scholarly journals Fit-for-Purpose VSI Modelling Framework for Process Simulation

Minerals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Simon Grunditz ◽  
Gauti Asbjörnsson ◽  
Erik Hulthén ◽  
Magnus Evertsson
Keyword(s):  
Particle Collision ◽  
Natural Sand ◽  
Modelling Framework ◽  
Replacement Product ◽  
Process Simulations ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
Particle Velocities ◽  
Manual Testing ◽  
Product Output ◽  
The Impact

The worldwide shortage of natural sand has created a need for improved methods to create a replacement product. The use of vertical shaft impact (VSI) crushers is one possible solution, since VSI crushers can create particles with a good aspect ratio and smooth surfaces for use in different applications such as in construction. To evaluate the impact a VSI crusher has on the process performance, a more fit-for-purpose model is needed for process simulations. This paper aims to present a modelling framework to improve particle breakage prediction in VSI crushers. The model is based on the theory of energy-based breakage behavior. Particle collision energy data are extracted from discrete element method (DEM) simulations with particle velocities, i.e., rotor speed, as the input. A selection–breakage approach is then used to create the particle size distribution (PSD). For each site, the model is trained with two datasets for the PSDs at different VSI rotor tip speeds. This allows the model to predict the product output for different rotor tip speeds beyond the experimental configurations. A dataset from 24 different sites in Sweden is used for training and validating the model to showcase the robustness of the model. The model presented in this paper has a low barrier for implementation suitable for trying different speeds at existing sites and can be used as a replacement to a manual testing approach.

Optimizing electronic capture of patient-reported outcome measures in oncology clinical trials: lessons learned from a qualitative study

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (17) ◽  
pp. 1195-1204
Author(s):  
Florence D Mowlem ◽  
Brad Sanderson ◽  
Jill V Platko ◽  
Bill Byrom
Keyword(s):  
Patient Reported Outcome Measures ◽  
Patient Reported Outcome ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Patient Reported ◽  
Oncology Clinical Trials ◽  
Anticancer Treatment ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Electronic Implementation

Aim: To understand the impact of anticancer treatment on oncology patients’ ability to use electronic solutions for completing patient-reported outcomes (ePRO). Materials & methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven individuals who had experienced a cancer diagnosis and treatment. Results: Participants reported that the following would impact the ability to interact with an ePRO solution: peripheral neuropathy of the hands (4/7), fatigue and/or concentration and memory issues (6/7), where they are in a treatment cycle (5/7). Approaches to improve usability included: larger, well-spaced buttons to deal with finger numbness, the ability to pause a survey and complete at a later point and presenting the recall period with every question to reduce reliance on memory. Conclusion: Symptoms associated with cancers and anticancer treatments can impact the use of technologies. The recommendations for optimizing the electronic implementation of patient-reported outcome instruments in this population provides the potential to improve data quality in oncology trials and places patient needs at the forefront to ensure ‘fit-for-purpose’ solutions.

scholarly journals Attributional & Consequential Life Cycle Assessment: Definitions, Conceptual Characteristics and Modelling Restrictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7386
Author(s):  
Thomas Schaubroeck ◽  
Simon Schaubroeck ◽  
Reinout Heijungs ◽  
Alessandra Zamagni ◽  
Miguel Brandão ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle Assessment ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Product Life Cycle ◽  
Sustainability Assessment ◽  
Consequential Life Cycle Assessment ◽  
Modelling Framework ◽  
Potential Environmental Impact ◽  
Reference Environment ◽  
The Impact

