Environment problem identification

HAZOP (Knowlton, 1989 Lees, 1980 CPQRA, 1989, pp. 419-422). HAZOP stands for hazard and operability studies. This is a set of formal hazard identification and elimination procedures designed to identify hazards to people, process plants, and the environment. The techniques aim to stimulate in a systematic way the imagination of designers and people who operate plants or eqmpment so they can identify potenti hazards. In effect, HAZOP studies make the assumption that a hazard or operating problem can arise when there is a deviation from the design or operating intention. Corrective actions can then be made before a real accident occurs. 

Obvious species such as CO provide useful spectral standards and are plentifully abundant in space. The Doppler shift for CO can then be applied to other unidentified transitions to see if they are coincident with known transitions in the laboratory spectrum of a molecule. Different molecular environments may complicate matters, with some CO molecules along the line of site of the telescope having different Doppler shifts (Figure 3.12). The CO transition at 115 GHz may then appear to be split into several lines associated with a different Doppler shift in each cloud. The identification problem now also has to decide to which cloud the unknown transition belongs. 

Surfactants are surface-active compounds, which are used in industrial processes as well as in trade and household products. They have one of the highest production rates of all organic chemicals. Commercial mixtures of surfactants consist of several tens to hundreds of homologues, oligomers and isomers of anionic, non-ionic, cationic and amphoteric compounds. Therefore, their identification and quantification in the environment is complicated and cumbersome. Detection, identification and quantification of these compounds in aqueous solutions, even in the form of matrix-free standards, still poses the analyst considerable problems. 

The presence of some surfactants or their by-products in the aquatic environment has been considered as a potential marker of pollution [45, 325]. Thus, the presence of alkylbenzene sulfonates in groundwater has been used as an indicator of the age of the groundwater [358]. Linear alkylbenzenes can act as tracers of domestic waste in the marine environment [34,35,359,360] and trial-kylamines as indicators of urban sewage in sludge, coastal waters, and sediments [17,33,45,325, 327, 346,361]. Analysis, identification, and characterization of surfactants are extensively reviewed and discussed by Aboul-Kassim and Simoneit [314], while pollution problems associated with these compounds are reviewed by Aboul-Kassim and Simoneit [356]. 

As already noted, the chemical composition of petroleum and petroleum products is complex and may change over time following release into the environment. These factors make it essential that the most appropriate analytical methods are selected from a comprehensive hst of methods and techniques that are used for the analysis of environmental samples (Dean, 1998 Miller, 2000 Budde, 2001 Sunahara et al., 2002 Nelson, 2003 Smith and Cresset, 2003). But once a method is selected, it may not be the ultimate answer to solving the problem of identification and, hence, behavior (Patnaik, 2004). There are a significant number of petroleum hydrocarbon-affected sites, and evaluation and remediation of these sites may be difficult because of the complexity of the issues (analytical, scientific, and regulatory not to mention economic) regarding water and soil affected. 

ESR Spectroscopy. Electron Spin Resonance spectroscopy is an important technique for investigating the role of radical intermediates in radiation chemistry. The technique has been used widely for many years in the study of radicals occurring in irradiated solid polymers (.6,7). However, by their very nature, such species are reactive and may only exist in low concentration. The identification of these species can also be a problem since in the majority of polymers the environment of the radicals leads to broad, unresolved ESR spectra, which makes detailed spectral analysis difficult. In recent years, many of these problems of sensitivity and resolution have been reduced by more sensitive and stable ESR spectrometers and by development of new methods of data handling and manipulation. 

The identification of new natural product structural classes active against insects will attack the pest-resistance problem and provide environmentally safer insecticides. The marine environment, with its chemical diversity, clearly holds an enormous potential to provide leads for the development of insecticidal agents. Many marine-derived structural classes have not yet been examined for their insecticidal activity. Further SAR studies of these marine natural products could lead to new and more selective insecticidal agents. 

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