Pneumatic Transport Explains "Foam" Storm

After a storm on Tuesday morning, Aberdeen's Footdee, a village in the Northern Scotland looked as if it was hit by a sudden snow storm.

According to the BBC report, a local resident Lindsay Gordon said: "I have lived in Footdee since just before 2000, you get storms of course. You could tell by the sounds this was a serious storm, the windows were rattling. I looked out of the window and the North Sea was advancing toward us. Luckily it was just foam."

According to Professor Christopher Todd, marine ecologist at the Scottish Oceans Institute, the strong winds battering the Aberdeenshire coast had led to an "incredible amount of wave action".

Prof. Todd said that the air had "piled into the water" and mixed up with organic material producing foam which most likely to be the product of whipped phytoplankton mucus. Most phytoplankton are too small to be seen but they can form an algal bloom in the spring and, to a lesser extent, in the autumn. But there is no need to worry because the foam is a stable organic material posing no health danger.

Sea foam spilling from the sea.

Relating this natural phenomenon to particle technology, how a sea foam storm covers a village can be explained by the so called "pneumatic transport". The sea foam was brought to land by the strong winds by mechanism similar to pneumatic transport. Because of the high velocity and high volume of air, the wind was able to suspend the organic material from the sea into the strong current of air. The organic sea material was whipped in a whirlpool of turbulent gale. The sea acted like a washing machine producing the a sea foam storm which eventually reached and covered the nearby village. 

The use of gases  has been used successfully in industry to transport a wide range of materials specifically particulate solids such as wheat flour and grains to coal and plastic chips. The flow of gas "fluidized" the solid particulates  so they act like fluids that can flow through pipelines.  

Pneumatic transport in industry.

Applications of Fluidization in Food Industry

Fluidization is one of the technologies commonly used in the agro-food industry. It basically covers drying, cooling, agglomeration, granulation, and coating of food products. Fluidization is common because it is ideal for the processes of a wide range of both heat sensitive and non-heat sensitive products.

By fluidization, particulate materials are able take the properties of fluid. Gas (usually air) is made to pass through a product layer under controlled conditions to create uniform processing conditions. The gas performs two functions. It supports the weights of the particles and enabling them to flow with the gas. It is also it serves to cool, heat or dry the particles at direct contact with the solids material.

Fluid Bed Drying

Even though in recent years frozen foods increased its popularity, drying is still an important operation in the food industry especially in the preservation of food products. And fluid bed drying has significant advantages over traditional frying techniques.  It lessens the risk of food particles being overheated as well as giving easy material transport, high rates of heat exchange at high thermal efficiency. 

Fluid bed drying is for powders, granules, agglomerates, and pellets with an average particle size normally between 50 and 5,000 microns. For very fine powders or highly elongated particles, vibration for successful fluid bed drying is required.

Fluid Bed Cooling

It is somehow similar to drying but in fluid bed cooling, cold gas (usually ambient or conditioned air) is used instead. It is desired to remove heat from the particles but it additionally requires conditioning of gas to prevent the loss of volatiles or moisture. Cold surfaces can also be used to help remove heat further. 

Fluid Bed Granulation

Granulation transforms suspensions or solutions into dry, free flowing, dustless granules using granulators. Particles in suspension or solution are sprayed onto warm air, simultaneously drying and agglomerating the product.

Fluid Bed Pelletization

Pellets can be formed in 2 ways: liquid-layering and powder layering. Liquid-layering uses top spray coater to layer the active particle onto an inert core then forming the shape of a pellet. The spraying is done simultaneously with drying. Powder layering is done when the active particle is in the form of powder. Pelletization is achieved using a sprayer and liquid binder solution to hold the particles together. After that, the pellets are then dried.

Fluid Bed Coating

Food coating more commonly known as encapsulation, has a lot of functions including increasing shelf-life, masking taste or odor, improving visual appeal and improving ease of handling. Layering can be designed to lessen the release of constituents from the food particles. This is usually used for finer particles. Coating is done using an atomizer. Then particles are dried with air blowing upward through the column. 

References:

GEA Pharma Systems. Fluid bed processes - drying, cooling, agglomeration, granulation, pelletizing and coating of particulate materials. Sept. 22, 2012. http://www.gea-ps.com/npsportal/cmsdoc.nsf/webdoc/ndkw73fb8j

Smith, Peter. Applications of Fluidization in Food Industry. Victoria: Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd. 2007

Pollen-free Bio engineered Plants for Allergic People

If you are allergic to airborne substances especially to pollen but love to grow plants in your house, this is good news for you!

