The U.S. Dept. of Energy estimates that there are more than 40,000 distillation columns in North America, and that they consume about 40% of the total energy used to operate plants in the refining and bulk chemical industries (1). Improving the energy efficiency of this unit operation, therefore, is important to achieving overall plant energy savings. Reducing the energy consumption of distilla...

It is well known that every 2-edge-connected graph can be oriented so that the resulting digraph is strongly connected. Here we study the problem of orienting a connected graph with cut edges in order to maximize the number of ordered vertex pairs (x,y) such that there is a directed path from x to y. After transforming this problem, we prove a key theorem about the transformed problem that allo...

Learning to Optimize (Li & Malik, 2016) is a recently proposed framework for learning optimization algorithms using reinforcement learning. In this paper, we explore learning an optimization algorithm for training shallow neural nets. Such high-dimensional stochastic optimization problems present interesting challenges for existing reinforcement learning algorithms. We develop an extension that...

sour orange is one of native fruits of iran, which are widely used in the food industry, medicine and cosmetics. sour orange peel is rich source of pectin and generally discarded as waste. in this research, response surface methodology (rsm) with box–behnken design was employed to optimize and to study the effects of the independent variables (temperature, time and ph) on the yield of pectin an...

rectangular waveguide (wr) is one of the earliest types of transmission lines. rectangular waveguide can be produced by hot extrusion process. in this paper, the hot extrusion process of cuzn5 rectangular waveguide was investigated by finite element method (fem). in addition, genetic algorithm method (ga) was used to optimize the die geometry and process conditions to achieve the lowest magnitu...

We investigate stability properties of indirectly damped systems of evolution equations in Hilbert spaces, under new compatibility assumptions. We prove polynomial decay for the energy of solutions and optimize our results by interpolation techniques, obtaining a full range of power-like decay rates. In particular, we give explicit estimates with respect to the initial data. We discuss several ...

Background An increasing number of acute referrals have led to unsatisfactory working conditions and a degradation of the service to the families and their children attending paediatric emergency and assessment units (PEAU). The usual way of refering for the general practitioner (GP) was by telephone to the resident. This study investigated if a nurse-led telephone referral system would optimiz...

Purpose: To determine the effects of temperature, pressure and extraction time on oil yield obtained from Polygonatum odoratum as well as the optimum processing conditions for supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) extraction. Methods: Supercritical CO2 extraction technology was adopted in this experiment to study the process of extraction of volatile oil from Polygonatum odoratum while gas chromat...

Quantization, which maps real values of raw data to a series of fixed gray levels, is an inevitable step in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) image formation. Three new quantization methods, Minimum Distortion, Information Expansion and Maximum Entropy are applied in the specific problem. Quantization results of a capillary with milk and the femoralis of rabbit are shown in this paper. Compari...