admission. This proportion could already be greater in some parts of the country and may increase if referrals of cases of self-poisoning increase faster than the facilities for their assessment and management. The provision of social work and psychiatric expertise in casualty departments may be one means of preventing unnecessary medical admissions without risk to the patients. Dr Blake's and Dr Bramble's figures do not demonstrate, however, that any advantage would attach to medical teams taking over assessment from psychiatrists except that, by implication, assessments would be completed sooner by staff working on the ward full time. What the figures actually suggest is that if assessment of overdoses were left to house doctors there would be an increase in admissions to psychiatric units (by 19°U), outpatients (by 5O°'), and referrals to social services (by 140o). So for house doctors to assess overdoses would provide no economy for the psychiatric or social services. The study does not tell us what the consequences would have been for the six patients who the psychiatrists would have admitted but to whom the house doctors would have offered outpatient appointments. E J SALTER

Vitamin D deficiency.

Impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita Le cause e le responsabilita dei cambiamenti climatici sono state trattate sul numero di ottobre della rivista Cda. Approfondiamo l’argomento presentando il documento: “Cambiamenti climatici 2007: impatti, adattamento e vulnerabilita” votato ad aprile 2007 dal secondo gruppo di lavoro del Comitato Intergovernativo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Si tratta del secondo di tre documenti che compongono il quarto rapporto sui cambiamenti climatici.

/pdf/climate-change-2007-impacts-adaptation-and-vulnerability-31xc1cf4d3.pdf

Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Renewable technologies are considered as clean sources of energy and optimal use of these resources minimize environmental impacts, produce minimum secondary wastes and are sustainable based on current and future economic and social societal needs. Sun is the source of all energies. The primary forms of solar energy are heat and light. Sunlight and heat are transformed and absorbed by the environment in a multitude of ways. Some of these transformations result in renewable energy flows such as biomass and wind energy. Renewable energy technologies provide an excellent opportunity for mitigation of greenhouse gas emission and reducing global warming through substituting conventional energy sources. In this article a review has been done on scope of CO2 mitigation through solar cooker, water heater, dryer, biofuel, improved cookstoves and by hydrogen.

https://www.beren.sakarya.edu.tr/sites/beren.sakarya.edu.tr/file/1380752545-07-RenewEn.pdf.pdf

Role of renewable energy sources in environmental protection: A review

The science and technology of ultracapacitors are reviewed for a number of electrode materials, including carbon, mixed metal oxides, and conducting polymers. More work has been done using microporous carbons than with the other materials and most of the commercially available devices use carbon electrodes and an organic electrolytes. The energy density of these devices is 3¯5 Wh/kg with a power density of 300¯500 W/kg for high efficiency (90¯95%) charge/discharges. Projections of future developments using carbon indicate that energy densities of 10 Wh/kg or higher are likely with power densities of 1¯2 kW/kg. A key problem in the fabrication of these advanced devices is the bonding of the thin electrodes to a current collector such the contact resistance is less than 0.1 cm2. Special attention is given in the paper to comparing the power density characteristics of ultracapacitors and batteries. The comparisons should be made at the same charge/discharge efficiency.

Ultracapacitors: Why, How, and Where is the Technology

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) constitute a class of flexible nonlinear models designed to mimic biological neural systems. In this entry, we introduce ANN using familiar econometric terminology and provide an overview of ANN modeling approach and its implementation methods. † Correspondence: Chung-Ming Kuan, Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Sec. 2, Taipei 115, Taiwan; ckuan@econ.sinica.edu.tw. †† I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the editor, Professor Steven Durlauf, for his patience and constructive comments on early drafts of this entry. I also thank Shih-Hsun Hsu and Yu-Lieh Huang for very helpful suggestions. The remaining errors are all mine.

Artificial neural networks

Sustained-release micro-/nanospheres of the ketorolac tromethamine (KTC) were prepared using four different techniques viz., single emulsion solvent evaporation, high pressure homogenization, spray...

Preparation and characterization of ketorolac tromethamine-loaded ethyl cellulose micro-/nanospheres using different techniques

The batch drying kinetics of corn as a test material were investigated experimentally in a novel rotating jet spouted bed (RJSB) using both continuous and intermittent (on/off) spouting and heating schemes. The parameters investigated include inlet air temperature, bed height, superficial air velocity, nozzle diameter, distributor rotational speed and intermittency of spouting and heat input. The results indicate that the drying kinetics are comparable with conventional spouted and fluidized beds for slow drying materials and that intermittent drying can save up to 40% of the thermal energy as well as air consumption with better quality product.



On a etudie experimentalement les cinetiques de sechage discontinu du mais comme materiau d'essai dans un nouveau lit jaillissant a jet rotatif avec des schemas de chauffage et de jaillissement continu et intermittent (on/off). Les parametres etudies incluent la temperature de l'air a l'entree, la hauteur du lit, la vitesse superficielle de l'air, le diametre de l'orifice, la vitesse de rotation du distributeur et l'intermittence du jaillissement et de l'apport de chaleur. Les resultats indiquent que la cinetique de sechage est comparable a celle des lits jaillissants et fluidises classiques pour les materiaux a sechage lent et que le sechage intermittent peut permettre d'economiser jusqu'a 40% de l'energie thermique ainsi que la consommation d'air avec un produit de meilleur qualite.

