MS ExcelTM Research Articles

An examination of maximum legal application rates of dairy processing and associated STRUBIAS fertilising products in agriculture

The dairy industry produces vast quantities of dairy processing sludge (DPS), which can be processed further to develop second generation products such as struvite, biochars and ashes (collectively known as STRUBIAS). These bio-based fertilizers have heterogeneous nutrient and metal contents, resulting in a range of possible application rates. To avoid nutrient losses to water or bioaccumulation of metals in soil or crops, it is important that rates applied to land are safe and adhere to the maximum legal application rates similar to inorganic fertilizers. This study collected and analysed nutrient and metal content of all major DPS (n = 84) and DPS-derived STRUBIAS products (n = 10), and created an application calculator in MS Excel™ to provide guidance on maximum legal application rates for ryegrass and spring wheat across plant available phosphorus (P) deficient soil to P-excess soil. The sample analysis showed that raw DPS and DPS-derived STRUBIAS have high P contents ranging from 10.1 to 122 g kg−1. Nitrogen (N) in DPS was high, whereas N concentrations decreased in thermo-chemical STRUBIAS products (chars and ash) due to the high temperatures used in their formation. The heavy metal content of DPS and DPS-derived STRUBIAS was significantly lower than the EU imposed limits. Using the calculator, application rates of DPS and DPS-derived STRUBIAS materials (dry weight) ranged from 0 to 4.0 tonnes ha−1 y−1 for ryegrass and 0–4.5 tonnes ha−1 y−1 for spring wheat. The estimated heavy metal ingestion to soil annually by the application of the DPS and DPS-derived STRUBIAS products was lower than the EU guideline on soil metal accumulation. The calculator is adaptable for any bio-based fertilizer, soil and crop type, and future work should continue to characterise and incorporate new DPS and DPS-derived STRUBIAS products into the database presented in this paper. In addition, safe application rates pertaining to other regulated pollutants or emerging contaminants that may be identified in these products should be included. The fertilizer replacement value of these products, taken from long-term field studies, should be factored into application rates.

Using Learning Analytics to evaluate the quality of multiple-choice questions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to find appropriate forms of analysis of multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to obtain an assessment method, as fair as possible, for the students. The authors intend to ascertain if it is possible to control the quality of the MCQ contained in a bank of questions, implemented in Moodle, presenting some evidence with Item Response Theory (IRT) and Classical Test Theory (CTT). The used techniques can be considered a type of Descriptive Learning Analytics since they allow the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data generated from students’ assessment. Design/methodology/approach A representative data set of students’ grades from tests, randomly generated with a bank of questions implemented in Moodle, was used for analysis. The data were extracted from a Moodle database using MySQL with an ODBC connector, and collected in MS ExcelTM worksheets, and appropriate macros programmed with VBA were used. The analysis with the CTT was done through appropriate MS ExcelTM formulas, and the analysis with the IRT was approached with an MS ExcelTM add-in. Findings The Difficulty and Discrimination Indexes were calculated for all the questions having enough answers. It was found that the majority of the questions presented values for these indexes, which leads to a conclusion that they have quality. The analysis also showed that the bank of questions presents some internal consistency and, consequently, some reliability. Groups of questions with similar features were obtained, which is very important for the teacher to develop tests as fair as possible. Originality/value The main contribution and originality that can be found in this research is the definition of groups of questions with similar features, regarding their difficulty and discrimination properties. These groups allow the identification of difficulty levels in the questions on the bank of questions, thus allowing teachers to build tests, randomly generated with Moodle, that include questions with several difficulty levels in the tests, as it should be done. As far as the authors’ knowledge, there are no similar results in the literature.

Life cycle assessment tool of electricity generation in Portugal

This article presents and describes the LCA4Power tool, developed in this work to assess the potential environmental impacts, as, for example, the contribution to global warming, of electricity generation in continental Portugal, not considering the Madeira and Azores archipelagos. Based on a life cycle perspective, the tool considers the life cycles of various available technologies for producing electricity, on a cradle-to-gate perspective, excluding distribution and final use. It was implemented in MS Excel™ using emission factors obtained from the literature and other sources, instead of raw life cycle inventory data. The current version of the tool includes wind and hydroelectric power as renewable energy sources, and thermal and combined heat and power generation from fossil fuels as non-renewable energy sources. The combination of the aforementioned electricity generation technologies is responsible for more than 90% of the electricity generated in continental Portugal. Results were validated comparing the tool’s predictions with data from other LCA studies of electricity production, showing a good agreement, in particular for the greenhouse gas emissions. As added value, this tool provides a user-friendly way of simulating the potential environmental impacts of different endogenous energy mixes in Portugal, thus support decision making and communication. Future developments of the tool will include other technologies for electricity generation and its application to support decision making through the analysis of future scenarios for electricity generation in Portugal.

