Residence time including mean residence time and residence time distribution (RTD) is a very important parameter to characterize a mixing system. In practice, tracer study has been widely used in experiments to obtain residence time distribution. There are several numerical approaches available to compute the average residence time and the residence time distribution of a system. This paper attempts to summarize those available approaches through an example.

Grading of breast carcinoma plays an important role for identification of severity of the disease and prognostic treatment in histopathology. It also is one of important indicators of carcinoma patterns. In general, it depends on three indices: tubule formation, nuclear plemorphism, and mitotic counts by scoring based on the degrees of cell differentiation or proliferation. However, scoring on these indices often subjects to intra-and inter-observer variability due to its complexities and manual classifications by pathologists.This study aims to accurately determine the scoring of tubule formation for histological grading using a series of image processing and a classifier consisting of support vector machine with Gaussian kernel function. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, a number of H&E stained images acquired from biopsy tissues of patients were tested with the proposed system for the scoring. Experimental result reveals that the proposed algorithms can obtain satisfactory scoring compared to other reported works. Therefore, it can provide reliable scores in the tubule formation and grade of breast carcinoma especially for ductal carcinoma.

Packed beds are the dominant reactor type for industrial heterogeneous catalytic reactions. Packing pattern affects the flow, heat and mass transfer characteristics within the beds. With the development of high performance computing and advances in CFD, it becomes possible to resolve flow/reactions in detail in packed beds, especially for beds with low tube-to-particle diameter ratio. In this paper a whole set of CFD solutions in dealing with such packed beds from packing, meshing, solving and post-processing is discussed. The solution process is illustrated by considering cylindrical beds packed with spherical balls. As an example, a plant-scale bed packed with about 1000 balls is simulated in the paper.

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