Abstract: This paper determines the presence and levels of phthalates in sachet and borehole water source in some parts of Delta State, Nigeria. Sachet and borehole water samples were collected from seven different water packaging facilities and level of phthalates determined using GC-MS instrumentation. Phthalates concentration in borehole samples varied from 0.00-0.01 (DMP), 0.06-0.20 (DEP), 0.10-0.98 (DBP), 0.21-0.36 (BEHP), 0.01-0.03 (DnOP) µg/L and (BBP) was not detectable; while sachet water varied from 0.03-0.95 (DMP), 0.16-12.45 (DEP), 0.57-3.38 (DBP), 0.00-0.03 (BBP), 0.08-0.31 (BEHP) and 0-0.03 (DnOP) µg/L. Phthalates concentration in the sachet water was higher than that of the corresponding boreholes sources and also showed significant difference (p < 0.05) between the two. Sources of these phthalate esters were the interaction between water molecules and plastic storage facilities. Although concentration of all phthalate esters analyzed were lower than the threshold limit value(TLV), over time storage of water samples in this medium can lead to substantial increase with negative effects on individuals consuming them.
Abstract: The main purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive review of various physical and chemical processes for electronic waste (e-waste) recycling, their advantages and shortfalls towards achieving a cleaner process of waste utilization, with especial attention towards extraction of metallic values. Current status and future perspectives of waste printed circuit boards (PCBs) recycling are described. E-waste characterization, dismantling/ disassembly methods, liberation and classification processes, composition determination techniques are covered. Manual selective dismantling and metal-nonmetal liberation at – 150 µm at two step crushing are found to be the best. After size reduction, mainly physical separation/concentration processes employing gravity, electrostatic, magnetic separators, froth floatation etc., which are commonly used in mineral processing, have been critically reviewed here for separation of metals and non-metals, along with useful utilizations of the non-metallic materials. The recovery of metals from e-waste material after physical separation through pyrometallurgical, hydrometallurgical or biohydrometallurgical routes is also discussed along with purification and refining and some suitable flowsheets are also given. It seems that hydrometallurgical route will be a key player in the base and precious metals recoveries from e-waste. E-waste recycling will be a very important sector in the near future from economic and environmental perspectives.
Abstract: The study assessed the effect of crude oil applied at rates, 0, 2, 5, and 10% on the fractional chemical forms and availability of some metals in soils from Usen, Edo State, with no known crude oil contamination and soil from a crude oil spill site in Ubeji, Delta State, Nigeria. Three methods were used to determine the bioavailability of metals in the soils: maize (Zea mays) plant, EDTA and BCR sequential extraction. The sequential extract acid soluble fraction of the BCR extraction (most labile fraction of the soils, normally associated with bioavailability) were compared with total metal concentration in maize seedlings as a means to compare the chemical and biological measures of bioavailability. Total Fe was higher in comparison to other metals for the crude oil contaminated soils. The metal concentrations were below the limits of 4.7% Fe, 190mg/kg Cu and 720mg/kg Zn intervention values and 36mg/kg Cu and 140mg/kg Zn target values for soils provided by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) guidelines. The concentration of the metals in maize seedlings increased with increasing rates of crude oil contamination. Comparison of the metal concentrations in maize seedlings with EDTA extractable concentrations showed that EDTA extracted more metals than maize plant.
Abstract: Squalene is a valuable component of the oil composed of 30 carbon atoms and is mainly used for cosmetic materials. The main concern of this article is to study the Squalene composition in the Lebanese olive oil and to compare it with foreign oil results. To our knowledge, extraction of Squalene from the Lebanese olive oil has not been conducted before. Three different techniques were studied and experiments were performed on three brands of olive oil, Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Virgo Bio and Boulos. The techniques performed are the Fractional Crystallization, the Soxhlet and the Esterification. By comparing the results, it is found that the Lebanese oil contains squalene and Soxhlet method is the most effective between the three methods extracting about 6.5E-04 grams of Squalene per grams of olive oil.