A tool for calculating concentration ratios from large environmental datasets

This paper presents a tool for calculating concentration ratios from a large and structured environmental dataset of radionuclide activity and metal concentrations. The tool has been developed in MS Excel™ and includes a simple user interface for setting up queries. The tool is capable of matching environmental media samples to biota samples based on user-defined spatial and temporal criteria to derive a representative estimate of the environmental exposure conditions of an organism and its accumulation. Some potential benefits and uses of the tool are discussed.

Temperature Analysis of the Water Supply System of a Dairy Company by Means of a Simulation Model

Abstract This paper builds upon the study by Marchini et al. (2014, International Journal of Food Engineering, pp. 557–571) and represents the second part of a research project whose general aim was to analyse and optimize, through simulation, the water distribution system of a dairy company. In the first paper, the authors focused on finding opportunities for recycling water in the distribution system of the targeted company, i.e. a dairy company located near Parma (Italy) and manufacturing Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and butter. In this work, we go ahead by analysing the thermal properties (such as, primarily, the temperature) of the water used inside the distribution system and of that discharged. To this purpose, we add the relevant thermal equations to the MS ExcelTM simulation model developed in the first study. The resulting model is able to derive the temperature trend of water inside all the tanks of the distribution system. Situations where the temperature of the water used for rinsing is higher than the maximum allowed value of approx. 25°C are also highlighted and suggestions for improvement are proposed.

Rock Maker: an MS Excel™ spreadsheet for the calculation of rock compositions from proportional whole rock analyses, mineral compositions, and modal abundance

Rock Maker is a simple software tool that computes bulk rock compositions resulting from mixing or unmixing of rocks or minerals. The calculations describe the chemical expression of processes such as magma mixing, fractional crystallization, assimilation, residual melt extraction, or formation of solid solutions. Rock Maker can also be used for the elimination of thermodynamically inactive or unwanted chemical components from the whole rock composition, such as cores of porphyroblasts that are considered not to be in equilibrium with the matrix. The calculation of the resulting rock composition is essentially based on modal proportions and compositions of different components in rocks, which may include specific portions of the rock or individual mineral phases. Compositional data, obtained using XRF, ICPMS, EDS, or EPMA, may include major and trace element concentrations. Depending upon the nature of the problem to be solved, the concentrations of oxidic and elemental components can be added to, or subtracted from, each other, producing the calculated normalized whole rock composition after completion of the investigated process (mixing, unmixing, depletion, enrichment, etc.). Furthermore, the software allows the calculation of whole rock compositions from ideal mineral compositions, for which modal proportions can be chosen from pre-defined mineral compositions. The data set includes the most common rock forming minerals and allows the addition of further phases. This section can be used to calculate the approximate whole rock compositions from petrographic modal analysis. This part of Rock Maker is specifically suitable as a teaching tool that illustrates the interrelationship between mineral compositions, modes, and the corresponding whole rock compositions.

Design and performance evaluation of supply networks: a simulation study

This paper presents a simulation tool for the design and performance analysis of supply networks. The tool, developed under MS ExcelTM and properly set up for this purpose, reproduces a fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) supply network, and incorporates viable input data taken from previous studies in that field. We analyse four network configurations, stemming from the combination of different numbers of echelons and of facilities per echelon. As further factors, we consider reorder policy, demand behaviour, demand stochasticity, procurement lead time and service level delivered to customers. Overall, we examine 128 scenarios, for which we assess, as performance parameters, the total costs of the network (and the related cost components), the bullwhip effect, the throughput time of items along the chain and the waiting time of customers at the retail store due to out-of-stocks. A detailed effect analysis identifies the impact of the network configuration and operating conditions on the results observed, with the ultimate aim to investigate how the performance of the network varies as a function of the parameters set. From the analysis, some key guidelines for the proper design of FMCG supply networks are elaborated.

