This article is obtained from here.

The project, led jointly by the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council and the Plastics Industry Association, exposes complexities around plastic market economics and recycling behavioral change.

SOURCE: Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council

DESCRIPTION:

The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC), in collaboration with the Plastics Industry Association (PLASTICS), announced today the completion of a multi-hospital plastics recycling project in the Chicago market. Focused on non-infectious plastic packaging and products collected from clinical areas of the hospitals, the project sought to demonstrate a viable business model for recycling healthcare plastics on a regional level. A complete report, detailing project development, implementation and analysis can be found here.

Participating hospitals included Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, and NorthShore University HealthSystem’s Evanston, Skokie and Glenbrook Hospitals. These hospitals collected a variety of healthcare plastics, primarily from main operating rooms and ambulatory surgery centers, including polypropylene and polyethylene resins in the form of sterilization wrap, irrigation bottles, basins, pitchers, trays, Tyvek®, and rigid and flexible packaging materials. These materials were then transported by waste haulers to material recovery facilities for assessments related to composition and quality. Complexity of material types, improper sorting, and the presence of non-conforming materials were the primary challenges in being able to extract the recycling value from the materials.

“This project provided valuable insights into the realities of implementing plastics recycling programs in clinical healthcare settings,” says Chris Rogers, HPRC Project Manager. “What we learned is that collection of plastics must be made simple for clinical staff in order to be effective. Detailed sorting at the point of generation is too complex and a distant priority from clinician’s primary focus of ensuring positive patient outcomes. It’s also important to remember that behavioral change around recycling can be a slow process, one that takes constant reinforcement over time.”

Companies providing logistics and recycling support included Waste Management, LakeShore Recycling Services and Antek Madison. Key Green Solutions, LLC, a sustainability management software service provider, collected and maintained project metrics. PLACON provided additional financial support to the project as an interested end-user looking to create new products from the recycled materials. Petoskey Plastics supplied specialized bags for collection and transportation of the plastic materials.

“In addition to testing the recovery and mechanical recycling of healthcare plastics, we were also able to explore alternative pathways of chemical recycling and conversion to fuel products with our technology partners,” said Kim Holmes, senior director of recycling and diversion at PLASTICS. “Proving the value of these hospital plastics in the conversion process was an exciting dimension of this project and underscores the importance of adding non-mechanical recovery technologies to our resource management tool kit.”

Additional key project insights include:

• Keep it simple: Collection of plastic materials must be simple for clinical staff participation.
• Program champions are critical: Tap engaged and committed program champions within each stakeholder group.
• Behavioral change is a process: Remember that behavioral change can be slow and requires consistent reinforcement of the desired behaviors.
• Discuss ownership: All stakeholders need to discuss and agree on who will be responsible for sorting as comingled materials have marginal value.
• The economics must work: To make a business case, plastic materials must be available in sufficient volumes and processes must be in place to ensure a clean supply.

About HPRC
The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) is a private technical coalition of industry peers across healthcare, recycling and waste management industries seeking to improve recyclability of plastic products within healthcare. HPRC is made up of globally recognized members including Baxter, BD, Bemis, Cardinal Health, DuPont, Eastman Chemical Company, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic and SABIC Innovative Plastics. The council convenes biannually at meetings hosted by an HPRC member that include facility tours to further learning and knowledge sharing opportunities through first-hand demonstration of best practices in sustainable product and packaging design and recycling processes. For more information, visit www.hprc.org. Connect with HPRC on LinkedIn.

About PLASTICS
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This article is obtained from here.

With a wide range of high-pressure responsibilities, project managers are some of the most important players in a construction firm. They spend their time managing employees, working with clients, reporting to superiors, and making sure everything goes according to plan.

Once upon a time, there was a hard limit to the amount of work a project manager could take on. PMs were shackled by in-office land lines and pen-and-paper record keeping. Collaboration with clients and subcontractors had to be face-to-face. Today however, collaboration and record keeping can occur anytime, anywhere. With advanced collaborative capabilities, expectations for project managers are sky high, and only PMs with the best tech can keep up. Let’s see how modern software has reinvented the project manager:

1. Project Planning

Every project begins with an idea, and it’s up to the project manager to turn that idea into a reality. To actively collaborate with stakeholders, PMs needs a streamlined communication tool. PMs and clients should be able to share and review blueprints, budgets, records and other crucial data in real-time. These early communications set a precedent of total collaboration so you can ensure that client feedback is considered at every stage.

2. Project Coordination

Once you’ve planned out the details of your project, it’s up to the project manager to make the arrangements and keep things running smoothly. It takes more than a simple collaborative tool to effectively manage employees, contractors and consultants. Robust software with advanced functions and integrated apps are essential for keeping everyone on track. Mobile reporting apps, for example, have the power to ‘stream’ relevant data from the jobsite to the office. PMs (and their supervisors) gain more access to information in less time.

3. Reporting & Accountability

It’s nearly impossible for a project manager to memorize every aspect of day-to-day operations. Yet, they’re expected to consistently advise clients, manage staff and inform their supervisors. Strong management software makes it easy to find and organize relevant project data. Advanced systems even let you format and send out reports based on standardized data. With the latest technology, project managers can keep meticulous records without breaking a sweat!

Overall, adopting these tools cuts out wasted time and empowers collaboration. You’re the project “leader,” after all, and it’s time to start leading. Want to learn more about project management technology? Check out our top 5 tips to improve construction management.

By Evan Ackerman

This article is obtained from here.