In a collaborative project between the Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas (IBMCP) and BIOMIVA S.L. (Spain) modified genes were injected to pelargonium plants which are now one of the most popular garden and house plants around the world. One gene was bioengineered to selectively destroy pollen-producing anthers consequently producing pollen-free plants. Another gene, encoding an enzyme Isopentenyl phosphotransferase (ipt) was bioengineered to increase the amount of cytokinin, a plant hormone thus preventing leaf falling or aging. 

The modified genes were carried into the plant’s genome using bacteria carriers which are able to transfer DNA between itself and the plants’.  Individual plants were then grown from the cells.

The bioengineered plants were observed to have smaller leaves and flowers with more vibrant colors compare to their natural counterparts. They are also expected to be able to survive longer because of the extra cytokinin.

One of the researchers from IBMCP, Dr Luis Cañas explained, "The ipt enzyme catalyzes the rate-limiting step for cytokinin biosynthesis in plants and consequently extra ipt, provided transgenically, produces more cytokinin and prevents the plant cells from aging. In addition, the use of an anther-specific promoter from pea driving the expression of a bacterial gene (ribonuclease), prevents the development of male progenitor cells into anthers and pollen, resulting in pollen-free flowers." 

Harvesting Water from Air: A Possible Solution to Drought

Drought is a common phenomenon in several areas of world. This is bad for the farmers as well as for us in general because the production of food is adversely affected.  The ideal solution for drought since there’s no rain is to create a source of water. And we know that air holds water when it is humid. Therefore we can get water from air. However, harvesting water from thin air sounds like a crazy idea. But a young Melbourne-based inventor was able to make the crazy idea work. 

Edward Linacre invented an equipment that actually able to do it. He was able to show that his air drop irrigation concept can produce significant amount of water through his pilot setup at the back of their house. Moreover, he was able to prove that it can also work in large scale. His work made him the winner of the James Dyson Award 2011 and he received US$14,000 as a prize as well as sponsorship for his design school faculty.

His invention seems high-tech but actually he was just able to transform an ancient cooling technique into a new sub-surface irrigation system that can be used in farms. His design only uses the simple process of condensation to harvest water from the air. He was able to make air channels through an underground network of piping that rapidly lowers the air temperature near to the soil temperature. This process creates a system of 100-percent humidity, from which water can then be harvested. The harvested water is then collected in an underground tank which can already be pumped out via sub-surface drip irrigation hosing. 

So let's hear from Edward himself how he created his awesome air drop irrigation concept.

Red Blood Cell Sedimentation Rate: A Disease Diagnosis Technique

//So here is the promised scientific journal review I made. 

The Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate

Jonathan S. Olshaker, MD, and David A. Jerrard, MD

Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Surgery, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland

Reprint Address: Jonathan S. Olshaker, MD, Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Surgery

University of Maryland Medical Center, 419 W. Redwood Street, Suite 280, Baltimore, MD 212011

Introduction:

The erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) has been used in the clinical lab from predicting severity of sickness to general sickness assessment. Specifically, it measures the body’s reaction to inflammation and infection.  The concept of the ESR originated from the Greeks, who first discovered the relation between the sedimentation of red blood cells and fibrinogen. In 1918, the German scholar Fahraeus discovered that erythrocytes sedimentation in pregnant women is more rapid compare to non-pregnant women. Since then, with minor modifications, the ESR has been used in the evaluation of a variety of diseases.  

However, we don’t encounter ESR in usual clinical tests because its use is based on medical myths. This article examines the use of ESR in the medical laboratory as a tool for predicting both disease likelihood and severity.  The ESR is a measure how fast is the red blood cell aggregation and the setting of a column of erythrocytes within one hour. The standard method of measuring the ESR is based on Westergren’s technique. The test includes anticoagulated blood being diluted with sodium citrate and being placed in an upright tube, known as a Westergren tube. Then the rate at which the red blood cells fall is measured and reported in mm/h.

On the contrary, there is another method that requires no dilution which is called the Wintrobe method. It is more sensitive compare to Westerner method at normal ranges of ESR but at higher ranges this methods may give erroneous results. The article gathered results from laboratory tests in order to find out the utility of ESR in disease diagnosis.

The results give the conclusion that ESR is not a myth in disease diagnosis. It is beneficial in certain diagnosis such as septic arthritis, osteomyelitis and many others. It is helpful in classifying patients into low or high risk groups. However, ESR does not give specific disease diagnosis because it only suggests various conditions. That’s why a diagnosis is still in need of investigation regardless of ESR.

Summary of the results:

Since the journal article is more of a descriptive journal article. There are no tables or figures included in the journal. However it gathered results of disease diagnostics in relation to the erythrocyte sedimentation rate.

