In-situ microwave-assisted catalytic upgrading of heavy oil: Experimental validation and effect of catalyst pore structure on activity.

In-situ combustion alone may not provide sufficient heating for downhole, catalytic upgrading of heavy oil in the Toe-to-Heel Air Injection (THAI) process. In this study, a new microwave heating technique has been proposed as a strategy to provide the requisite heating. Microwave technology is alone able to provide rapid heating which can be targeted at the catalyst packing and/or the incoming oil in its immediate vicinity.

Characterisation of potato crisp effective porosity using micro-CT.

Background: The effective porosity is an important quantitative parameter for food products that has a significant effect on taste and quality. It is challenging to quantify the apparent porosity of fried potato crisps as they have a thin irregularly shaped cross section containing oil and water. This study uses a novel micro-CT technique to determine the solid volume fraction and hence the effective porosity of three types of potato crisps: standard continuously fried crisps, microwaved crisps, and continuously fried 'kettle' crisps.

Multi-granularity Parallel Computing in a Genome-Scale Molecular Evolution Application.

Previously [1], we reported a coarse-grained parallel computational approach to identifying rare molecular evolutionary events often referred to as horizontal gene transfers. Very high degrees of parallelism (up to 65x speedup on 4,096 processors) were reported, yet the overall execution time for a realistic problem size was still on the order of 12 days. With the availability of large numbers of compute clusters, as well as genomic sequence from more than 2,000 species containing as many as 35,000 genes each, and trillions of sequence nucleotides in all, we demonstrated the computational feasibility of a method to examine "clusters" of genes using phylogenetic tree similarity as a distance metric.

Adsorbate-limited conductivity of graphene.

We present a theory of electronic transport in graphene in the presence of randomly placed adsorbates. Our analysis predicts a marked asymmetry of the conductivity about the Dirac point, as well as a negative weak-localization magnetoresistivity. In the region of strong scattering, renormalization group corrections drive the system further towards insulating behavior.

GENDER CONVERGENCE IN THE AMERICAN HERITAGE TIME USE STUDY (AHTUS).

We present evidence from a new comprehensive database of harmonized national time-diary data that standardizes information on almost 40 years of daily life in America. The advantages of the diary method over other ways of calculating how time is spent are reviewed, along with its ability to generate more reliable and accurate measures of productive activity than respondent estimates or other alternatives. We then discuss the various procedures used to develop these harmonized data, both to standardize reporting detail and to match with Census Bureau population characteristics.

Surface acoustic-wave-induced magnetoresistance oscillations in a two-dimensional electron gas.

We study the geometrical commensurability oscillations imposed on the resistivity of 2D electrons in a perpendicular magnetic field by a propagating surface acoustic wave (SAW). We show that, for omega View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A framework to contain a spatially distributed model of the degradation of solid waste in landfills.

This paper describes the concept and development of a generic spatially distributed numerical model that can contain and link sub-models of landfill processes in order to simulate solid waste degradation and gas generation in landfills. The model has been designed to simulate anaerobic degradation of solid waste saturated in leachate, and to reflect the effect on degradation of the control of both the flow and chemistry of the leachate in the pore space of the solids. The model can accommodate different profiles of waste constituents and therefore has the potential to simulate the effects of pre-treatment techniques such as shredding and inoculation.

ESTprep: preprocessing cDNA sequence reads.

Motivation: High accuracy of data always governs the large-scale gene discovery projects. The data should not only be trustworthy but should be correctly annotated for various features it contains. Sequence errors are inherent in single-pass sequences such as ESTs obtained from automated sequencing.