Saber Khoshjavan, Mohammad Heidary, Dr Bahram Rezai,
Volume 7, Issue 3 (8-2010)
Abstract
Free swelling index (FSI) is an important parameter for cokeability and combustion of coals. In this research, the effects of chemical properties of coals on the coal free swelling index were studied by artificial neural network methods. The artificial neural networks (ANNs) method was used for 200 datasets to estimate the free swelling index value. In this investigation, ten input parameters such as moisture, volatile matter (dry), fixed carbon (dry), ash (dry), total sulfur (organic and pyretic)(dry), (British thermal unit (Btu)/lb) (dry), carbon (dry), hydrogen (dry), nitrogen (dry) as well as oxygen (dry) were used. For selecting the best model for this study the outputs of models were compared. A three-layer ANN was found to be optimum with architecture of ten and four neurons in first and second hidden layer, respectively, and one neuron in output layer. Results of artificial neural network shows that training, testing and validating data’s square correlation coefficients (R2) achieved 0.99, 0.92 and 0.96, respectively. The sensitivity analysis showed that the highest and lowest effects of coal chemical properties on the coal free swelling index were nitrogen (dry) and fixed carbon (dry), respectively.
Keywords: Coal Chemical Properties, Free Swelling Index, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Cokeability and Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN).
S. Giridhar Reddy,
Volume 19, Issue 2 (6-2022)
Abstract
Sodium alginate (SA), brown seaweed algae, and Lignosulphonic acid (LS), a plant product, are biodegradable polymers extensively investigated for drug-controlled release. The Hydroxychloroquine sulphate (HCQ) drug, an antimalarial drug, was extensively used in the initial periods of COVID situations. The HCQ drug release from SALS beads is investigated for its control release in a simulated medium (pH1.2 and pH7.4) using different crosslinking agents such as Calcium chloride, Barium chloride and Aluminum chloride. The HCQ release has better controlled in Barium crosslinked beads. They are found to be relatively intact and stable and release the drug for more than 180 minutes in the simulated medium. Further drug entrapment studies prove very high for Ba crosslinked SALS beads. Whereas Aluminum crosslinked beads showed, inferior crosslinking and drug retention in beads is very low and starts degrading in simulated fluids. Drug release kinetics were analyzed using various kinetic model equations to discuss the order of reaction and drug-polymer mechanism. FT-IR investigations of beads show chemical interactions between crosslinking ion and alginate blends.
