Background: Seven patients at a hospital in Houston, TX, were diagnosed during a two-week period in 2009 with joint space infection of pansusceptible P. aeruginosa following arthroscopic procedures of the knee or shoulder. Tosh et al. (2011), who investigated and published the principal report discussing this bacterial outbreak, conclude that its most likely cause was the improper reprocessing ...

The advanced validation of a CFD code for containment applications requires the investigation of water steam in the different flow types like jets or buoyant plumes. This paper addresses therefore the simulation of two “HYJET” experiments from the former Battelle Model Containment by CFX. These experiments involve jet releases into the multi-compartment geometry of the test facility accompanied...

Fractional-order controller was proven to perform better than the integer-order controller. However, the absence of a pole at origin in the approximated transfer function produced marginal error in fractional-order control system. This study demonstrated the design of an error compensator that comprises of a very small zero and a pole at origin to produce a zero steady-state error for the close...

Ejectors have been widely used in many applications such as water desalination, steam turbine power generation, refrigeration systems, and chemical plants. The advantage of an ejector system lies in its extremely reliable and stable operation due to the complete absence of moving parts. However, the performance depends on a number of factors, among which the flow channel configuration/arrangeme...

Rice bran (RB) is an underutilised fibre source due to undesirable effects when incorporated into food products. Thus, this study aims improve the physicochemical properties of RB by using ultrasound (US) and steam explosion (SE) treatments, making it more usable in applications. The US treatment unpurified resulted inconsistent average particle size, water binding capacity (WBC), swelling (SC)...

With the increase in thermal power capacity, ultra supercritical units have become the mainstream of power industry. At the same time, with the improvement of the steam parameters and the lengthening of shafting, the production of steam flow excited vibration is frequent in the ultra supercritical units, which may seriously affect the reliability of the unit. This paper has taken steam flow exc...

The economic feasibility of resource recovery projects depends largely on the amount of revenue that can be obtained from the recovered energy products. The revenue that can be obtained from steam is dependent on the type of steam market available. The type of steam market in turn affects the design of the resource recovery facility and its capital cost. This paper discusses how the proposed st...

Background: The shortage of skilled workers choosing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers in the USA and worldwide has fueled a movement towards STEAM, in which the “A” addresses the arts and humanities. STEAM education has been proposed as a way to offer relevant problems to solve while drawing on creative and collaborative skills to increase interest and engagement in the...

The Extreme Measurement Communications Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) explores the deployment of a wireless sensor system with a real-time measurement-based energy efficiency optimization framework in the ORNL campus. With particular focus on the 12-mile long steam distribution network in our campus, we propose an integrated system-level approach to optimize the energy delivery ...