The October issue of The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering is now available. This issue features the official announcement of our Best Graduate Student Paper award winner, Khushaal Popli from University of Alberta, for his 2018 article “Development of a vision‐based online soft sensor for oil sands flotation using support vector regression and its application in the dynamic monitoring of bitumen extraction.” This month’s issue also continues our Experimental Methods in Chemical Engineering special series, with both October articles also available as part of the Virtual Issue, which is freely available until the end of October. In this October issue, you can also read a review article on advancements in wastewater treatment processes from our Environment, Renewable Resources, and Green Processes subject area.
Our Editor-in-Chief selected four issue highlights for this month’s issue, including the two new Experimental Methods in Chemical Engineering mini-reviews. The first article, from University of Ottawa, Polytechnique Montréal, and Chemical Manufacturing Technologies (Switzerland), analyzes how chemical engineers use micro-reactors and ways to improve the research in that area. In the second article, researchers from Polytechnique Montréal and University of Milan explore the technique of x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and its role in chemical engineering.
Our next highlighted article comes from the Biotechnology, Biochemical, and Biomedical Engineering subject area and features research from authors at Ryerson University. The article, “Functionalized bacterial cellulose nanowhiskers as long‐lasting drug nanocarrier for antibiotics and anticancer drugs,” describes research that offers a promising new method of long-lasting drug delivery. The authors developed functionalized bacterial cellulose nanowhisker drug-nanocarriers and tested their drug delivery abilities on antibiotic and anticancer drugs. The results from this article show that these nanocarriers released the drugs in a sustained and controlled manner over 5-5.5 days, which could reduce the problems of frequent daily dosing or systemic toxicity for normally-released drugs.
The final issue highlight from Can. J. Chem. Eng.’s October issue is “Impeller power draw during turbulent operation in solid-liquid suspensions.” This research, from authors at University of Dayton, provides an experimental assessment of the performance of six different types of impellers in solid-liquid suspensions. The findings show that, in the turbulent regime, the relationship between power draw and suspension density is approximately proportional. The authors also demonstrate, however, that there are important differences in how the suspension density affects the power draw across the different kinds of impellers.