To assess the potential environmental impact of human/industrial systems, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a very common method. There are two prominent types of LCA, namely attributional (ALCA) and consequential (CLCA). A lot of literature covers these approaches, but a general consensus on what they represent and an overview of all their differences seems lacking, nor has every prominent feature been fully explored. The two main objectives of this article are: (1) to argue for and select definitions for each concept and (2) specify all conceptual characteristics (including translation into modelling restrictions), re-evaluating and going beyond findings in the state of the art. For the first objective, mainly because the validity of interpretation of a term is also a matter of consensus, we argue the selection of definitions present in the 2011 UNEP-SETAC report. ALCA attributes a share of the potential environmental impact of the world to a product life cycle, while CLCA assesses the environmental consequences of a decision (e.g., increase of product demand). Regarding the second objective, the product system in ALCA constitutes all processes that are linked by physical, energy flows or services. Because of the requirement of additivity for ALCA, a double-counting check needs to be executed, modelling is restricted (e.g., guaranteed through linearity) and partitioning of multifunctional processes is systematically needed (for evaluation per single product). The latter matters also hold in a similar manner for the impact assessment, which is commonly overlooked. CLCA, is completely consequential and there is no limitation regarding what a modelling framework should entail, with the coverage of co-products through substitution being just one approach and not the only one (e.g., additional consumption is possible). Both ALCA and CLCA can be considered over any time span (past, present & future) and either using a reference environment or different scenarios. Furthermore, both ALCA and CLCA could be specific for average or marginal (small) products or decisions, and further datasets. These findings also hold for life cycle sustainability assessment.

scholarly journals African Swine Fever Laboratory Diagnosis—Lessons Learned from Recent Animal Trials

Pathogens ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 177
Author(s):  
Jutta Pikalo ◽  
Paul Deutschmann ◽  
Melina Fischer ◽  
Hanna Roszyk ◽  
Martin Beer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
African Swine Fever Virus ◽  
Clinical Signs ◽  
African Swine Fever ◽  
Laboratory Diagnosis ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Hemorrhagic Disease ◽  
Passive Surveillance ◽  
Animal Trials ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Impact

African swine fever virus (ASFV) causes a hemorrhagic disease in pigs with high socio-economic consequences. To lower the impact of disease incursions, early detection is crucial. In the context of experimental animal trials, we evaluated diagnostic workflows for a high sample throughput in active surveillance, alternative sample matrices for passive surveillance, and lateral flow devices (LFD) for rapid testing. We could demonstrate that EDTA blood is significantly better suited for early ASFV detection than serum. Tissues recommended by the respective diagnostic manuals were in general comparable in their performance, with spleen samples giving best results. Superficial lymph nodes, ear punches, and different blood swabs were also evaluated as potential alternatives. In summary, all matrices yielded positive results at the peak of clinical signs and could be fit for purpose in passive surveillance. However, weaknesses were discovered for some matrices when it comes to the early phase of infection or recovery. The antigen LFD showed variable results with best performance in the clinical phase. The antibody LFD was quite comparable with ELISA systems. Concluding, alternative approaches are feasible but have to be embedded in control strategies selecting test methods and sample materials following a “fit-for-purpose” approach.

scholarly journals Love in the time of Covid-19: a case-study of the complex laws governing weddings

Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rebecca Probert ◽  
Stephanie Pywell
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Marriage Law ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
General Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Impact

Abstract During 2020, weddings were profoundly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. During periods of lockdown few weddings could take place, and even afterwards restrictions on how they could be celebrated remained. To investigate the impact of such restrictions, we carried out a survey of those whose plans to marry in England and Wales had been affected by Covid-19. The 1,449 responses we received illustrated that the ease and speed with which couples had been able to marry, and sometimes whether they had been able to marry at all, had depended not merely on the national restrictions in place but on their chosen route into marriage. This highlights the complexity and antiquity of marriage law and reinforces the need for reform. The restrictions on weddings taking place also revealed the extent to which couples valued getting married as opposed to having a wedding. Understanding both the social and the legal dimension of weddings is important in informing recommendations as to how the law should be changed in the future, not merely to deal with similar crises but also to ensure that the general law is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

Erosion Mechanism and Sensitivity Parameter Analysis of Natural Gas Curved Pipeline

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jie Zhang ◽  
Hao Yi ◽  
Zhuo Huang ◽  
Jiadai Du
Keyword(s):  
Natural Gas ◽  
Wear Rate ◽  
Shape Factor ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Solid Particles ◽  
Parameter Analysis ◽  
Particle Collision ◽  
Erosion Wear ◽  
Gas Wells ◽  
The Impact

