Introduction: Electronic cigarettes are the most popular tobacco product among U.S. youth, and over 80% of current youth users of e-cigarettes use flavored e-cigarettes, with fruit, mint/menthol, and candy/sweets being the most popular flavors. A number of new e-liquid flavors are currently emerging in the online e-cigarette market. Menthol and other flavored e-cigarettes could incentivize combustible tobacco smokers to transition to e-cigarette use. Methods: From February to May 2021, we scraped data of over 14,000 e-liquid products, including detailed descriptions of their flavors, from five national online vape shops. Building upon the existing e-liquid flavor wheel, we expanded the semantic databases (i.e., key terms) to identify flavors using WordNet—a major database for keyword matching and group discussion. Using the enriched databases, we classified 14,000+ e-liquid products into the following 11 main flavor categories: “fruit”, “dessert/candy/sweets”, “coffee/tea”, “alcohol”, “other beverages”, “tobacco”, “mint/menthol”, “nuts”, “spices/pepper”, “other flavors”, and “unspecified flavor”. Results: We find that the most prominent flavor sold in the five online vape shop in 2021 was fruit flavored products, followed by dessert/candy/other sweets. Online vendors often label a product with several flavor profiles, such as fruit and menthol. Conclusions: Given that online stores market products with multiple flavor profiles and most of their products contain fruit flavor, the FDA may have issued marketing denial orders to some of these products. It is important to further examine how online stores respond to the FDA flavor restrictions (e.g., compliance or non-compliance).

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IntroductionThe present study empirically examined the association between price discounts and product attributes of e-liquids sold by online retailers.MethodsWe analysed 14 000 e-liquid products from five major online e-cigarette retailers between April and May 2021 to determine the association between price discounts and product attributes such as nicotine level and form, flavour and vegetable glycerine/propylene glycol ratio. A fixed-effects model was used in the analysis and discounts were calculated in US cents/mL of e-liquid volume.ResultsOut of 14 407 e-liquid products, 92.5% were offered at a discounted price. On average, the price discount for the 13 324 products that had discounts was 16.84 cents/mL across the five stores. Among the three forms of nicotine (salt, freebase and nicotine free), salt e-liquids had the highest average price discount.ConclusionOur findings suggest that e-liquids with salt nicotine have a higher average price discount when sold online, which may influence consumer purchasing behaviour. Further research is needed to assess the potential impact of these discounts on youth and adult tobacco use. Policymakers may consider implementing measures to limit online price discounts for e-liquids as a means of reducing sales among young people.

In the production process of anode, the quality of anode is affected by the sloshing of molten copper caused by casting wheel during operation. Therefore, it is significant to study the sloshing of molten copper and the motion model of casting wheel for improving the quality of anode. Using VOF method and UDF to study the sloshing of molten copper and the motion characteristics of casting wheel. Establishing the ΔH – a model through the method of FLUENT and MATLAB. The optimal motion model of casting wheel is S-model.

BACKGROUND Identifying the existing brands in the e-cigarette market in the US is key to calculating the market share of different companies and their market power. OBJECTIVE To provide a database of e-cigarette brands to expedite e-cigarette market surveillance and help policymakers monitor market changes following regulatory actions. METHODS To facilitate the surveillance of the e-cigarette market and various product types that exist, we created a semantic database of e-cigarette brand names of 2020-2022 from multiple data sources, including: e-liquid brand data from online vape shops collected in 2021; disposable e-cigarette brand data from online vape shops collected in 2022; e-cigarette brand information from 2020 Nielsen Retail Scanner Data; a pre-existing list of e-cigarette brands on Wikipedia; self-reported brands from e-cigarette users in the US who participated in the 2020 International Tobacco Control Four-Country Smoking and Vaping (ITC 4CV) survey; and e-cigarette brands on Twitter from May 2021 to December 2021, published by Tang et al (2022). RESULTS In total, we identify 907 brands in our database that sell a variety of e-cigarette products through different channels (e.g., brick-and-mortar stores or online), such as e-liquids, pods/cartridges, disposables, devices, and starter kits. We also observe and document the top five e-cigarette brands by sales volume in counts in brick-and-mortar stores during 2020, the top five e-liquid brands by product frequency counts available in five popular online vape shops in 2021, as well as the top five e-cigarette brands by frequency counts in self-reported data from the ITC 4CV US 2020 survey. CONCLUSIONS Continuous monitoring of existing e-cigarette brands is crucial for e-cigarette market surveillance, and our semantic database can serve as a useful research tool to assess manufacturers’ marketing behaviors.