems to target interventions to specific populations. Understanding how all-cause mortality has changed with respect to development status can identify exemplars for best practice. To accomplish this, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) estimated age-specific and sex-specific all-cause mortality between 1970 and 2016 for 195 countries and territories and at the subnational level for the five countries with a population greater than 200 million in 2016. METHODS: We have evaluated how well civil registration systems captured deaths using a set of demographic methods called death distribution methods for adults and from consideration of survey and census data for children younger than 5 years. We generated an overall assessment of completeness of registration of deaths by dividing registered deaths in each location-year by our estimate of all-age deaths generated from our overall estimation process. For 163 locations, including subnational units in countries with a population greater than 200 million with complete vital registration (VR) systems, our estimates were largely driven by the observed data, with corrections for small fluctuations in numbers and estimation for recent years where there were lags in data reporting (lags were variable by location, generally between 1 year and 6 years). For other locations, we took advantage of different data sources available to measure under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) using complete birth histories, summary birth histories, and incomplete VR with adjustments; we measured adult mortality rate (the probability of death in individuals aged 15-60 years) using adjusted incomplete VR, sibling histories, and household death recall. We used the U5MR and adult mortality rate, together with crude death rate due to HIV in the GBD model life table system, to estimate age-specific and sex-specific death rates for each location-year. Using various international databases, we identified fatal discontinuities, which we defined as increases in the death rate of more than one death per million, resulting from conflict and terrorism, natural disasters, major transport or technological accidents, and a subset of epidemic infectious diseases; these were added to estimates in the relevant years. In 47 countries with an identified peak adult prevalence for HIV/AIDS of more than 0·5% and where VR systems were less than 65% complete, we informed our estimates of age-sex-specific mortality using the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP)-Spectrum model fitted to national HIV/AIDS prevalence surveys and antenatal clinic serosurveillance systems. We estimated stillbirths, early neonatal, late neonatal, and childhood mortality using both survey and VR data in spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression models. We estimated abridged life tables for all location-years using age-specific death rates. We grouped locations into development quintiles based on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and analysed mortality trends by quintile. Using spline regression, we estimated the expected mortality rate for each age-sex group as a function of SDI. We identified countries with higher life expectancy than expected by comparing observed life expectancy to anticipated life expectancy on the basis of development status alone. FINDINGS: Completeness in the registration of deaths increased from 28% in 1970 to a peak of 45% in 2013; completeness was lower after 2013 because of lags in reporting. Total deaths in children younger than 5 years decreased from 1970 to 2016, and slower decreases occurred at ages 5-24 years. By contrast, numbers of adult deaths increased in each 5-year age bracket above the age of 25 years. The distribution of annualised rates of change in age-specific mortality rate differed over the period 2000 to 2016 compared with earlier decades: increasing annualised rates of change were less frequent, although rising annualised rates of change still occurred in some locations, particularly for adolescent and younger adult age groups. Rates of stillbirths and under-5 mortality both decreased globally from 1970. Evidence for global convergence of death rates was mixed; although the absolute difference between age-standardised death rates narrowed between countries at the lowest and highest levels of SDI, the ratio of these death rates-a measure of relative inequality-increased slightly. There was a strong shift between 1970 and 2016 toward higher life expectancy, most noticeably at higher levels of SDI. Among countries with populations greater than 1 million in 2016, life expectancy at birth was highest for women in Japan, at 86·9 years (95% UI 86·7-87·2), and for men in Singapore, at 81·3 years (78·8-83·7) in 2016. Male life expectancy was generally lower than female life expectancy between 1970 and 2016, an

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe