Hydrotreated vegetable oils (HVOs) are currently a popular renewable energy source, frequently blended into a Diesel-fuel. In the paper, HVO potential as feedstock for the steam-cracking process was investigated, since HVOs promise high yields of monomers for producing green polymers and other chemicals. Prepared HVO samples of different oil sources were studied experimentally, using pyrolysis gas chromatography to estimate their product yields in the steam-cracking process and compare them to traditional feedstocks. At 800 °C, HVOs provided significantly elevated ethylene yield, higher yield of propylene and C4 olefins, and lower oil yield than both atmospheric gas oil and hydrocracked vacuum distillate used as reference traditional feedstocks. The HVO preparation process was found to influence the distribution of steam-cracking products more than the vegetable oil used for the HVO preparation. Furthermore, pyrolysis of HVO/traditional feedstock blends was performed at different blending ratios. It provided information about the product yield dependence on blending ratio for future process design considerations. It revealed that some product yields exhibit non-linear dependence on the blending ratio, and therefore, their yields cannot be predicted by the simple principle of additivity.

Meloxicam (MLX) is a poorly soluble drug exhibiting strong hydrophobicity. This combination of properties makes dissolution enhancement by particle size reduction ineffective; therefore, combined formulation approaches are required. Various approaches were investigated in this study, including milling, solid dispersions, and self-emulsified lipid formulations. Whereas milling studies of MLX and its co-milling with various polymers have been reported in recent literature, this study is focused on investigating the dissolution kinetics of particulate formulations obtained by co-milling MLX with sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) in a planetary ball mill with 5–25 wt.% SLS content. The effects of milling time and milling ball size were also investigated. No significant reduction in drug crystallinity was observed under the investigated milling conditions according to XRD data. For the dissolution study, we used an open-loop USP4 dissolution apparatus, and recorded dissolution profiles were fitted according to the Weibull model. The Weibull parameters and a novel criterion—surface utilization factor—were used to evaluate and discuss the drug release from the perspective of drug particle surface changes throughout the dissolution process. The most effective co-milling results were achieved using smaller balls (2 mm), with a co-milling time of up to 15 min SLS content of up to 15 wt.% to increase the dissolution rate by approximately 100 times relative to the physical mixture reference. The results suggest that for hydrophobic drugs, particle performance during dissolution is very sensitive to surface properties and not only to particle size. Co-milling with SLS prepares the surface for faster drug release than that achieved with direct mixing.