Abstract: In the present study, an ecofriendly biocomposite namely calcium alginate immobilized Ammi Visnaga (Khella) extraction waste (SWAV/CA) was prepared by electrostatic extrusion method and used on the cadmium biosorption from aqueous phase with and without the assistance of ultrasound in batch conditions. The influence of low frequency ultrasound (37 and 80 KHz) on the cadmium biosorption kinetics was studied. The obtained results show that the ultrasonic irradiation significantly enhances and improves the efficiency of the cadmium removal. The Pseudo first order, Pseudo-second-order, Intraparticle diffusion, and Elovich models were evaluated using the non-linear curve fitting analysis method. Modeling of kinetic results shows that biosorption process is best described by the pseudo-second order and Elovich, in both the absence and presence of ultrasound.
Abstract: Effective statistical feature extraction and classification are important in image-based automatic inspection and analysis. An automatic wood species recognition system is designed to perform wood inspection at custom checkpoints to avoid mislabeling of timber which will results to loss of income to the timber industry. The system focuses on analyzing the statistical pores properties of the wood images. This paper proposed a fuzzy-based feature extractor which mimics the experts’ knowledge on wood texture to extract the properties of pores distribution from the wood surface texture. The proposed feature extractor consists of two steps namely pores extraction and fuzzy pores management. The total number of statistical features extracted from each wood image is 38 features. Then, a backpropagation neural network is used to classify the wood species based on the statistical features. A comprehensive set of experiments on a database composed of 5200 macroscopic images from 52 tropical wood species was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed feature extractor. The advantage of the proposed feature extraction technique is that it mimics the experts’ interpretation on wood texture which allows human involvement when analyzing the wood texture. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed method.
Abstract: Effect of enzyme on the yield and chemical composition of Artemisia campestris essential oil is reported in the present study. It was demonstrated that enzyme facilitated the extraction of essential oil with increase in oil yield and did not affect any noticeable change in flavour profile of the volatile oil. Essential oil was tested for antibacterial activity using Escherichia coli; which was extremely sensitive against control with the largest inhibition (29mm), whereas Staphylococcus aureus was the most sensitive against essential oil obtained from enzymatic pre-treatment with the largest inhibition zone (25mm). The antioxidant activity of the essential oil with hemicellulase pre-treatment (EO2) and control sample (EO1) was determined through reducing power. It was significantly lower than the standard drug (vitamin C) in this order: vitamin C˃EO2˃EO1.
Abstract: Polymers from renewable resources have attracted an increasing amount of attention over the last two decades, predominantly due to two major reasons: firstly environmental concerns, and secondly the realization that our petroleum resources are finite. Finding new uses for agricultural commodities is also an important area of research. Therefore, it is crucial to get new sources of natural materials that can be used in different applications. Ramon tree (Brosimum alicastrum) is a tropical plant that grows freely in Yucatan countryside. This paper focuses on the seeds recollection, processing and starch extraction and characterization in order to find out about its suitability as biomaterial. Results demonstrated that it has a high content of qualities to be used not only as comestible but also as an important component in polymeric blends.
Abstract: In this paper, a genetic-neural-network (GNN) based large-signal model for GaN HEMTs is presented along with its parameters extraction procedure. The model is easy to construct and implement in CAD software and requires only DC and S-parameter measurements. An improved decomposition technique is used to model self-heating effect. Two GNN models are constructed to simulate isothermal drain current and power dissipation, respectively. The two model are then composed to simulate the drain current. The modeling procedure was applied to a packaged GaN-on-Si HEMT and the developed model is validated by comparing its large-signal simulation with measured data. A very good agreement between the simulation and measurement is obtained.