With the deepening of natural gas exploitation, the problem of sand production in gas wells is becoming more and more serious, especially in high-yield gas wells. The solid particles in natural gas are very likely to cause erosion and wear of downstream pipelines and throttling manifolds, which makes the pipeline ineffective. Once the pipeline is damaged, the natural gas leaks, which may cause serious catastrophic accidents. In this paper, the impact of sand particles on the pipeline wall is predicted by the analysis of the research on bent and continuous pipeline combined with particle collision model. The parameters of different particles (particle shape factor, particle velocity, and particle diameter), different bent parameters (angle, diameter, and curvature-to-diameter ratio), and the influence of different continuous pipeline parameters (assembly spacing and angle) are explored on the erosion and wear mechanism of curved pipeline. The results show that the shape of the particles has a great influence on the wear of the curved pipeline. As the shape factor of the particles decreases, the wear tends to decrease. The bent area is subject to erosion changes as the particle parameters and piping parameters. The increase in pipeline diameter is beneficial to reduce the maximum and the average erosion wear rate. When the bent angle of the pipeline is less than 90 deg, the maximum erosion wear rate is basically the same. But when it is greater than 90 deg, it decreases with the increase in the bent angle. When the assembly angle of double curved pipeline is between 0 deg and 60 deg, the elbow is subject to severe erosion wear. At the same time, increasing the assembly spacing is beneficial to reduce the erosion wear rate. The research can provide a theoretical support for subsequent engineering applications.

scholarly journals Developing fit-for-purpose self-report instruments for assessing consumer responses to tobacco and nicotine products: the ABOUT™ Toolbox initiative

F1000Research ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christelle Chrea ◽  
Catherine Acquadro ◽  
Esther F. Afolalu ◽  
Erica Spies ◽  
Thomas Salzberger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Medical Product ◽  
Consumer Perception ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Measurement Instruments ◽  
Patient Reported ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Impact

Background. Determining the public health impact of tobacco harm reduction strategies requires the assessment of consumer perception and behavior associated with tobacco and nicotine products (TNPs) with different exposure and risk profiles. In this context, rigorous methods to develop and validate psychometrically sound self-report instruments to measure consumers’ responses to TNPs are needed. Methods. Consistent with best practice guidelines, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s “Guidance for Industry Patient-Reported Outcome Measures: Use in Medical Product Development to Support Labeling Claims,” scientifically designed, fit-for-purpose, reliable, and valid instruments are now being applied to tobacco regulatory research. Results. This brief report presents the ABOUT™ Toolbox (Assessment of Behavioral OUtcomes related to Tobacco and nicotine products) initiative. This communication: (1) describes the methodological steps followed for the development and validation of the measurement instruments included in the ABOUT™ Toolbox, (2) presents a summary of the high-priority tobacco-related domains that are currently covered in the ABOUT™ Toolbox (i.e., risk perception, dependence, product experience, health and functioning, and use history), and (3) details how the measurement instruments are made accessible to the scientific community. Conclusions. By making the ABOUT™ Toolbox available to the tobacco research and public health community, we envision a rapidly expanding knowledge base, with the goals of (1) supporting consumer perception and behavior research to allow comparisons across a wide spectrum of TNPs, (2) enabling public health and regulatory communities to make better-informed decisions for future regulation of TNPs, and (3) enhancing surveillance activities associated with the impact of TNPs on population health.

Dynamic modelling framework to track sediment provenance and solve lakes in long-term landscape evolution models

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Gailleton ◽  
Luca Malatesta ◽  
Jean Braun ◽  
Guillaume Cordonnier
Keyword(s):  
Landscape Evolution ◽  
Dynamic Modelling ◽  
Signal Propagation ◽  
Sediment Provenance ◽  
Topological Order ◽  
Time Step ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Scales ◽  
Modelling Framework ◽  
The Impact

