Research Brief: Applying Green Chemistry Principles Towards the Sustainable Synthesis of Biodiesel from Waste Vegetable Oil

In 2011, the U.S. consumed over 18 million barrels per day of refined petroleum products and biofuels; almost 22% of global petroleum consumption. This includes oil used for transportation, electricity, and production of consumer products. More than half of this oil was imported from foreign countries, and in his 2006 State of the Union Address President Bush warned that, “We have a serious problem, America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world”. With the need for new energy sources more apparent than ever, serious research is needed to further the advancement of alternative fuels, so that they may become a more practical source of energy. Biodiesel is an alternative fuel to petroleum diesel, and is produced from renewable and/or recycled resources. Biodiesel’s benefits include reduced emissions of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, plus reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The process of making biodiesel involves transesterification of triacyl-glycerides in Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) with methanol, using potassium hydroxide (KOH) as a catalyst. Research in Dr. Brush’s group has focused on developing an efficient and cost-effective process for converting 50 liter (13 gallon) batches of Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) from BSU cafeterias into biodiesel fuel for campus use. However, in a detailed analysis of our efficiency in producing biodiesel by this traditional process, we found that this “simple” transesterification reaction is only one small part of a complex, interrelated, and inefficient overall production process

Implications for Policy

macroeconomics, tax-based income policy, TIP, economic stability, economic growth

Phase-locked laser array

A phase-locked laser array comprises a substrate with two spaced-apart pluralities of channels extending towards different reflecting surfaces of the array. The axes of symmetry of the channels of one plurality are offset from the axes of symmetry of the channels of the second plurality. Coupling of light propagating in the optical waveguides over one plurality of channels into the waveguides over the second plurality of channels induces a zero phase difference between the laser oscillations of adjacent channels

Morphological evidence for a sea-ice origin for Elysium Planitia platy terrain

Abstract not available

Phase-locked laser array having a non-uniform spacing between lasing regions

A phase-locked semiconductor array wherein the lasing regions of the array are spaced an effective distance apart such that the modes of oscillation of the different lasing regions are phase-locked to one another. The center-to-center spacing between the lasing regions is non-uniform. This variation in spacing perturbs the preferred 180.degree. phase difference between adjacent lasing regions thereby providing an increased yield of arrays exhibiting a single-lobed, far-field radiation pattern

Droplet-Based Production of Liposomes

A process for making monodisperse liposomes having lipid bilayer membranes involves fewer, simpler process steps than do related prior methods. First, a microfluidic, cross junction droplet generator is used to produce vesicles comprising aqueous solution droplets contained in single layer lipid membranes. The vesicles are collected in a lipid-solvent mix that is at most partially soluble in water and is less dense than is water. A layer of water is dispensed on top of the solvent. By virtue of the difference in densities, the water sinks to the bottom and the solvent floats to the top. The vesicles, which have almost the same density as that of water, become exchanged into the water instead of floating to the top. As there are excess lipids in the solvent solution, in order for the vesicles to remain in the water, the addition of a second lipid layer to each vesicle is energetically favored. The resulting lipid bilayers present the hydrophilic ends of the lipid molecules to both the inner and outer membrane surfaces. If lipids of a second kind are dissolved in the solvent in sufficient excess before use, then asymmetric liposomes may be formed

The use of the generalized inverse in the general linear statistical model

The general linear model of statistical inference is formulated in terms of the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse. The matrix algebra of the generalized inverse which is essential to the model is presented. A methodology for estimation and hypothesis testing is derived which permits identical manipulation of both the full rank and the less-than-full rank cases of the model.http://www.archive.org/details/useofgeneralized00acklLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

A survey of services for the speech and hearing handicapped in New England

Thesis (Ed. M.)--Boston University, 195

A survey of services for the speech and hearing handicapped in New England

Thesis (Ed. M.)--Boston University, 195

Negative ternary set-sharing

The Set-Sharing domain has been widely used to infer at compiletime interesting properties of logic programs such as occurs-check reduction, automatic parallelization, and flnite-tree analysis. However, performing abstract uniflcation in this domain requires a closure operation that increases the number of sharing groups exponentially. Much attention has been given to mitigating this key inefflciency in this otherwise very useful domain. In this paper we present a novel approach to Set-Sharing: we define a new representation that leverages the complement (or negative) sharing relationships of the original sharing set, without loss of accuracy. Intuitively, given an abstract state sh\> over the finite set of variables of interest V, its negative representation is p(V) \ shy. Using this encoding during analysis dramatically reduces the number of elements that need to be represented in the abstract states and during abstract uniflcation as the cardinality of the original set grows toward 2 . To further compress the number of elements, we express the set-sharing relationships through a set of ternary strings that compacts the representation by eliminating redundancies among the sharing sets. Our experiments show that our approach can compress the number of relationships, reducing signiflcantly the memory usage and running time of all abstract operations, including abstract uniflcation