A well-balanced diet habit of a wide variety of foods and adequate nutrition can help to maintain proper growth and healthy life for young children. In Korea, young children aged 3 to 6 years use their own plates to eat lunch served in the kindergarten or childcare facilities. In this paper, we propose a smart plate that can easily measure how much food children have eaten. The smart plate has five load cell sensors to measure the weight of five places. Using them, the amount of food intake can be determined by measuring the weight of food before and after meals, respectively. This helps to know which foods young children prefer and which foods they do not prefer and identifies nutritional deficiencies in them. In addition, long-term accumulated data can be used to predict the growth index of young children. Finally, menus are recommended based on the nutrition facts consumed on a monthly basis by analyzing nutrition ingredients that were insufficient or excessive for children.

This paper introduces multiple esterification reactions of three alcohols occurring in a single reactive distillation (RD) column and reports significant energy savings by combining three reactions in the single unit. To realize a feasible integration of the three reactions, the removal of the common water product from the unstable heterogeneous azeotrope should be possible through liquid–liquid decantation in the eight-component system. For this multireaction system, only the direct sequence can produce three esters with a purity higher than 99.0 mol % due to the behavior of liquid–liquid phase equilibrium. We demonstrate an economic evaluation of the direct sequence of a single RD column simultaneously producing the three esters by comparing the direct sequence with the two parallel RD sequences in the same design basis. The total annual cost of the triple esterification direct sequence is reduced by 21.3–25.2% compared to that of the parallel esterification system.

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This study introduces a pinch-based method to design an internally heat-integrated pressure swing distillation (HIPSD) with a double annular column. In the configuration, the annular stripping section of a low-pressure (LP) column partially wraps around the rectifying section of an inner high-pressure (HP) column to minimize exergy loss. In order to enable adequate heat transfer and azeotropic separation, the key factor is setting the pressure of the columns by considering the so-called pinch pressure, which is determined by the minimum temperature approach and circumvention of the azeotropic boundary. This heat integration between two individual columns reflects different overall heat transfer coefficients for each stage, because they are affected by the composition of the fluid and its hydrodynamic characteristics. Each column is also sized to meet hydraulic conditions to ensure separation efficiency. The HIPSD of several azeotropic mixtures was described and the maximum energy savings reached 23.80%.

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