Fluorination of neodymium carbonate monohydrate with anhydrous hydrogen fluoride in a Carberry spinning-basket reactor

Please read abstract in the article.The South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under the Fluorochemical Expansion Initiative (FEI).http://rsc.li/reaction-engineering2020-08-01hj2019Chemical Engineerin

CO2 Capture by Absorption with Potassium Carbonate

The objective of this work is to improve the process for CO{sub 2} capture by alkanolamine absorption/stripping by developing an alternative solvent, aqueous K{sub 2}CO{sub 3} promoted by piperazine. The best K{sup +}/PZ solvent, 4.5 m K{sup +}/4.5 m PZ, requires equivalent work of 31.8 kJ/mole CO{sub 2} when used with a double matrix stripper and an intercooled absorber. The oxidative degradation of piperazine or organic acids is reduced significantly by inhibitor A, but the production of ethylenediamine is unaffected. The oxidative degradation of piperazine in 7 m MEA/2 m PZ is catalyzed by Cu{sup ++}. The thermal degradation of MEA becomes significant at 120 C. The solubility of potassium sulfate in MEA/PZ solvents is increased at greater CO{sub 2} loading. The best solvent and process configuration, matrix with MDEA/PZ, offers 22% and 15% energy savings over the baseline and improved baseline, respectively, with stripping and compression to 10 MPa. The energy requirement for stripping and compression to 10 MPa is about 20% of the power output from a 500 MW power plant with 90% CO{sub 2} removal. The stripper rate model shows that a ''short and fat'' stripper requires 7 to 15% less equivalent work than a ''tall and skinny'' one. The stripper model was validated with data obtained from pilot plant experiments at the University of Texas with 5m K{sup +}/2.5m PZ and 6.4m K{sup +}/1.6m PZ under normal pressure and vacuum conditions using Flexipac AQ Style 20 structured packing. Experiments with oxidative degradation at low gas rates confirm the effects of Cu{sup +2} catalysis; in MEA/PZ solutions more formate and acetate is produced in the presence of Cu{sup +2}. At 150 C, the half life of 30% MEA with 0.4 moles CO{sub 2}/mole amine is about 2 weeks. At 100 C, less than 3% degradation occurred in two weeks. The solubility of potassium sulfate in MEA solution increases significantly with CO{sub 2} loading and decreases with MEA concentration. The base case corrosion rate in 5 M MEA/1.2M PZ is 22 mpy. With 1 wt% heat stable salt, the corrosion rate increases by 50% to 160% in the order: thiosulfate< oxalate<acetate<formate. Cupric carbonate is ineffective in the absence of oxygen, but 50 to 250 ppm reduces corrosion to less than 2 mpy in the presence of oxygen

Drought in the Anthropocene

Drought management is inefficient because feedbacks between drought and people are not fully understood. In this human-influenced era, we need to rethink the concept of drought to include the human role in mitigating and enhancing drought

Drought in a human-modified world: reframing drought definitions, understanding, and analysis approaches

In the current human-modified world, or Anthropocene, the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes. Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows, and storage changes. Our current inability to adequately analyse and manage drought in many places points to gaps in our understanding and to inadequate data and tools. The Anthropocene requires a new framework for drought definitions and research. Drought definitions need to be revisited to explicitly include human processes driving and modifying soil moisture drought and hydrological drought development. We give recommendations for robust drought definitions to clarify timescales of drought and prevent confusion with related terms such as water scarcity and overexploitation. Additionally, our understanding and analysis of drought need to move from single driver to multiple drivers and from uni-directional to multi-directional. We identify research gaps and propose analysis approaches on (1) drivers, (2) modifiers, (3) impacts, (4) feedbacks, and (5) changing the baseline of drought in the Anthropocene. The most pressing research questions are related to the attribution of drought to its causes, to linking drought impacts to drought characteristics, and to societal adaptation and responses to drought. Example questions include: (i) What are the dominant drivers of drought in different parts of the world? (ii) How do human modifications of drought enhance or alleviate drought severity? (iii) How do impacts of drought depend on the physical characteristics of drought vs. the vulnerability of people or the environment? (iv) To what extent are physical and human drought processes coupled, and can feedback loops be identified and altered to lessen or mitigate drought? (v) How should we adapt our drought analysis to accommodate changes in the normal situation (i.e. what are considered normal or reference conditions) over time? Answering these questions requires exploration of qualitative and quantitative data as well as mixed modelling approaches. The challenges related to drought research and management in the Anthropocene are not unique to drought, but do require urgent attention. We give recommendations drawn from the fields of flood research, ecology, water management, and water resources studies. The framework presented here provides a holistic view on drought in the Anthropocene, which will help improve management strategies for mitigating the severity and reducing the impacts of droughts in future

Drought in a human-modified world: reframing drought definitions, understanding, and analysis approaches

In the current human-modified world, or Anthropocene, the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes.Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows, and storage changes. Our current inability to adequately analyse and manage drought in many places points to gaps in our understanding and to inadequate data and tools. The Anthropocene requires a new framework for drought definitions and research. Drought definitions need to be revisited to explicitly include human processes driving and modifying soil moisture drought and hydrological drought development. We give recommendations for robust drought definitions to clarify timescales of drought and prevent confusion with related terms such as water scarcity and overexploitation. Additionally, our understanding and analysis of drought need to move from single driver to multiple drivers and from uni-directional to multi-directional. We identify research gaps and propose analysis approaches on (1) drivers, (2) modifiers, (3) impacts, (4) feedbacks, and (5) changing the baseline of drought in the Anthropocene. The most pressing research questions are related to the attribution of drought to its causes, to linking drought impacts to drought characteristics, and to societal adaptation and responses to drought. Example questions include (i) What are the dominant drivers of drought in different parts of the world? (ii) How do human modifications of drought enhance or alleviate drought severity? (iii) How do impacts of drought depend on the physical characteristics of drought vs. the vulnerability of people or the environment? (iv) To what extent are physical and human drought processes coupled, and can feedback loops be identified and altered to lessen or mitigate drought? (v) How should we adapt our drought analysis to accommodate changes in the normal situation (i.e. what are considered normal or reference conditions) over time

