Palmitic acid World War II to produce napalm. The word "napalm" is derived from the words naphthenic acid and palmitic acid. Palmitic acid was discovered by Edmond Frémy in 1840, in saponified palm oil. This remains the primary industrial route for its production, with the triglycerides (fats) in palm oil being hydrolysed by high temperature water (above ), and the resulting mixture fractionally distilled to give the pure product. Palmitic acid is naturally produced by a wide range of other plants and organisms, typically at low levels. It is naturally present in butter, cheese, milk, and meat, as well as cocoa butter,
Weapon target assignment problem problem has received more attention. In spite of the name, there are nonmilitary applications of the WTA. The main one is to search for a lost object or person by heterogeneous assets such as dogs, aircraft, walkers, etc. The problem is to assign the assets to a partition of the space in which the object is located to minimize the probability of not finding the object. The "value" of each element of the partition is the probability that the object is located there. The weapon target assignment problem is often formulated as the following nonlinear integer programming problem: subject to