Student drug use in Bermuda

Student drug use has been investigated in many countries and a standard method of conducting such surveys is described here. Using an adapted World Health Organization questionnaire patterns of drug use were investigated among the population of secondary school students in Bermuda (N=3,930). The prevalence of use of alcohol and eight illicit drugs is described and related to students’ attitudes, life-styles and demographic characteristics. Factors such as age, sex, race, parental use of alcohol, leisure time activities, allowances and beliefs about drugs all emerge (as they have in other studies) as strongly related to drug use. It is concluded that though these cross cultural similarities exist, there are important sub-cultural differences in drug use patterns which reflect social dynamics and characteristics within communities. It is suggested that a focus on sub-cultural differences may be particularly valuable in future research.     

Conversion of CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> to useful substances with composite iron,nickel, and copper catalysts

Composite materials of Fe/Al₂O₃, which consist of small particles of iron supported by thermally stable alumina even at 500–700 °C, have been widely used in the water-gas shift reaction for natural gas reforming. Therefore, Fe/Al₂O₃ is one of the promising candidates for re-transformation of exhausted CO₂ into fuels such as alcohols and hydrocarbons. The development of a CO₂ reforming system using the composite materials of Fe/Al₂O₃ through CO₂ reduction to CO, dissociation of water into hydrogen, and methanol synthesis has been investigated. It was found that dry and steam (i.e. wet) reforming of CO₂ produced almost the same amount of CO. At a temperature above 500 °C, maximal and saturated yields of CO and H₂ from CO₂ and water were obtained. However, this CO₂ reforming system requires higher-pressure conditions from several tens to hundreds standard atmospheric pressure in order to achieve high yield and selectivity for methanol production. In this study we developed the modified CO₂ reforming system by the utilization of Ni and/or Cu instead of Fe in order to obtain other types of useful products such as CO, CH₄, and carbon, more efficiently and selectively under atmospheric pressure. When Ni or Cu was used, conversion of CO₂ was reduced to 76%, while 9% of methane was detected in the case of Ni. On the other hand, though the CO₂ conversion reduced half of the Fe, the selectivity of CO from CO₂ increased to 95% in the case of Cu.     

Professional standards for survey research

This paper concludes that it is time for institutional research to address the issue of standards for the conduct of surveys. In reaching that conclusion, it argues that executing surveys is one of the most common activities of institutional research (IR) and one of the least served in IR literature; that as a craft, survey research is an orphan without a home in an academic discipline and therefore without a clear articulation of standards in its own right; and that as practiced in IR, survey research faces special technical problems and challenges not embraced in much of the general-survey research literature. Finally, it asks, but does not answer, how such a lofty goal as the pursuit of standards might be attained.     

Numerical investigation of cavitating flow behind the cone of a poppet valve in water hydraulic system

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of cavitating flow through water hydraulic poppet valves were performed using advanced RNGk-epsilon turbulence model. The flow was turbulent, incompressible and unsteady, for Reynolds numbers greater than 43000. The working fluid was water, and the structure of the valve was simplified as a two dimensional axisymmetric geometrical model. Flow field visualization was numerically achieved. The effects of inlet velocity, outlet pressure, opening size as well as poppet angle on cavitation intensity in the poppet valve were numerically investigated. Experimental flow visualization was conducted to capture cavitation images near the orifice in the poppet valve with 30° poppet angle using high speed video camera. The binary cavitating flow field distribution obtained from digital processing of the original cavitation image showed a good agreement with the numerical result. Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 59835160) and Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry of China (No. 50175097)     

Filtration of micro-particles within multi-fiber arrays by adhesive DEM-CFD simulation

A 3D multi-time scale discrete element method-computational fluid dynamic (DEM-CFD) coupling approach was applied to investigate the filtration of micron-sized particles by different types of fiber arrays. Both the pressure drop and the filtration efficiency were examined to indicate the filtration performance of the fiber arrays. Fibers that were uniformly arrayed in a parallel or staggered manner were compared. Results showed that the staggered array showed a better performance than the parallel array in terms of both pressure drop and filtration efficiency. Further, we compared the performance of different staggered arrays, i.e. a regular case, one densified in the front layers and another densified in the back layers. The front densified array was found to enter the clogging and cake filtration stage in the shortest time, leading to the highest filtration efficiency, but the highest pressure drop. The back densified array still achieved a much higher filtration efficiency, despite a much lower pressure drop comparable to that of the regular array. The results suggest that the two kinds of densified arrays may be suited for different purposes, e.g. baghouse filters or breathing masks.