Recent insights in synthesis and energy storage applications of porous carbon derived from biomass waste: A review

In the last few decades, global warming, environmental pollution, and an energy shortage of fossil fuel may cause a severe economic crisis and health threats. Storage, conversion, and application of regenerable and dispersive energy would be a promising solution to release this crisis. The development of porous carbon materials from regenerated biomass are competent methods to store energy with high performance and limited environmental damages. In this regard, bio-carbon with abundant surface functional groups and an easily tunable three-dimensional porous structure may be a potential candidate as a sustainable and green carbon material. Up to now, although some literature has screened the biomass source, reaction temperature, and activator dosage during thermochemical synthesis, a comprehensive evaluation and a detailed discussion of the relationship between raw materials, preparation methods, and the structural and chemical properties of carbon materials are still lacking. Hence, in this review, we first assess the recent advancements in carbonization and activation process of biomass with different compositions and the activity performance in various energy storage applications including supercapacitors, lithium-ion batteries, and hydrogen storage, highlighting the mechanisms and open questions in current energy society. After that, the connections between preparation methods and porous carbon properties including specific surface area, pore volume, and surface chemistry are reviewed in detail. Importantly, we discuss the relationship between the pore structure of prepared porous carbon with surface functional groups, and the energy storage performance in various energy storage fields for different biomass sources and thermal conversion methods. Finally, the conclusion and prospective are concluded to give an outlook for the development of biomass carbon materials, and energy storage applications technologies. This review demonstrates significant potentials for energy applications of biomass materials, and it is expected to inspire new discoveries to promote practical applications of biomass materials in more energy storage and conversion fields.     

Recent progress on low-cost ceramic membrane for water and wastewater treatment

Great progress in the development of low-cost ceramic membranes from alternative materials have been achieved recently towards various application especially water and wastewater treatment. However, their significance has not been fully recognized and understood especially in term of their microstructural analysis such as formation of grain growth and microcracks. This review paper summarizes fabrication method, alternative materials, microstructure, wettability, mechanical properties and application of low-cost ceramic membrane. The fabrication method including slip casting, tape casting, extrusion, pressing method and phase inversion technique are described. Alternative materials used in low-cost ceramic membrane fabrication are discussed and categorized into clays, agricultural waste, industrial waste and animal bone waste. The mechanisms of morphology formation, microstructure and wettability properties are analysed. Modification strategies for the surface of low-cost ceramic membrane are discussed, and classified into modification for separation application, modification for photocatalytic application and modification for membrane distillation and membrane contactor system. Modification improves the membrane structure by changing the pore size, porosity and wettability properties of low-cost ceramic membranes. Mechanical properties of low-cost ceramic membranes are also discussed in detail towards several mechanism, like grain growth phenomenon and formation of microcracks which also considered as membrane defects. Grain growth phenomenon can be divided into normal and abnormal grain growth. Meanwhile, formation of microcracks could be occurred in single-phase polycrystalline ceramics that have anisotropic grains or biphasic polycrystalline grains. The application of low-cost ceramic membrane in seawater desalination, oily wastewater treatment, heavy metal adsorption, textile separation and photocatalytic application are reviewed. Finally, some possible opportunities and challenges for further development of low-cost ceramic membrane are pointed out.     

Quality assessment for color correction-based stitched images via bi-directional matching

With the deepening of social information, the panoramic image has drawn a significant interest of viewers and researchers as it can provide a very wide field of view (FoV). Since panoramic images are usually obtained by capturing images with the overlapping regions and then stitching them together, image stitching plays an important role in generating panoramic images. In order to effectively evaluate the quality of stitched images, a novel quality assessment method based on bi-directional matching is proposed for stitched images. Specifically, dense correspondences between the testing and benchmark stitched images are first established by bi-directional SIFT-flow matching. Then, color-aware, geometric-aware and structure-aware features are respectively extracted and fused via support vector regression (SVR) to obtain the final quality score. Experiments on our newly constructed database and ISIQA database demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable performance compared with the conventional blind quality metrics and the quality metrics specially designed for stitched images.     

Dithizone,carminic acid and pyrocatechol violet dyes sensitized metal (Ho,Ba& Cd) doped TiO2/CdS nanocomposite as a photoanode in hybrid heterojunction solar cell

