OBJECTIVE To assess intensive care unit (ICU) nurses' acceptance of electronic health records (EHR) technology and examine the relationship between EHR design, implementation factors, and nurse acceptance. DESIGN The authors analyzed data from two cross-sectional survey questionnaires distributed to nurses working in four ICUs at a northeastern US regional medical center, 3 months and 12 mont...

Shortcut methods are valuable tools in the early stages of chemical process design, where numerous flowsheet alternatives need to be evaluated to determine the most energy-efficient, feasible flowsheet. Various shortcut methods based on tray-to-tray calculation and pinch point analysis for the inspection of feasibility and the determination of the minimum energy demand (MED) for homogeneous non...

Due to increasing of biodiesel production in recent years, the utilization of its byproduct, glycerol, into high-value chemicals becomes more important. The esterification reaction of glycerol with acetic acid to produce triacetin is one such application. Triacetin is used mainly as a plasticizer and a gelatinizing agent in polymers, explosives and also as an additive in tobacco, pharmaceutical...

A process evaluation methodology is presented that incorporates flowsheet mass and energy balance modeling, heat and power integration, and life cycle assessment Environmental impacts are determined by characterizing and weighting (using CO2 equivalents, Eco-indicator 99, and Eco-scarcity) the flowsheet and inventory modeling results. The methodology is applied to a waste biomass to synthetic n...

In this work, we propose the optimal flowsheet for the production of bioethanol from switchgrass, via hydrolysis. A superstructure embedding a number of alternatives is proposed. Two technologies are considered for switchgrass pretreatment, dilute acid and ammonia fibre explosion (AFEX) so that the structure of the grass is broken down. Next, enzymatic hydrolysis follows any of the pretreaments...

The synthesis and optimization of plant-wide waste management policies under uncertainty is the subject of this paper. The combinatorial synthesis methodology (Chakraborty, A.; Linninger, A. A. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2002, 41 (18), 4591-4604) was adapted to incorporate variations in the expected waste loads. In its first stage, automatic generation of recovery and treatment flowsheet produces a s...

Biodiesel is a promising fuel alternative compared to traditional diesel obtained from conventional sources such as fossil fuel. Many flowsheet alternatives exist for the production of biodiesel and therefore it is necessary to evaluate these alternatives using defined criteria and also from process intensification opportunities. This work focuses on three main aspects that have been incorporat...

The objective of this contribution is to propose a multilevel-hierarchical approach to the MINLP synthesis of process flowsheets. Following a hierarchical strategy, the designer can postulate the superstructure at different levels of representation of flowsheet alternatives and model it at the corresponding level of aggregation and complexity. By the use of the prcscrcening procedure the supers...