Abstract: The security of the medical images and its related data is the major research area which is to be concentrated in today’s era. Security in the medical image indicates that the physician may hide patients’ related data in the medical image and transfer it safely to a defined location using reversible watermarking. Many reversible watermarking methods had proposed over the decade. This paper enhances the security level in brain tumor images to hide the patient’s detail, which has to be conferred with other physician’s suggestions. The details or the information will be hidden in Non-ROI area of the image by using the block cipher algorithm. The block cipher uses different keys to extract the details that are difficult for the intruder to detect all the keys and to spot the details, which are the key advantage of this method. The ROI is the tumor area and Non-ROI is the area rest of ROI. The Non-ROI should not be spoiled in any cause and the details in the Non-ROI should be extracted correctly. The reversible watermarking method proposed in this paper performs well when compared to existing methods in the process of extraction of an original image and providing information security.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a pedestrian detection descriptor called Fused Structure and Texture (FST) features based on the combination of the local phase information with the texture features. Since the phase of the signal conveys more structural information than the magnitude, the phase congruency concept is used to capture the structural features. On the other hand, the Center-Symmetric Local Binary Pattern (CSLBP) approach is used to capture the texture information of the image. The dimension less quantity of the phase congruency and the robustness of the CSLBP operator on the flat images, as well as the blur and illumination changes, lead the proposed descriptor to be more robust and less sensitive to the light variations. The proposed descriptor can be formed by extracting the phase congruency and the CSLBP values of each pixel of the image with respect to its neighborhood. The histogram of the oriented phase and the histogram of the CSLBP values for the local regions in the image are computed and concatenated to construct the FST descriptor. Several experiments were conducted on INRIA and the low resolution DaimlerChrysler datasets to evaluate the detection performance of the pedestrian detection system that is based on the FST descriptor. A linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to train the pedestrian classifier. These experiments showed that the proposed FST descriptor has better detection performance over a set of state of the art feature extraction methodologies.
Abstract: Human skin detection recognized as the primary step in most of the applications such as face detection, illicit image filtering, hand recognition and video surveillance. The performance of any skin detection applications greatly relies on the two components: feature extraction and classification method. Skin color is the most vital information used for skin detection purpose. However, color feature alone sometimes could not handle images with having same color distribution with skin color. A color feature of pixel-based does not eliminate the skin-like color due to the intensity of skin and skin-like color fall under the same distribution. Hence, the statistical color analysis will be exploited such mean and standard deviation as an additional feature to increase the reliability of skin detector. In this paper, we studied the effectiveness of statistical color feature for human skin detection. Furthermore, the paper analyzed the integrated color and texture using eight classifiers with three color spaces of RGB, YCbCr, and HSV. The experimental results show that the integrating statistical feature using Random Forest classifier achieved a significant performance with an F1-score 0.969.
Abstract: The new methods as accelerated steam distillation
assisted by microwave (ASDAM) is a combination of microwave
heating and steam distillation, performed at atmospheric pressure at
very short extraction time. Isolation and concentration of volatile
compounds are performed by a single stage. (ASDAM) has been
compared with (ASDAM) with cryogrinding of seeds (CG) and a
conventional technique, hydrodistillation assisted by microwave
(HDAM), hydro-distillation (HD) for the extraction of essential oil
from aromatic herb as caraway and cumin seeds. The essential oils
extracted by (ASDAM) for 1 min were quantitatively (yield) and
qualitatively (aromatic profile) no similar to those obtained by
ASDAM-CG (1 min) and HD (for 3 h). The accelerated microwave
extraction with cryogrinding inhibits numerous enzymatic reactions
as hydrolysis of oils.
Microwave radiations constitute the adequate mean for the
extraction operations from the yields and high content in major
component majority point view, and allow to minimise considerably
the energy consumption, but especially heating time too, which is one
of essential parameters of artifacts formation.
The ASDAM and ASDAM-CG are green techniques and yields an
essential oil with higher amounts of more valuable oxygenated
compounds comparable to the biosynthesis compounds, and allows
substantial savings of costs, in terms of time, energy and plant
material.
