E nergy costs are the largest percentage of a hydrocarbon plant’s operating expenditures. This is especially true of the distillation process, which requires substantial energy consumption. Concerns over recent high costs and economic pressures continually emphasise the need for efficient distillation design and operation without a loss of performance. This article illustrates how energy-effici...

Philippe Calain discusses the health and environmental hazards of extractive industries like mining and explores the tensions that arise when medical humanitarian organizations are called to intervene in emergencies involving the extractive sector.

Ionic liquids (ILs) are organic salts that have melting points around room temperature. They have received tremendous attention recently due to their low volatility and subsequent potential to reduce air pollution if used as replacements for volatile organic solvents. As a result, they have the potential to be used in a wide variety of chemical processing applications, including as solvents for...

Volatile components from Exocarpium Citri Grandis (ECG) were, respectively, extracted by three methods, that is, steam distillation (SD), headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME), and solvent extraction (SE). A total of 81 compounds were identified by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry including 77 (SD), 56 (HS-SPME), and 48 (SE) compounds, respectively. Despite of the extraction metho...

whereas American industry has available large supplies of natural gas; the refiner in the U.S.A. can therefore produce high quality fuels partly by catalytic cracking of heavy distillates, but his European counterpart has no such opportunity and must rely to a much greater extent on catalytic reforming processes to produce high quality fuels from straightrun naphthas. Again, while demand for hi...

The active parts of 11 medicinal plants were analyzed for physico-chemical evaluation, phytochemical determination and antioxidant activity. The physico-chemical evaluation revealed that highest water soluble extractive was from Origanum vulgare (38%), highest chloroform extractive was from Psoralea corylifolia (21%); highest ethanolic extractive was that of Acorus calamus (11%) and the highest...

The objective of this study was to evaluate different pretreatment methods prior to oxygen delignification on extractives removal and O-delignification selectivity. Four different pretreatment methods were used including ultrasonic treatment, hot water soaking, soda addition-preheating, and applying a high-shear mechanical pretretament. Acacia mangium and mixed hardwood (MHW) kraft pulps were u...

Substantial research is currently focused on the toxicological effects of alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs) and alkylphenols (APs) on aquatic animals. Considerable data are available on the concentrations of APEs and APs in river systems in the United States; however, few if any data are available on the tissue concentrations of fish living in these rivers. A reliable method for the analysis of no...

We experimentally demonstrate the two-step distillation of entanglement. The output of a first distillation stage underwent a second distillation step and was made available for subsequent steps. Our experiment displays the realization of the building blocks required for an entanglement distillation scheme that can fully overcome decoherence.