Low ESR usually indicated abnormal plasma protein. Monitoring ESR can also be used in the assessment of the activities of collagen vascular disease. Patients with collagen vascular disease have higher ESR.  Pregnant women normally have high ESR. Patients with cancer usually have normal ESR however when ESR do elevate, it means that metastases are present. 
Specific uses of ESR in the emergency department include the diagnosis of temporal arteritis, septic arthritis, osteomyelitis, pelvic inflammatory disease and the evaluation of intravenous drug users.

Critique of the Result

The accuracy of the data depends on the results the researchers gathered from laboratories. It did not indicate what method was actually used in obtaining lab results. It did not also tell how many are the respondents so we cannot tell if the number of surveys can represent a significant sample of the population.

Recommendations

The results could be tabulated so that it is easier to comprehend the results and compare the diagnosis. The researchers could do their own experiments on ESR so as to prove the findings. Undergraduates can also do thesis by proving the findings too and improving the methodology of the work.

How to Write a Scientific Journal Review (with sample)

Reading and writing scientific journal review is pretty much indispensible in school especially in engineering not just because it’s a requirement but also because we have to know what’s happening in the field of research and discover some topics from which we can do a thesis. Scientific journals also give us an idea of the applications of what have we been studying in school. There are a lot of sources of scientific journals both in the library and in the internet. In my school, the magazines for scientific journals from my observation are hardly updated with new ones so I read journals online instead. But of course you have look into legit sources. I recommend that you make good use of your school’s online subscriptions to journal publications. As for me, I use sciencedirect.com and springerlink.com.

Basically here is the most common format you can use in writing a scientific journal review from online publications (*note: humanities journal review have different format).

Title

Author/s

Introduction

-Gives a brief summary of all the contents of the journal article. It gives the current understanding of the problem and how the problem was solved using specific methods, experimental design, instrumentation and procedures. It also gives the brief of results and interpretation of the results.

Summary of Results

-Tables and figures are included here as well as the explanations. These are purely from the results of the journal being reviewed.

Critique of Results

-This is the part where you can now express if you are satisfied with the results of the journal article and explain why or why not. You can refer to specific tables or figures for the results. You can also criticize the methods used in solving the problem and their accuracies.

Recommendation

-You can suggest ways in order to improve the work and make the results more accurate and more precise. Other than that, you can also recommend other problems related with the article that can be addressed with research or which can be the interest of a thesis.

References

-This is optional. If you have used information from other sources in your critique and recommendation then you have to site your references.

You can access a sample of scientific journal review here.

And I will also be posting my own journal review soon. :)

GENE EXPRESSION PROGRAMMING: in solving friction factor in turbulent flow

Genetics has always amazed me ever since we have it in my high school days. The gene expression process is simple in what I remember from my bio teacher's lectures. But in reality, this process is so complex because from the genetic code stored in the DNA, it will transform series of codes into gene product in the form of proteins. Then, these proteins will in turn form the phenotype or the evident characteristics of an organism. The ingenuity of gene expression in organisms has been imitated to create the so called "gene expression programming".  The mechanism of process is the same but instead of organisms, gene expression programming produces algorithms or models that can change and adapt to a certain environment. 

GEP has the same genotype-phenotype system just like in a living organism. It depends on genomes composed of numbers which represent strings of symbols and whose symbols further represent equations (which is analogous to phenotypes). The genome can be illustrated by a binary tree from which you can trace its nodes to evaluate the equation. This is a very powerful technique in programming because you are not mapping hard values but symbols instead.  

Well, I think you have to try to use it first to create a program in order to fully understand how it works. This has been a new knowleadge for me but GEP and their use actually dates back to the 1950s where they were first used to solve optimization problems (e.g. Box 1957^[1] and Friedman 1959^[2]). But it was in 1965 when this evolutionary technique started to gained popularity.  Nowadays, GEP has already a lot of applications especially in different engineering branches.  

In the field of chemical engineering, GEP has been used to model some highfalutin empirical equations related to fluid mechanics.  One example, in hydraulic design , GEP has been used as a technique to estimate the friction factor using the Colebrook–White equation for turbulent fluid-flow.This is very important for scientific intensive computations because numerical simulations of pipe flows require the computation of the friction coefficient for each point. And in simulations of long pipes, the friction coefficient has to be solved many times. GEP makes the calculation faster and more accurate. 

The Colebrook–White equation:

*This conclusion is based from a journal I have read in science direct. The paper basically examines the potential of genetic programming based technique in estimating flow friction factor in comparison with the most currently available explicit alternatives to the Colebrook–White equation.