Married Coal Gasification and Biomass Pyrolysis

This project is a proposal to marry a coal gasification process to a biomass pyrolysis. Coal is pyrolized to produce syngas and a large amount of heat. The syngas is treated and fed to a Fischer-Tropsch process. The excess heat produces steam that is used to pyrolize biomass. The biomass produces char, gas, and vapor. The char and gas are recovered, and the vapor is condensed to produce bio-oil. The proposed plant has a capacity of 1100 tons of biomass (550 dry tons) per day. I assumed an operating factor of 0.9 The plant could be operational within five years, with approximately three years of construction and a year operating at lowered capacity. However, significant research is needed to confirm and optimize certain aspects of the process. The process has some sections at high temperatures and moderately high pressures. Certain units will be constructed of special materials to withstand the temperatures. Safety features will also be installed which will prevent temperatures from elevating beyond normal operating levels. A strong basic solution is also used to strip CO2 from process gases. These units will be constructed of stainless steel for structural integrity. Finally, highly combustible products are used in the process. Safe storage of these materials and strict fire safety provisions will be established to minimize the risks of fire or explosion. Safety considerations affected the capital cost of the plant because of the special materials required for safe construction. The process does not have many environmental concerns. The gases produced by gasification and pyrolysis are collected as a byproduct to be used in a Fischer-Tropsch process. The disposal of liquid and solid waste is more of a concern. Solid slag can be disposed of in a landfill. Some liquid waste contains slag and ash and can be filtered. Other liquid waste has bio-oil contamination which is more expensive to remove. I made the assumption that this waste stream would need secondary treatment, which is fairly expensive and is a large contribution to the overall costs. The total capital cost of the plant is around $30 million. For a chemical plant, this is not very large. The capital cost has a very minor effect on the production costs. To run the equipment, the plant will employ 45 process engineers, with 5 shifts of 9 operators. Bio-oil can be produced for$1.77 per kilogram. Estimates for bio-oil produced from an unmarried process are hard to find, and have not been scaled to a current value. They range from $0.09 to$0.50 per kilogram. The large disparity between my price and the literature values is mostly due to the high cost of disposing water contaminated with bio-oil. I recommend proceeding with research on ways to lower the operating costs. Specifically, if water contaminated with bio-oil can be disposed of with primary treatment rather than secondary treatment, the cost of production is lowered by $1.47 per kilogram, to$0.30 per kilogram. Lowering waste treatment costs will make the plant highly competitive with unmarried designs. Further research should also be conducted into other process parameters, such as the effectiveness of NaOH stripping, a novel technique I used to lower treatment costs

Catholic Treatment Ethics and Secular Law: How Can They Cohere?

Central elements of Roman Catholic treatment ethics include: 1) that rejection of treatment with the intent of hastening death (even for a good end) is ethically equivalent to active euthanasia with the same intent; 2) a distinction between morally obligatory “ordinary” treatment and morally optional “extraordinary treatment”; 3) that the quality of the patient’s life is not be a legitimate basis for rejecting treatment; and 4) that extraordinary treatment is not forbidden, but optional, and that it is the patient or the patient’s legal surrogate–not the doctor– who has the right to choose or reject it. Despite these principles, even in a cultural climate fully sympathetic to Catholic treatment ethics, it is appropriate as a legal matter to maintain the doctrine of informed consent under which it is possible for patients or their surrogates to reject life-preserving treatment, including for unethical reasons. It is normally impossible to enforce in practice in the external forum a differentiation between rejection of treatment for ethically acceptable and ethically unacceptable reasons. By contrast, in cases of direct killing, such as assisting suicide, the intent to cause death is unmistakable (as opposed to accepting an increased risk of death as a foreseeable but unintended consequence of pursuing a good end). In a pluralistic society Catholic ethics cannot be legislatively enforced on the ground that they are compelled by Catholic teaching. However, the basic principles of Catholic treatment ethics may be justified based on logic and widely accepted norms of human equality independently of revelation or ecclesiastical authority. Particularly in protecting the right of individuals to choose and obtain life-saving medical treatment regardless of their “quality of life,” and in suicide prevention, secular law can and should be congruent with key aspects of Catholic health care ethics

Discipline Policies in Urban Educational Contexts: Approaches, Barriers, and Restorative Justice

Beginning in the late twentieth century, a surge in school violence associated with racism and urban poverty has sparked increased use of punitive approaches to school discipline, and these high-stakes approaches have become normalized in school districts nationwide. “Discipline” at the classroom and school level, understood as the procedures and interactions between students and teacher surrounding behaviors deemed inappropriate, have historically been grouped into two domains: punitive discipline and restorative justice. Punitive justice methods increased their domination in urban classrooms throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s but in the last decade or so, a new wave of conflict-resolution-based discipline has emerged in the form of restorative justice practices. In this paper, I will outline the pedagogical bases and development of each approach and, based on data and scholarly analysis, contend that restorative justice techniques are more effective in lowering instances of misconduct and creating a successful learning environment. I will present statistics on the effect and success levels of each, as well as case studies exemplifying the implementation of each discipline strategy. In my analysis of punitive discipline, I will, in part, focus specifically on the argument that these policies are particularly detrimental to boys of color. I will then pose the question: If the research is so conclusive, why aren’t more schools transitioning from punitive discipline to restorative justice techniques? I argue that the foremost barriers to this transition are an ill-placed emphasis on safety in schools, and an unfounded perception of racial threat to order in the classroom

Experimental study of main rotor tip geometry and tail rotor interactions in hover. Volume 1. Text and figures

A model scale hover test was conducted in the Sikorsky Aircraft Model rotor hover Facility to identify and quantify the impact of the tail rotor on the demonstrated advantages of advanced geometry tip configurations. The test was conducted using the Basic Model Test Rig and two scaled main rotor systems, one representing a 1/5.727 scale UH-60A BLACK HAWK and the others a 1/4.71 scale S-76. Eight alternate rotor tip configurations were tested, 3 on the BLACK HAWK rotor and 6 on the S-76 rotor. Four of these tips were then selected for testing in close proximity to an operating tail rotor (operating in both tractor and pusher modes) to determine if the performance advantages that could be obtained from the use of advanced geometry tips in a main rotor only environment would still exist in the more complex flow field involving a tail rotor. The test showed that overall the tail rotor effects on the advanced tip configurations tested are not substantially different from the effects on conventional tips

Hybrid perturbation/Bubnov-Galerkin technique for nonlinear thermal analysis

A two step hybrid analysis technique to predict the nonlinear steady state temperature distribution in structures and solids is presented. The technique is based on the regular perturbation expansion and the classical Bubnov-Galerkin approximation. The functions are obtained by using the regular perturbation method. These functions are selected as coordinate functions and the classical Bubnov-Galerkin technique is used to compute their amplitudes. The potential of the proposed hybrid technique for the solution of nonlinear thermal problems is discussed. The effectiveness of this technique is demonstrated by the effects of conduction, convection, and radiation modes of heat transfer. It is indicated that the hybrid technique overcomes the two major drawbacks of the classical techniques: (1) the requirement of using a small parameter in the regular perturbation method; and (2) the arbitrariness in the choice of the coordinate functions in the Bubnov-Galerkin technique. The proposed technique extends the range of applicability of the regular perturbation method and enhances the effectiveness of the Bubnov-Galerkin technique