Hydroprocessing has become the main technology for the production of API Group II and III base oils. One of the key properties is viscosity index for Group II and III base oils. The effect of wax content in hydrocracker unconverted oil on viscosity index and yield was studied in a 400 kton/year hydroisomerization dewaxing plant at a total pressure of 15 MPa, a feed rate of 38 ton/hour, and a ga...

Mineral oils (also known as base oils, mineral base oils or lubricant base oils) are chemical substances prepared from naturally occurring crude petroleum oil. Crude oil is distilled first at atmospheric pressure and then under high vacuum to yield vacuum distillates and residual fractions that can be further refined to mineral oils. Mineral oils refined from petroleum crude oils are complex an...

Technologies for storing, transmitting, and processing information have made astounding progress in dematerialization. The amount of physical mass needed to represent one bit of information has dramatically decreased in the last few years, and is still declining. However, information will always need a material basis. In this chapter, we address both the upstream (from mining to the product) an...

In this paper, we propose use of the influence diagram for stock portfolio selection. We use an algorithm that applies the mutual information as the metric to guide the refinement of the influence diagram. We applied the algorithm to the conceptual refinement of the influence diagram. We tested our algorithm to a specific domain – portfolio selection; the result is impressive compared to the S&...

The effects of stocking density on the performance, egg quality, leukocyte concentration, blood biochemistry, corticosterone levels, bone mineral density, and noxious gas emission of laying hens were investigated. Eight hundred 34-week-old Hy-Line Brown laying hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) were randomly assigned to one of 4 treatments, each of which was replicated 4 times. Four stocking densi...

Although frequently suggested as a goal for ecosystem-based fisheries management, incorporating ecosystem information into stock assessments has proven challenging. The uncertainty of input data, coupled with the structural complex multi-species models, currently makes use absolute values from such models contentious short-term single-species management advice. Here, we propose different approa...

Clark and Scarf (1960) consider a two-stage inventory system in a finite horizon. They show that echelon base-stock policies are optimal. The optimal base-stock levels can be obtained by solving two sets of recursive, functional equations. Nevertheless, finding the upstream base-stock level is more complex because the functional equation depends on the downstream base-stock level. This paper pr...