Pinaceae Species: Spruce, Pine and Fir as a New Culinary Herb and Spice

The Pinaceae family has traditionally been used as medicine, resorted to as a famine food and for ornamental purposes as Christmas trees. In the last few years numerous restaurants have been using different species of Pinaceae family as a garnish or an aromatic spice, using them in different culinary applications like oils and infusions to flavor dressings and broths. Abies grandis (Grand fir), Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas fir), Pinus sylvestris (Scots pine) and Picea abies (Norway spruce) were researched on taxonomy, habitats and non-edible uses, culinary traditions, health and nutritional properties, aroma profile. The main compounds in Pinaceae family are monoterpenes, oxygenated monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, oxygenate sesquiterpenes, diterpenes and hydrocarbons, especially α-β-pinene, limonene, α-terpinene, and even bornyl acetate, responsible for aroma compounds such as citrusy-, woody-, herbal-, or piney aromas. Modern gastronomy uses, sensory analysis and culinary applications were applied for demonstrating the possibilities on modern culinary application in this novel yet traditional spice.

The Challenge of Elastomer Seals for Blowout Preventer BOP and Wellhead/Christmas Trees under High Temperature

It is critically important for elastomer sealing components in blowout preventers (BOP) and wellheads to meet the pressure and temperature rating requirements under the newly released American Petroleum Institute (API) standards, API 16A (fourth edition) and API 6A (twenty-first edition) respectively. Extrusion resistance under high pressure and high temperature is one of the most critical challenge for the elastomer sealing components to meet the above API standards. This challenge is related to the basic properties of elastomer materials and mechanical design of the sealing components. This paper outlines how a simple and low-cost approach was developed to evaluate extrusion resistance of elastomer sealing components, and the correlation between critical tear pressure and extrusion gap of the two elastomers seals was evaluated using a power law equation. This correlation revealed that the above challenges of elastomer sealing components for BOPs and wellheads/Christmas trees is related to the weak strength of elastomers under high temperature and large clearances (extrusion gap) in current designs. New materials and/or new mechanical design to overcome such a challenge were also provided and discussed in this paper. The paper will help practicing engineers understand the challenge of material selection, mechanical design, and API testing as well as better understand the capability and limitation of sealing components for blowout preventors and wellhead applications under high pressure and/or high temperature (HPHT).

What’s under the Christmas Tree? A Soil Sulfur Amendment Lowers Soil pH and Alters Fir Tree Rhizosphere Bacterial and Eukaryotic Communities, Their Interactions, and Functional Traits

We used sulfur incorporation to investigate the legacy effects of lowered soil pH on the bacterial and eukaryotic populations in the rhizosphere of Christmas trees. Acidification of the soils drove alterations of fir tree root chemistry and large shifts in the taxonomic and functional compositions of the communities.

Development of new electrical technological systems and complex in the production of hard-to-remove oil reserves

When developing hard-to-recover hydrocarbon reserves, enterprises use various complexes and systems to facilitate technological processes that contribute to the lifting of heavy and viscous oils to the surface, as well as the extraction of light oils from lowpermeability reservoirs. During the operation of fields, abnormal situations also arise, caused by the appearance of asphalt-resin-paraffin deposits (ARPD) and salt deposits on the walls of tubing pipes, Christmas trees, process pipelines and equipment at the bottom. The existing methods of combating and preventing the manifestations of ARPD and salt precipitation can be conditionally divided into mechanical, chemical, thermal. To prevent and combat ARPD, as well as to reduce the viscosity of produced oils, thermal methods are most preferred, among which electrothermal methods are considered effective. In the case of salt sediments, technologies based on electrical energy are also an effective means of prevention, in particular, exposure of the well emulsion to a magnetic field. Keywords: electrical technological systems and complexes; hard-to-remove oil reserves; asphalt-resin-paraffin deposits; induction heating systems.

Cupressus arizonica (Arizona cypress).

At present, in the New World, C. arizonica and its varieties are of low economic importance, but they are sometimes cut for fenceposts, fuelwood and lumber, and recently they have become popular as Christmas trees. By contrast, the Arizona cypress (C. arizonica var. arizonica) and the smooth cypress (C. arizonica var. glabra) are widespread in Europe and are used for landscaping, erosion control, windbreaks, and to a minor extent for lumber.

Development and control strategy research for subsea all-electric actuators

The development of subsea all-electric Christmas trees is an area of focus in the offshore oil industry worldwide. The main difficulties are associated with the development and control strategies for subsea all-electric actuators, which are the most critical components of subsea Christmas trees. In this paper, a single-motor level fuzzy PID control with an integrated working condition detection module and a 3-motor redundant-level deviation strategy with coupled joint synchronous control were proposed to realize the real-time determination of algorithm parameters according to the working conditions, accelerate convergence to solve the problem of rapid redistribution, maintain the fast speed of the servo motor of the subsea all-electric tree valve actuator, conduct simulation analyses of the synchronous control model, build the synchronous control electrical system and test this system. With the simulation analysis, a synchronous control electrical system was built, tested and verified. The simulation results of the control strategy show that the proposed single-motor fuzzy PID-deviation coupled control strategy in this paper tends to be stable approximately 0.2 s after the system is started; additionally, with this approach, the convergence speed is faster than that of the traditional PID method, tracking errors are highly reduced, and robustness to load shocks is decreased. The test results show that when the inlet pressures are 1.0 MPa, 1.5 MPa and 2.0 MPa and the three servo motors simultaneously work, the control effect is good, the synchronization effect is good. When one servo motor fails, the two redundant servo motors can still control the all-electric valve actuator and provide good synchronization control capabilities. When the inlet pressure is 1.0 MPa, 1.5 MPa and 2.0 MPa, whether the system is in normal operation or a servo motor fails, the vertical and horizontal vibration values of the system are within reasonable ranges. This result verifies that the proposed control strategy yields superior performance in power distribution compared to traditional systems and strong robustness. The synchronous control strategy can be applied to the synchronous control problem of subsea all-electric production systems, which is of great significance for the development of subsea all-electric production systems.

Visualization of Chromatin in the Yeast Nucleus and Nucleolus Using Hyperosmotic Shock

Unlike in most eukaryotic cells, the genetic information of budding yeast in the exponential growth phase is only present in the form of decondensed chromatin, a configuration that does not allow its visualization in cell nuclei conventionally prepared for transmission electron microscopy. In this work, we studied the distribution of chromatin and its relationships to the nucleolus using different cytochemical and immunocytological approaches applied to yeast cells subjected to hyperosmotic shock. Our results show that osmotic shock induces the formation of heterochromatin patches in the nucleoplasm and intranucleolar regions of the yeast nucleus. In the nucleolus, we further revealed the presence of osmotic shock-resistant DNA in the fibrillar cords which, in places, take on a pinnate appearance reminiscent of ribosomal genes in active transcription as observed after molecular spreading (“Christmas trees”). We also identified chromatin-associated granules whose size, composition and behaviour after osmotic shock are reminiscent of that of mammalian perichromatin granules. Altogether, these data reveal that it is possible to visualize heterochromatin in yeast and suggest that the yeast nucleus displays a less-effective compartmentalized organization than that of mammals.