CO2 Capture by Absorption with Potassium Carbonate

The objective of this work is to improve the process for CO{sub 2} capture by alkanolamine absorption/stripping by developing an alternative solvent, aqueous K{sub 2}CO{sub 3} promoted by piperazine. The best solvent and process configuration, matrix with MDEA/PZ, offers 22% and 15% energy savings over the baseline and improved baseline, respectively, with stripping and compression to 10 MPa. The energy requirement for stripping and compression to 10 MPa is about 20% of the power output from a 500 MW power plant with 90% CO{sub 2} removal. The stripper rate model shows that a ''short and fat'' stripper requires 7 to 15% less equivalent work than a ''tall and skinny'' one. The stripper model was validated with data obtained from pilot plant experiments at the University of Texas with 5m K{sup +}/2.5m PZ and 6.4m K{sup +}/1.6m PZ under normal pressure and vacuum conditions using Flexipac AQ Style 20 structured packing. Experiments with oxidative degradation at low gas rates confirm the effects of Cu{sup +2} catalysis; in MEA/PZ solutions more formate and acetate is produced in the presence of Cu{sup +2}. At 150 C, the half life of 30% MEA with 0.4 moles CO{sub 2}/mole amine is about 2 weeks. At 100 C, less than 3% degradation occurred in two weeks. The solubility of potassium sulfate in MEA solution increases significantly with CO{sub 2} loading and decreases with MEA concentration. The base case corrosion rate in 5 M MEA/1,2M PZ is 22 mpy. With 1 wt% heat stable salt, the corrosion rate increases by 50% to 160% in the order: thiosulfate< oxalate<acetate<formate. Cupric carbonate is ineffective in the absence of oxygen, but 50 to 250 ppm reduces corrosion to less than 2 mpy in the presence of oxygen

Circulating Lipoproteins Are a Crucial Component of Host Defense against Invasive Salmonella typhimurium Infection

Contains fulltext : 79883.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)BACKGROUND: Circulating lipoproteins improve the outcome of severe Gram-negative infections through neutralizing lipopolysaccharides (LPS), thus inhibiting the release of proinflammatory cytokines. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Low density lipoprotein receptor deficient (LDLR-/-) mice, with a 7-fold increase in LDL, are resistant against infection with Salmonella typhimurium (survival 100% vs 5%, p<0.001), and 100 to 1000-fold lower bacterial burden in the organs, compared with LDLR+/+ mice. Protection was not due to differences in cytokine production, phagocytosis, and killing of Salmonella organisms. The differences were caused by the excess of lipoproteins, as hyperlipoproteinemic ApoE-/- mice were also highly resistant to Salmonella infection. Lipoproteins protect against infection by interfering with the binding of Salmonella to host cells, and preventing organ invasion. This leads to an altered biodistribution of the microorganisms during the first hours of infection: after intravenous injection of Salmonella into LDLR+/+ mice, the bacteria invaded the liver and spleen within 30 minutes of infection. In contrast, in LDLR-/- mice, Salmonella remained constrained to the circulation from where they were efficiently cleared, with decreased organ invasion. CONCLUSIONS: plasma lipoproteins are a potent host defense mechanism against invasive Salmonella infection, by blocking adhesion of Salmonella to the host cells and subsequent tissue invasion

Low Q^2 Jet Production at HERA and Virtual Photon Structure

The transition between photoproduction and deep-inelastic scattering is investigated in jet production at the HERA ep collider, using data collected by the H1 experiment. Measurements of the differential inclusive jet cross-sections dsigep/dEt* and dsigmep/deta*, where Et* and eta* are the transverse energy and the pseudorapidity of the jets in the virtual photon-proton centre of mass frame, are presented for 0 < Q2 < 49 GeV2 and 0.3 < y < 0.6. The interpretation of the results in terms of the structure of the virtual photon is discussed. The data are best described by QCD calculations which include a partonic structure of the virtual photon that evolves with Q2.Comment: 20 pages, 5 Figure

Energy Flow in the Hadronic Final State of Diffractive and Non-Diffractive Deep-Inelastic Scattering at HERA

An investigation of the hadronic final state in diffractive and non--diffractive deep--inelastic electron--proton scattering at HERA is presented, where diffractive data are selected experimentally by demanding a large gap in pseudo --rapidity around the proton remnant direction. The transverse energy flow in the hadronic final state is evaluated using a set of estimators which quantify topological properties. Using available Monte Carlo QCD calculations, it is demonstrated that the final state in diffractive DIS exhibits the features expected if the interaction is interpreted as the scattering of an electron off a current quark with associated effects of perturbative QCD. A model in which deep--inelastic diffraction is taken to be the exchange of a pomeron with partonic structure is found to reproduce the measurements well. Models for deep--inelastic $ep$ scattering, in which a sizeable diffractive contribution is present because of non--perturbative effects in the production of the hadronic final state, reproduce the general tendencies of the data but in all give a worse description.Comment: 22 pages, latex, 6 Figures appended as uuencoded fil