Abstract: The Metropolitan Region of Sao Paulo (MRSP) has suffered from serious water scarcity. Consequently, the most convenient solution has been building wells to extract groundwater from local aquifers. However, it requires constant vigilance to prevent over extraction and future events that can pose serious threat to the population, such as subsidence. Radar imaging techniques (InSAR) have allowed continuous investigation of such phenomena. The analysis of data in the present study consists of 23 SAR images dated from October 2007 to March 2011, obtained by the ALOS-1 spacecraft. Data processing was made with the software GMTSAR, by using the InSAR technique to create pairs of interferograms with ground displacement during different time spans. First results show a correlation between the location of 102 wells registered in 2009 and signals of ground displacement equal or lower than -90 millimeters (mm) in the region. The longest time span interferogram obtained dates from October 2007 to March 2010. As a result, from that interferogram, it was possible to detect the average velocity of displacement in millimeters per year (mm/y), and which areas strong signals have persisted in the MRSP. Four specific areas with signals of subsidence of 28 mm/y to 40 mm/y were chosen to investigate the phenomenon: Guarulhos (Sao Paulo International Airport), the Greater Sao Paulo, Itaquera and Sao Caetano do Sul. The coverage area of the signals was between 0.6 km and 1.65 km of length. All areas are located above a sedimentary type of aquifer. Itaquera and Sao Caetano do Sul showed signals varying from 28 mm/y to 32 mm/y. On the other hand, the places most likely to be suffering from stronger subsidence are the ones in the Greater Sao Paulo and Guarulhos, right beside the International Airport of Sao Paulo. The rate of displacement observed in both regions goes from 35 mm/y to 40 mm/y. Previous investigations of the water use at the International Airport highlight the risks of excessive water extraction that was being done through 9 deep wells. Therefore, it is affirmed that subsidence events are likely to occur and to cause serious damage in the area. This study could show a situation that has not been explored with proper importance in the city, given its social and economic consequences. Since the data were only available until 2011, the question that remains is if the situation still persists. It could be reaffirmed, however, a scenario of risk at the International Airport of Sao Paulo that needs further investigation.
Abstract: This article considers the problems of economic growth
and Russian energy strategy. Also in this paper, the issues related to
the economic growth prospects of Russian were discussed. Russian
energy strategy without standing Russia`s stature in global energy
markets, at the current production and extraction rates, will not be able
to sustain its own production as well as fulfil its energy strategy.
Indeed, Russia’s energy sector suffers from a chronic lack of
investments which are necessary to modernize its energy supply
system. In recent years, especially since the international financial
crisis, Russia-EU energy cooperation has made substantive progress.
Recently the break-through progress has been made, resulting mainly
from long-term contributing factors between the countries and recent
international economic and political situation changes. Analytical
material presented in the article is intended for a more detailed or
substantive analysis related to foreign economic relations of the
countries and Russia as well.
Abstract: Community living adjacent to forests and Protected
Areas, especially in South Asian countries, have a common practice
in extracting resources for their living and livelihoods. This
extraction of resources, because the way it is done, destroys the biophysical
features of the area. Deforestation, wildlife poaching, illegal
logging, unauthorized hill cutting etc. are some of the serious issues
of concern for the sustainability of the natural resources that has a
direct impact on environment and climate as a whole. To ensure
community involvement in conservation initiatives of the state,
community based forest management, commonly known as Comanagement,
has been in practice in 6 South Asian countries. These
are -India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh.
Involving community in forestry management was initiated first in
Bangladesh in 1979 and reached as an effective co-management
approach through a several paradigm shifts. This idea of Comanagement
has been institutionalized through a Government Order
(GO) by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of
Bangladesh on November 23, 2009. This GO clearly defines the
structure and functions of Co-management and its different bodies.
Bangladesh Forest Department has been working in association with
community to conserve and manage the Forests and Protected areas
of Bangladesh following this legal document. Demographically
young people constitute the largest segment of population in
Bangladesh. This group, if properly sensitized, can produce valuable
impacts on the conservation initiatives, both by community and
government. This study traced the major factors that motivate
community youths to work effectively with different tiers of comanagement
organizations in conservation of forests and Protected
Areas of Bangladesh. For the purpose of this study, 3 FGDs were
conducted with 30 youths from the community living around the
Protected Areas of Cox’s bazar, South East corner of Bangladesh,
who are actively involved in Co-management organizations. KII were
conducted with 5 key officials of Forest Department stationed at
Cox’s Bazar. 2 FGDs were conducted with the representatives of 7
Co-management organizations working in Cox’s Bazar region and
approaches of different community outreach activities conducted for
forest conservation by 3 private organizations and Projects have been
reviewed. Also secondary literatures were reviewed for the history
and evolution of Co-management in Bangladesh and six South Asian
countries. This study found that innovative community outreach
activities that are financed by public and private sectors involving
youths and community as a whole have played a pivotal role in
conservation of forests and Protected Areas of the region. This
approach can be replicated in other regions of Bangladesh as well as
other countries of South Asia where Co-Management exists in
practice.
