This report describes results from a research study investigating how virtual world (VW) concepts, techniques, and tools can be employed to create an online environment that supports experiments in Decentralized Command and Control. We refer to this project and the VW we have prototyped collectively as the DECENT project and system platform. DECENT is a platform for exercising and assessing the...

Although experts sense a big future for virtual worlds (VWs) in the workplace scenario, their use in the business world is still in a nascent stage. A key challenge for organizations is to motivate users for utilizing VW for workplace related tasks. This research investigates the behavioral intention (BI) to use VW as a workplace ‘collaboration tool’. The model, grounded in literature on ‘motiv...

Virtual worlds (VW) have paved a new and important channel for workplace collaborations. However, analysts have noted that several organizations that made a strong entrance into using VW as a nouveau channel for communication and collaboration are stepping back due to limited user response. Motivated by this fact, we propose a trust-theoretic ‘virtual world collaboration model’ for collaboratio...

In the literature, there are several empirical models to estimate the higher heating values of vegetable oils and biodiesel fuels. In this study, five of these models found in the literature were used to estimate the higher heating value of waste frying oils. When some models are used to estimate HHVs of waste frying oils, the relative errors were found up to 5% compared to the values obtained ...

The production of fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) from waste activated bleaching earth (ABE) discarded by the crude oil refining industry using lipase from Candida cylindracea was investigated in a 50-L pilot plant. Diesel oil or kerosene was used as an organic solvent for the transesterification of triglycerides embedded in the waste ABE. When 1% (w/w) lipase was added to waste ABE, the FAME ...

due to the high price of virgin vegetable oils and the drawbacks of the homogeneous catalytic transesterification, in this work an economically profitable alternative process was proposed for biodiesel synthesis in which transesterification of the low-cost waste cooking oil (wco) with methanol in a heterogeneous system was done. alumina impregnated with sodium hydroxide was utilized as a solid ...