Integrating open-source technologies to build low-cost information systems for improved access to public health data

Effective public health practice relies on the availability of public health data sources and assessment tools to convey information to investigators, practitioners, policy makers, and the general public. Emerging communication technologies on the Internet can deliver all components of the "who, what, when, and where" quartet more quickly than ever with a potentially higher level of quality and assurance, using new analysis and visualization tools. Open-source software provides the opportunity to build low-cost information systems allowing health departments with modest resources access to modern data analysis and visualization tools. In this paper, we integrate open-source technologies and public health data to create a web information system which is accessible to a wide audience through the Internet. Our web application, "EpiVue," was tested using two public health datasets from the Washington State Cancer Registry and Washington State Center for Health Statistics. A third dataset shows the extensibility and scalability of EpiVue in displaying gender-based longevity statistics over a twenty-year interval for 3,143 United States counties. In addition to providing an integrated visualization framework, EpiVue's highly interactive web environment empowers users by allowing them to upload their own geospatial public health data in either comma-separated text files or MS Excel™ spreadsheet files and visualize the geospatial datasets with Google Maps™.

Splitting of Islands-in-the-Sea Fibers (PA6/COPET) during Hydroentangling of Nonwovens

This paper summarizes the investigations of hydroentangled islands-in-the-sea (PA6/COPET) fiber webs. An increase in water jet pressure improved the tensile strength and fiber splitting while elongation at break decreased. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) micrographs and ANOVA (MS Excel ™) were used for characterizing fiber splitting and data analyses respectively. It can be concluded that with a new innovation in spinnerette design and modification of co-polyester structure, PA6/COPET, fibers can be split in the hydroentanglement process without dissolution of the sea component.

Application of PC Spreadsheet Software For Non-linear Parameter Optimization

Abstract Currently available spreadsheet software packages offer an easy to implement and user friendly platform for setting up problems involving non-linear parameter optimization. This paper presents the application of one such software "Solver" embedded in MS-Excel ™ for quantitative interpretation of counter-current imbibition experiments on reservoir core samples. Usually imbibition tests are conducted to obtain qualitative estimates of reservoir wettability and oil recovery. This paper presents a procedure for history matching of counter-current imbibition tests that involves minimization of a user-defined global objective function with respect to various model parameters. Application of this procedure for many counter-current imbibition experiments reveals that a single dimensionless function can represent imbibition recovery history for most rock samples. Also, apparent contact angles for various samples are consistent with their expected wettability. The parameter optimization procedure presented in this paper offers a powerful and efficient method that can be modified to solve numerous reservoir and production engineering problems. Introduction Solution of many common problems encountered in different facets of oil and gas industry requires obtaining values for parameters embedded in highly non-linear mathematical models. Examples of such problems include: determination of petrophysical properties, skin, and drainage radius of a reservoir based on pressure transient data and/or production decline data(1); forward modelling for obtaining petrophysical properties of vertical sequences by matching response of a suite of wire-line logs; and interpretation of laboratory corefloods for determining relative permeability curves(2,3). Solution procedure for these and other similar problems usually requires assignment of initial guesses for the unknown parameters, predicting system response using the available model, and using the quality of match between the actual and predicted system response to correct the value of parameters. This procedure is continued until a satisfactory agreement between system response and model predictions is obtained. For many problems, such strategy is easier to implement than attempting to explicitly obtain various parameters because of the non-linear nature of mathematical formulation obtained in the model. Approaches suggested in the past for implementing such parameter determination include kriging(1), simulated annealing(2,3), regression(4) and optimal control theory(5). Implementation of any of these parameter determination procedures requires an extensive amount of programming effort or investment in some expensive software which may need to be customized in order to operate compatibly with user developed code. Commercially available spreadsheet software packages offer built-in utility software for determining parameters of a non-linear formulation. This paper describes the implementation of a non-linear model in the spreadsheet software MS-EXCEL ™. The parameters of this model were refined using the built-in utility solver by seeking to minimize a user-defined objective function. Experiments involving imbibition of water and production of oil are commonly conducted on the core samples from fractured reservoirs in order to characterize mass-transfer of oil from the matrix to the fracture system(4). Such tests are also conducted to understand the wettability of reservoir rocks. Gupta and Civan(6) developed a three exponent transfer function based on mathematical analysis to represent the cumulative production of oil