Abstract: Green chemistry for plant extraction of active principles is the main interest of many researchers concerned with climate change. While classical organic solvents are detrimental to our environment, greener alternatives to ionic liquids are very promising for sustainable organic chemistry. This study focused on the determination of functional groups observed in the main constituents from the ionic liquid extracts of Coleus aromaticus Benth leaves using FT-IR Spectroscopy. Moreover, this research aimed to determine the best ionic liquid that can separate functionalized plant constituents from the leaves Coleus aromaticus Benth using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. Coleus aromaticus Benth leaf extract in different ionic liquids, elucidated pharmacologically important functional groups present in major constituents of the plant, namely, rosmarinic acid, caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid. In connection to distinctive appearance of functional groups in the spectrum and highest % transmittance, potassium chloride-glycerol is the best ionic liquid for green extraction.
Abstract: The UK has had its fair share of the shale gas
revolutionary waves blowing across the global oil and gas industry at
present. Although, its exploitation is widely agreed to have been
delayed, shale gas was looked upon favorably by the UK Parliament
when they recognized it as genuine energy source and granted
licenses to industry to search and extract the resource. This, although
a significant progress by industry, there yet remains another test the
UK fracking resource must pass in order to render shale gas
extraction feasible – it must be economically extractible and
sustainably so. Developing unconventional resources is much more
expensive and risky, and for shale gas wells, producing in
commercial volumes is conditional upon drilling horizontal wells and
hydraulic fracturing, techniques which increase CAPEX. Meanwhile,
investment in shale gas development projects is sensitive to gas price
and technical and geological risks. Using a Two-Factor Model, the
economics of the Bowland shale wells were analyzed and the
operational conditions under which fracking is profitable in the UK
was characterized. We find that there is a great degree of flexibility
about Opex spending; hence Opex does not pose much threat to the
fracking industry in the UK. However, we discover Bowland shale
gas wells fail to add value at gas price of $8/ Mmbtu. A minimum gas
price of $12/Mmbtu at Opex of no more than $2/ Mcf and no more
than $14.95M Capex are required to create value within the present
petroleum tax regime, in the UK fracking industry.
Abstract: Recently, traffic monitoring has attracted the attention
of computer vision researchers. Many algorithms have been
developed to detect and track moving vehicles. In fact, vehicle
tracking in daytime and in nighttime cannot be approached with the
same techniques, due to the extreme different illumination conditions.
Consequently, traffic-monitoring systems are in need of having a
component to differentiate between daytime and nighttime scenes. In
this paper, a HSV-based day/night detector is proposed for traffic
monitoring scenes. The detector employs the hue-histogram and the
value-histogram on the top half of the image frame. Experimental
results show that the extraction of the brightness features along with
the color features within the top region of the image is effective for
classifying traffic scenes. In addition, the detector achieves high
precision and recall rates along with it is feasible for real time
applications.
Abstract: In order to retrieve images efficiently from a large
database, a unique method integrating color and texture features
using genetic programming has been proposed. Opponent color
histogram which gives shadow, shade, and light intensity invariant
property is employed in the proposed framework for extracting color
features. For texture feature extraction, fast discrete curvelet
transform which captures more orientation information at different
scales is incorporated to represent curved like edges. The recent
scenario in the issues of image retrieval is to reduce the semantic gap
between user’s preference and low level features. To address this
concern, genetic algorithm combined with relevance feedback is
embedded to reduce semantic gap and retrieve user’s preference
images. Extensive and comparative experiments have been conducted
to evaluate proposed framework for content based image retrieval on
two databases, i.e., COIL-100 and Corel-1000. Experimental results
clearly show that the proposed system surpassed other existing
systems in terms of precision and recall. The proposed work achieves
highest performance with average precision of 88.2% on COIL-100
and 76.3% on Corel, the average recall of 69.9% on COIL and 76.3%
on Corel. Thus, the experimental results confirm that the proposed
content based image retrieval system architecture attains better
solution for image retrieval.