[Assessment of affecting factors on women's sexual quality of life among hospital employees]

Background and Objective: Changing of lifestyle in women and increasing their social activity especially in working places can affect women's sexual quality of life [SQOL]. This study was done to determine the affecting factors on sexual quality of life among hospital employee's women

Methods: This descriptive - analytical study was carried out on 121 women who work in the two hospitals in Sabzevar city and Birjand city in Iran during 2014. Data was collected using two questionnaires including the Iranian version of sexual quality of life-female [SQOL-F] questionnaire and a researcher-made measure to assess demographic characteristics, health related, and work-related variables

Results: The mean +/- SD score of SQOL-F was 80.1 +/- 19.7. The univariate analysis showed that the mean score of SQOL-F significantly related with age [P<0.05], duration of sleep [P<0.05], marital duration [P<0.05], educational level [P<0.05], and physical activity [P<0.05]. The regression modeling indicated that educational level [beta=0.33], marital duration [beta=0.32] and quality of sleep [beta=0.56] were predictors of SQOL-F scores

Conclusion: This study showed that educational level, marital duration and quality of sleep were predictors of SQOL-F scores among hospital employee's women

[Removal of xylene fromwaste air stream using catalytic ozonation process]

Volatile organic compounds [VOCs] are one of the common groups of contaminants encountered in the industrial activities, emitted through air stream into the atmosphere. To prevent the human and environmental health from the adverse effects of VOCs, air streams containing VOCs need to be treated before discharging to environment. This study was aimed at investigating the catalytic ozonation process for removing xylene from a contaminated air stream. In the present work, a bench scale experimental setup was constructed and used for catalytic ozonation of xylene. The performance of catalytic ozonation process was compared with that of single adsorption and ozonation in removal of several concentration of xylene under the similar experimental conditions. The results indicated that the efficiency of catalytic ozonation was higher than that of single adsorption and ozonation in removal of xylene. The emerging time and elimination capacity of xylene for inlet concentration of 300 ppm was 1.4 and 5.8 times of those in adsorption system. The activated carbon acted as catalyst in the presence of ozone and thus attaining the synergistic effect for xylene degradation. Catalytic ozonation process is an efficient technique the treatment of air streams containing high concentrations of xylene. The adsorption systems can also be simply retrofitted to catalytic ozonation process and thereby improving their performance for treating VOCs

[Investigating the effect of gas flow rate, inlet ozone concentration and relative humidity on the efficacy of catalytic ozonation process in the removal of xylene from waste airstream]

The catalytic ozonation is an efficient process for the degradation of volatile organic compounds from contaminated air stream. This study was aimed at investigating the efficacy of catalytic ozonation process in removal of xylene from the polluted air stream and the influence of retention time [gas flow rate], inlet ozone dose and relative humidity on this performance. the catalytic ozonation of xylene was conducted using a bench scale set-up consisted of a syringe pump, an air pump, an ozone generator, and a glass reactor packed with activated carbon. Several experimental run was defined to investigate the influence of the selected operational variables. The results indicated that the efficiency of catalytic ozonation was greater than that of single adsorption in removal of xylene under similar inlet concentration and relative humidity. We found a significant catalytic effect for activated carbon when used in combination with ozonation process, leading to improvement of xylene removal percentage. In addition, the elimination capacity of the system improved with the increase of inlet ozone dose as well as gas flow rate. The relative humidity showed a positive effect of the xylene removal at the range of 5 to 50%, while the higher humidity [more than 50%] resulted in reduction of the performance. The findings of the present work revealed that the catalytic ozonation process can be an efficient technique for treating the air streams containing industrial concentrations of xylene. Furthermore, there is a practical potential to retrofit the present adsorption systems into the catalytic ozonation simply by coupling them with the ozonation system