Batch drying kinetics of corn in a novel rotating jet spouted bed

Modern Drying Technology (MDT) is planned as a five-book series on advances of science and technology of the drying process. The idea of the book series on the subject is not entirely new and reminds me of another book series, Advances in Drying, also composed of five volumes and published in the years 1982–1992. However, these approximately 20 years make an era both for the level of available drying technology and for the level of books on the subject. But contrary to Advances in Drying, which contained randomly selected subjects, the new Modern Drying Technology series is carefully planned. Volume 1 offers Computational Tools at Different Scales, Vol. 2 Experimental Techniques, Vol. 3 Product Quality and Formulation, Vol. 4 Energy Savings, and finally Vol. 5 Process Intensification. Although having no ambition to cover all important subjects, the editors strive to select the most important, most promising, and most advanced topics to include in their book series thus providing high-level, attractive product to all possible readers both from academia and industry. The editors have chosen process simulation as the subject of the first volume. Clearly, the advancement of computer technology is probably the best indicator of the progress made in all technology areas in the last 25 years. It is enough to say that processor clocks of PCs in 1982 ran at 8 MHz compared to 2.5 GHz now, and similar progress applies to RAM memory and hard-disk storage capacity. This allowed much of the dreams of authors contributing to Advances in Drying to be converted to computer code and firm results as shown in MDT Vol. 1. Moreover, owing to increasing computer power, simulations now enter deeper and deeper into details of the solid structure, into single pores or capillaries of micrometric scale, or, recently, even deeper into nanometric scale. This approach, combined with the model of the entire drying system, is the essence of multiscale modeling, which is getting momentum as the computer power increases. A long time ago, I asked myself a question: Will it ever be possible to design a dryer for a given product based on the fundamental solid properties but without performing the drying experiment itself? I believe that we are now closer than ever to reaching this goal. The first chapter, ‘‘Comprehensive Drying Models Based on Volume Averaging: Background, Application and Perspective,’’ by P. Perre, R. Rémond and I. W. Turner shows how this can be made in the case of wood drying. A microscale model is used to model moisture transfer in a pore system. When this is combined with the model of a wood board considered as continuum, we obtain information on how a single board dries, including the internal moisture content, temperature, pressure, and strain and stress distributions. The single board model, in turn, combined with the dryer model gives possibility to model drying of the entire stack. This multiscale model would in fact require only information on the structure of wood and basic thermodynamic properties to be capable to design a dryer. If this is not the case yet, it is because experiments are sometimes cheaper than sophisticated computations. The subject of moisture transport in the micrometric scale, possibly a basis for the drying rate and moisture distribution determination, is addressed in chapter 2, ‘‘Pore-Network Models: A Powerful Tool to Study Drying at the Pore Level and Understand the Influence of Structure on Drying Kinetics,’’ by T. Metzger, E. Tsotsas, and M. Prat. The idea of a solid being a continuum is abandoned and a discrete model of pore system is used instead. The flow of moisture in the pore system is modeled using basic laws of physics. Liquid moisture is allowed to move by capillary pressure difference. Somewhat surprising, though, is the assumption that vapor moves by mechanism of diffusion through inert gas (Eq. 2.6) while no assumption was made about the model of air infiltration into pores. The discrete model, nevertheless, can qualitatively predict basic drying phenomena: the existence of constant and falling drying rate periods, etc. It still lacks quantitative accuracy, however; only simplified pore systems were used so far. As the authors imply, with further work, pore network models may provide parameters for continuous models that can otherwise be obtained by experiments only. Such continuous models considering drying induced deformation of a monolithic solid are presented in the Drying Technology, 26: 812–814, 2008 Copyright # 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0737-3937 print/1532-2300 online DOI: 10.1080/07373930802046559

Modern Drying Technology Vol. 1 Computational Tools at Different Scales

Collagen peptide powders were produced by drying the peptides solution. The molecular weight distribution and amino acid composition of the peptides were determined and the effects of freeze-drying, spray-drying, and hot-air-drying methods on the functional properties were investigated. The collagen peptides had a molecular weight distribution of 180–5000 Da and high content of glycine, arginine, proline, and hydroxyproline but low content of cysteine and methionine. Freeze drying is found to be the best method to have superior functional properties. Spray drying can still be preferred if lower cost and higher production throughput are required.

Effect of Drying Processes on the Functional Properties of Collagen Peptides Produced from Chicken Skin

This compact book is a valuable addition to the rapidly growing technical and scientific literature on drying technology. It is especially significant since it summarizes the fundamentals as well t...

Arun S. Mujumdar

Papers

Preparation and characterization of ketorolac tromethamine-loaded ethyl cellulose micro-/nanospheres using different techniques

Batch drying kinetics of corn in a novel rotating jet spouted bed

Modern Drying Technology Vol. 1 Computational Tools at Different Scales

Effect of Drying Processes on the Functional Properties of Collagen Peptides Produced from Chicken Skin

Instant Controlled Pressure Drop (DIC) in Food Processing