<p>Many laws have been developed to describe the different aspects of landscape evolution at large spatial and temporal scales. Natural landscapes have heterogeneous properties (lithologies, climates, tectonics, etc.) that are associated with multiple coexisting processes. In turn, this can demand different mathematical expressions to model landscape evolution as a function of time and or space. Landscape Evolution Models are mostly designed to facilitate the combination of different landscape-wide laws in a plug-and-play way and many frameworks are being developed in this aim. However, most current frameworks cannot capture important landscape processes such as lake dynamics and full sediment tracing because they are optimized for speed and handle fluxes separately. Several processes require information from more than the immediate neighboring cells within a time step and demand an integrated knowledge from the entire upstream trajectory. Lakes for example require knowledge of all upstream water and sediment fluxes to be filled. These can only be known if all the laws controlling those have been processed. Tackling these situation with a grid logic requires substantial amount of numerical refactoring from existing models.</p><p>We present an alternative method to tackle landscape evolution modelling in heterogeneous landscapes with a framework inspired from Lagrangian and cellular automaton methods. Our framework only relies on the assumption that upstream nodes needs to be processed before the downstream ones, including lakes with outlets, in order to process all selected governing equations on a pixel-to-pixel basis. This way, we ensure that the true content of sediment and water fluxes can be known and tracked at any points. We first utilise graph theory to (i) find the most comprehensive path to reroute water through depressions and (ii) determine a generic multiple flow topological order (any node is processed after all potential upstream ones). Particles that register and track all fluxes simultaneously can then "roll" on the landscape and merge between each other while interacting with the grid.</p><p>This formulation makes possible a number of generic features. (i) The laws can be dynamically adapted to the environment (e.g. switching from single to multiple flow function of water content, adapting erodibility function of the sediment composition and quantity), (ii) Depressions can be explicitly managed, filled (or not) and separated from the rest of the landscape (e.g. sedimentation or evaporation in lakes) as a function function of inputted fluxes and parameters, (iii) full provenance, transport time, and deposition tracking as the particle can always keep in memory where the fluxes are from and in what proportions. In this contribution, we demonstrate the impact the importance of considering these additional elements in landscape evolution. In particular, lake dynamic can significantly impact the long-term signal propagation from source to sink.</p>

Estimates of future flood risk in Western Europe and its potential impact on insured losses.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remi Meynadier ◽  
Hugo Rakotoarimanga ◽  
Madeleine-Sophie Deroche ◽  
Sylvain Buisine
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Flood Risk ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Flood Risks ◽  
Hazard Exposure ◽  
Modelling Framework ◽  
Loss Modelling ◽  
The Impact

<p>The large-scale and complex nature of climate change makes it difficult to assess and quantify the impact on insurance activities. Climate change is likely affecting the probability of natural hazard occurrence in terms of severity and/or frequency.</p><p>Natural catastrophe risk is a function of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. As a (re)-insurer it is seen that changes in year-on-year losses are a function of all these components and not just the hazard.</p><p>The present study focuses, in a first step, on assessing impacts of climate change on fluvial flood risks in Europe solely due to changes in hazard itself. A stochastic catalogue of future flood risk events is derived from Pan-European data sets of river flood probability of occurrence produced within EU FP7 RAIN project. The loss modelling framework internally developed at AXA is then used to provide a geographical view of changes in future flood risks.</p><p> </p>

scholarly journals Timely, consistent, transparent assessment of market access evidence: implementing tools based on the HTA Core Model® in a pharmaceutical company

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Ducournau ◽  
Cornelia Irl ◽  
Iain Tatt ◽  
Mary McCarvil ◽  
Marlene Gyldmark
Keyword(s):  
Pharmaceutical Company ◽  
Market Access ◽  
Health Technology ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Core Model ◽  
Development Teams ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
Assessment Of Evidence ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Evidence Generation

AbstractObjectivesEvidence requirements and assessment methods access differ between health technology assessment (HTA) agencies. The HTA Core Model® provides a standardized approach to HTA, targeting evidence sharing and collaboration between participating HTA bodies. It is fit for purpose from an industry perspective and was used by pharmaceutical company Roche to develop a framework for internal assessment of evidence required for market access and coverage/reimbursement (“access evidence”).MethodsTools were developed to systematically scope, assess, plan, and summarize access evidence generation. The tools were based mainly on the first four HTA Core Model® domains and rolled-out in selected development teams in 2017. Five months after full implementation, the impact of tools was assessed in an internal survey.ResultsSystematic access evidence generation started with the Access Evidence Questionnaire, to scope evidence requirements and identify evidence gaps. Findings were summarized in the Access Evidence Metric, which assessed the alignment of available/planned evidence against HTA bodies’ requirements and developed scope mitigation strategies. The Access Evidence Plan was then used to plan and document (additional) evidence generation. Once generated, evidence was summarized in the Access Evidence Dossier. A survey of twenty-seven Roche employees involved in evidence generation showed that the tools made discussions around access strategies and evidence more efficient and transparent.ConclusionsThe HTA Core Model® provided a useful framework around which to optimize internal evidence generation and assessment. The benefits of using a standardized HTA approach in industry mirror those expected from implementing the HTA Core Model® in HTA agencies.

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