Lactic acid is widely used in the food, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries and has received increased attention for use as a monomer for the production of biodegradable poly(lactic acid). It can be produced by either biotechnological fermentation or chemical synthesis, but the former route has received considerable interest recently, due to environmental concerns and the limited ...

Objective: To determine the incidence and pattern of presentation of patients with multiple myeloma (MM) in a tertiary health center in Edo state, Niger Delta region of Nigeria noted for its petrochemical industries and gas flare sites. Design: A retrospective study of 30 cases of MM from 1992 to 2004. Setting: University of Benin Teaching Hospital, Nigeria. Main outcome measures: Clinicoimmuno...

Criteria are used to help decide whether the risk associated with a project or activity is low enough to proceed. The key question then, is when is low enough good enough? This paper describes the flexible framework in use in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries for deciding on the tolerability of risk. The levels of individual risk that are generally accepted world-wide as intolerable are...

Passage of the 1990Amendments to the Clean Air Act made it clear that maximum available control technology (“MACT”) regulations on the emission of hazardous air pollutants (“HAPS”) from process heaters and industrial boilers, used extensively in the petroleum and petrochemical industries, would be promulgated under congressional mandate by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency in the year 2...

Surface-active compounds of biological origin are widely used for many industries (cosmetic, food, petrochemical). The Saccharomyces lipolytica CCT-0913 was able to grow and produce a biosurfactant on 5% (v/v) diesel-oil at pH 5.0 and 32C. The cell-free broth emulsified and stabilized the oil-in-water emulsion through a first order kinetics. The results showed that the initial pH value and temp...

background: volatile organic compounds (vocs) are human-made chemicals widely spread in the environment and produced by petrochemical industries and petroleum refineries. the aim of this research was to evaluate the distribution of vocs in the ambient air of mahshahr petrochemical complex, iran. methods: this study was a cross-sectional research performed in 2009. we used the method numbered 15...

Due to easy availability of cheaper raw material and increase in new applications, the use of polyolefins in various industries is becoming a major priority. The Middle East region, on account of its vast oil and gas reserves has, in the last decade or so, been developing many new petrochemical complexes with their expansion into colossal polyolefin production capacities. The predictions are th...

The pooling problem is a folklore NP-hard global optimization problem that finds applications in industries such as petrochemical refining, wastewater treatment and mining. This paper assimilates the vast literature on this problem that is dispersed over different areas and gives new insights on prevalent techniques. We also present new ideas for computing dual bounds on the global optimum by s...

Laccases have received much attention from researchers in last decades due to their ability to oxidise both phenolic and non-phenolic lignin related compounds as well as highly recalcitrant environmental pollutants, which makes them very useful for their application to several biotechnological processes. Such applications include the detoxification of industrial effluents, mostly from the paper...