Decadence

A business classic by the man who took General Motors to the top - and kept them there for decades. 

The distillation of crudes chosen for their yield in heavy fractions is the most common means. Bitumen is extracted from the residue from a vacuum distillation column (a few dozen mm of mercury), the latter being fed by atmospheric distillation residue. Unlike the practice of a decade ago, it is now possible to obtain all categories of bitumen, including the hard grades. 

Figure 10.16 presents the refining flowsheet of the two decades between 1950 and 1970. An optional unit, visbreaking, appears there. 

IFP (1989), Gasoline production in the next decade new trends . Booklet from Direction Industrielle de I lnstitut Frangais du Petrole, symposium Venezia. 

It is fair to say that advances in seismic surveys over the last decade have changed the way fields are developed and managed. From being a predominantly exploration focused tool, seismic has progressed to become one of the most cost effective methods for optimising field production. In many cases, seismic has allowed operators to extend the life of mature fields by several years. 

Over the last decade some of the major oil companies have been using vast amounts of outcrop derived measurements to design and calibrate powerful computer models. These models are employed as tools to quantitatively describe reservoir distribution and flow behaviour within individual units. Hence this technique is not only important for the exploration phase but more so for the early assessment of production profiles. 

Horizontal wells were drilled as far back as the 1950s, but have gained great popularity in the last decade, as lower oil prices have forced companies to strive for technologies which reduce the cost of oil and gas recovery. Horizontal wells have potential advantage over vertical or deviated wells for three main reasons ... 

Introduction and commercial application Investment opportunities in the exploration and production (E P) sector of oil and gas business are abundant. Despite areas such as the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico and the North Slope in Alaska being mature areas, there are still many new fields under development in those regions, and new areas of business interest are opening up in South America, Africa and South East Asia. Some fields which have a production history of decades are being redeveloped, such as the Pedernales Field in Venezuela. 

Since we did not know that we were in NDT we were unaware of others in the field and felt it to be a rather new field, we felt like explorers For us it was new and we carried on for some time blissfully unaware that Prof. Hughes had demonstrated the effect almost 100 years before and Foerster had solved most of the practical problems more than a decade earlier. We only gradually became aware that we were not alone. 

The principle of the photothermal camera is known for decades (see ref. 1) but did not offer sufficient performances to permit this instrument to find an industrial issue. The main reason of that lack of success Is the poor efficiency of the previous configurations when applied on industrial products (figures 3, 4, 5) ... 

Computerized Tomographic Imaging (CT), a well established method in medical diagnostics for 25 years now, also makes its arrival into non-destructive testing since the last decade. 

The linear relation between the PSL signal and neutron fluence was established to exist over three decades up to 6. lO cm. The IP-ND can be used as fast and efficient neutron monitors at rather low neutron fluxes. However, for neutron dosimetry individual IP-ND must be calibrated individually since their sensitiviy can differ from one plate to another. In Gd/film based direct NR the film fog below the exposure dose of about 8.10 cm is the limiting factor. 

Electrolytic silver recovery is a common technique to desilver fixing solutions. It has been known for decades, although it never really reached a point where it was massively introduced into the industrial radiology market. In the past, the main reasons to implement silver recovery were twofold. 

After many decades of application, industry has completely accepted standard NDT as an inevitable but invaluable part of production and maintenance of components. Its application has been well-regulated, acceptance criteria for weld defects exist, good schemes for personnel qualification are in place and equipment has evolved to a standard of nearperfection. NDT has become a commodity. Pioneering years are over. 

Due to the many problems concerning steam generators of nuclear power plants over the last decades, we developed our own inspection equipment and services. Next to this main activity, we provide inspections for nuclear power plants components such as thimbles, guide carts and baffle bolts. 

A beautiful and elegant example of the intricacies of surface science is the formation of transparent, thermodynamically stable microemulsions. Discovered about 50 years ago by Winsor [76] and characterized by Schulman [77, 78], microemulsions display a variety of useful and interesting properties that have generated much interest in the past decade. Early formulations, still under study today, involve the use of a long-chain alcohol as a cosurfactant to stabilize oil droplets 10-50 nm in diameter. Although transparent to the naked eye, microemulsions are readily characterized by a variety of scattering, microscopic, and spectroscopic techniques, described below. 

A highly readable account of early efforts to apply the independent-particle approximation to problems of organic chemistry. Although more accurate computational methods have since been developed for treating all of the problems discussed in the text, its discussion of approximate Hartree-Fock (semiempirical) methods and their accuracy is still useful. Moreover, the view supplied about what was understood and what was not understood in physical organic chemistry three decades ago is... 

Equation (A2.1.53) is frequently called the Clausius-Clapeyronequation, although this name is sometimes applied to equation (A2.1.52). Apparently Clapeyron first proposed equation (A2.1.52) in 1834, but it was derived properly from thennodynamics decades later by Clausius, who also obtained tlie approximate equation (A2.1.53).)... 

Equation A2.4.126 shows that the EMF increases by 0.059/z V for each decade change in the activity ratio in the two solutions. 

With these simplifications, and with various values of the as and bs, van Laar (1906-1910) calculated a wide variety of phase diagrams, detennining critical lines, some of which passed continuously from liquid-liquid critical points to liquid-gas critical points. Unfortunately, he could only solve the difficult coupled equations by hand and he restricted his calculations to the geometric mean assumption for a to equation (A2.5.10)). For a variety of reasons, partly due to the eclipse of the van der Waals equation, this extensive work was largely ignored for decades. 

Considerable amount of research effort has been devoted, especially over the last tln-ee decades, on various issues in domain growth and dynamical scaling. See the reviews [13,14, H, 16 and 17],... 

The importance of numerical treatments, however, caimot be overemphasized in this context. Over the decades enonnous progress has been made in the numerical treatment of differential equations of complex gas-phase reactions [8, 70, 71], Complex reaction systems can also be seen in the context of nonlinear and self-organizing reactions, which are separate subjects in this encyclopedia (see chapter A3,14. chapter C3.6). 

In the past decade there has been photodissociation work on doubly charged positive ions, e.g.,... 

It is usually convenient to work with the decadic absorbance. A, defined by... 

The quantity e is called the absorption coefficient or extinction coefficient, more completely the molar decadic absorption coefficient it is a characteristic of the substance and the wavelength and to a lesser extent the solvent and temperature. It is coimnon to take path length in centimetres and concentration in moles per... 

Plenary 13. Andreas Otto, e-mail address otto rz.imi-duesseldorf.de (SERS). A survey of problems and models that underlie the SERS effect, now two decades old. Understanding the role of surface rouglmess in the enliancement. 

Ainong the first TFIz mixers to be constructed were those based on room-temperature Schottky diodes [11]. Over the past decade, new mixers based on superconducting tunnel junctions have been developed that have effective noise levels only a few tunes the quantum limit of [12]. Flowever, certain conditions... 

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