A cyclocopter is a weird sort of aircraft that uses airfoils rotating around a horizontal axis to generate lift and thrust. The concept was developed about a century ago, but these things are tricky to build and fly, so they haven’t, er, taken off as much as helicopters have. In fact, there’s only a small handful of research groups working on cyclocopters at all, and at the moment, they’re focusing on small scales. Professor Moble Benedict and graduate students Carl Runco and David Coleman at Texas A&M’s Advanced Vertical Flight Laboratory has been testing the smallest cyclocopter ever developed: It’s just 29 grams in mass, and could be a tiny step towards replacing helicopters and multirotors with something better.

If it’s still not clear how it actually flies and maneuvers, this diagram might help:

Image: Moble Benedict/Texas A&M

The cycloidal rotor (left) with key components identified. Blade kinematics (right) and forces on a cycloidal rotor in hover.

A single cycloidal rotor, or cyclorotor, consists of multiple airfoils attached to a frame that turns around in a circle very fast. The airfoils produce lift and thrust as they move through the air, and because each blade can pivot, that thrust that can be directed in any direction perpendicular to the cyclorotor. Or, as Benedict explains, “With the blades cyclically pitched such that each blade has a positive geometric angle of attack at the top and bottom of the circular trajectory, a net thrust is produced.” The thrust vectoring is instant, making the cyclocopter very maneuverable, and (among other advantages) the vehicle can transition from, say, stable hovering to high-speed forward flight without needing to pitch itself over like a helicopter or multirotor aircraft. The little rotor on the back stabilizes the pitch.

Benedict has been working on cyclocopters for years; we wrote about a quad-cyclocopter that he developed at the University of Maryland a while back. That was, in fact, the first successful flight test of a cycloidal-rotor based aircraft and along with Dr. Benedict, other people involved in that effort were Elena Shrestha, Dr. Vikram Hrishikeshavan and Dr. Inderjit Chopra. At 800 grams, it wasn’t what you’d call large, but cyclocopters get particularly interesting at very small scales because of their combination of very high maneuverability and potential for excellent efficiency. They’re also more stable, more space efficient, and they’re theoretically quieter and capable of a higher top speed than helicopters are.

Cyclocopters sound pretty great, right? So our first question for Benedict was this:

IEEE Spectrum: Why aren’t we all flying cyclopters right now, instead of helicopters and multirotors?

Moble Benedict: Even though people were trying to explore cyclorotors 100 years back, we have only started looking at this concept seriously now. What happened in the early 20th century is that helicopters became successful before cyclocopters and then people naturally lost interest in pursuing this concept.

One of the biggest structural issues in cyclorotors is the fact that blades have to take large transverse centrifugal bending loads, and 100 years ago, we did not have the materials that had the strength-to-weight ratio to do that. Today, with composites and so on, it is possible, and this is a key enabler for the present cyclorotors. Also, all the successful cyclocopters built so far needed electronic onboard feedback stabilization, unlike helicopters, which can be passively stabilized. So a cyclocopter idea was far too advanced for its time when it was introduced.

Can you describe the characteristics of the cyclocopter that give it advantages over multirotors and helicopters?

A cycloidal rotor can achieve higher hover efficiency than a conventional rotor at smaller scales, because of the uniform aerodynamic conditions along the blade span and favorable unsteady aerodynamic phenomena on the blades. We have experimentally demonstrated the higher aerodynamic efficiency (thrust per unit aerodynamic power) of cycloidal rotors in comparison with conventional micro rotors used in multicopters and helicopters.

Additionally, a cycloidal rotor is capable of instantaneous thrust vectoring, which can potentially make the vehicle more maneuverable. The cyclorotor can perform efficient high-speed forward flight even beyond an advance ratio of 1.0 by a simple phasing of the cyclic blade-pitch schedule. Unlike a traditional hybrid aircraft (e.g., a tilt-rotor), a cyclocopter can transition from hover to high-speed forward flight without any configuration change due to its thrust vectoring capability. Finally, a cyclorotor can efficiently utilize the available 3-D space, and therefore, requires smaller footprint as compared to a conventional rotor, resulting in a highly compact flying vehicle.

What are some of the challenges in building a cyclocopter this small, and how did you solve them?

Designing and building a rotor at those scales was extremely challenging. We had to come up with innovative carbon composite fabrication techniques to make the rotor blades (0.12 grams each) and pitch links (10 milligrams) and they needed to have sub-millimeter accuracy. We had to custom build a 1.3-gram autopilot (called ELKA, designed by Dr. Vikram Hrishikeshavan at University of Maryland) with triaxial gyros, triaxial accelerometers, a processor, and wireless communications. System integration was challenging. When you scale things down, the dynamics becomes faster, so we had to spend many months trimming and tuning the feedback gains for hover stability. Developing and flight testing the 29-gram cyclocopter took more than 2 years, and was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory’s MAST-CTA Program.

Image: Moble Benedict/Texas A&M

Conceptual drawing of a future palm-sized cyclocopter.

What are you working on next?

I think that the key areas that still need to be improved are:

1. Designing ultralight blades that can handle the large centrifugal bending loads at high RPMs
2. Reducing the weight and complexity of the cyclorotors significantly
3. Optimization of blade kinematics, blade aerodynamic design, rotor geometry, etc to maximize efficiency in both hover and high-speed flight
4. Mechanically simpler means of implementing these optimal pitching mechanisms either passively or actively
5. Investigating more compact cyclocopter configuration and understanding the upward scalability of this concept

We have shown that this concept has the potential at smaller micro air vehicle scales. The next big step in our research is to investigate the upward scalability of a cycloidal rotor to be used on large VTOL UAVs weighing 100s of pounds and maybe even on a manned aircraft. We have a five-year grant from the U.S. Army to investigate the upward scalability of this concept.

More than anything I want more people around the world to be aware of such a concept so that we can encourage them to work on this. One or two groups working on this idea can only make so much progress. I hope that in the future, once this technology is more mature, it will find its place in the next generation of personal air vehicles and flying cars.