Considering the great importance of nanocomposite based photo-active nanomaterials for a variety of electronics, photonics and photovoltaics application, it is always worth considering to synthesize new hetreostructure. This paper describes the sol-gel and hydrothermal synthesis of metal (holmium, barium, and cadmium) doped TiO₂/CdS nanocomposites for photoanode applications. Various characterization techniques, including XRD, FTIR, UV–VIS, EDX, and SEM were used to examine the synthesized heterostructures. The band gap of pure TiO₂ NPs is 3.10 eV, which was effectively decreased to 2.16 eV by doping and coupling with CdS. The nanomaterial's crystallinity, crystallite size, morphology and elemental composition were determined by XRD, SEM and EDX, respectively. As sensitizers, the organic dyes dithizone, carminic acid, and pyrocatechol violet were used. FTIR was used to analyze the effective dye grafting on the surface of nanomaterials. In the presence of hole conducting P3HT polymer as solid state electrolyte, the sensitized materials were evaluated for solid state dye-sensitized solar cells. Compared to the reference device, Cd–TiO₂/CdS photosensitized using Pyrocatechol violet dye demonstrated the highest efficiency of 2.68% (0.82%). Other parameters of this device, including open circuit voltage (Voc) and short circuit current (Jsc), were determined to be 16.97 mA cm² and 0.41V, respectively.     

Reconstructed Water Oxidation Electrocatalysts: The Impact of Surface Dynamics on Intrinsic Activities

Electroreduction of small molecules such as H₂O, CO₂, and N₂ for producing clean fuels or valuable chemicals provides a sustainable approach to meet the increasing global energy demands and to alleviate the concern on climate change resulting from fossil fuel consumption. On the path to implement this purpose, however, several scientific hurdles remain, one of which is the low energy efficiency due to the sluggish kinetics of the paired oxygen evolution reaction (OER). In response, it is highly desirable to synthesize high-performance and cost-effective OER electrocatalysts. Recent advances have witnessed surface reconstruction engineering as a salient tool to significantly improve the catalytic performance of OER electrocatalysts. In this review, recent progress on the reconstructed OER electrocatalysts and future opportunities are discussed. A brief introduction of the fundamentals of OER and the experimental approaches for generating and characterizing the reconstructed active sites in OER nanocatalysts are given first, followed by an expanded discussion of recent advances on the reconstructed OER electrocatalysts with improved activities, with a particular emphasis on understanding the correlation between surface dynamics and activities. Finally, a prospect for clean future energy communities harnessing surface reconstruction-promoted electrochemical water oxidation will be provided.     

瞬变电磁井间勘探的全空间几何因子

井间是剩余油的主要分布区域,为探测井间剩余油,提高采收率,提出了基于全空间几何因子的瞬变电磁井间勘探方法。在本井使用线圈发射、邻井使用线圈接收,根据瞬变电磁场理论,在阶跃信号的激励下发射线圈在地层中激发出沿圆周方向的闭合瞬变电场,该电场在导电地层中产生与地层电导率呈正比的涡流。由Doll地层环模型可知,地层中的涡流在空间任意点激发得到与地层电导率成正比的二次场响应信号(有用信号),并可表示为空间各点电导率的加权平均值,其权重即为井间瞬变电磁勘探的全空间几何因子;全空间几何因子集中分布在发射线圈和接收线圈附近,其它区域分布较少,在发射线圈和接收线圈两侧呈现不同的极性;对瞬变电磁响应与地层电导率、井间距和源距的变化规律研究可知,瞬变电磁井间勘探有用信号随着地层电导率的增大而增大,随着井间距的增加单调减小,在发射线圈和接收线圈处于同一深度时该响应信号幅度最大。     

Feasibility of zeolites in converting butyric acid into propylene for biorefineries

The biorefinery has been recognized as a new industry to produce both energy and chemical materials such as olefins and BTX from renewable resources. In this context the conversion of butyric acid over zeolites was investigated for establishing a new production route of propylene. Propylene was mainly generated by decarbonylation and dehydration of butyric acid. Our study proved that H-ZSM-5 (750) and silicalite were the best industrial catalyst among the tested ones. For H-ZSM-5 (750), the selectivity of propylene reached 64.2 C% and the ratio of the yield for propylene to theoretical yield (75 C%) became 85.6%.     

Adaptive Discretization for Computerized Tomography

Two adaptive discretization frameworks are tested for computerized tomography (CT) data reconstruction. Removal of inactive pixels is primary motivation. Efficient and user independent entropy optimized masking is employed for spatial filtering purposes. Density of nodes at high gradient of reconstructed physical property is used as adaptation criterion. An alternative option, independent from noisy projection data and nature of the physical properties, is also discussed. Sensitivity analysis between the uniform and nonuniform (evolved via adaptive route) reconstruction grid reveals the utility of nonuniform grids. Iterative and transform based reconstruction techniques are used. Outcomes are tested successfully on three real world projection data from two different compact CT setups and one commercial high-resolution micro-CT scanner.     

Perception‐aware autonomous mast motion planning for planetary exploration rovers

Highly accurate real‐time localization is of fundamental importance for the safety and efficiency of planetary rovers exploring the surface of Mars. Mars rover operations rely on vision‐based systems to avoid hazards as well as plan safe routes. However, vision‐based systems operate on the assumption that sufficient visual texture is visible in the scene. This poses a challenge for vision‐based navigation on Mars where regions lacking visual texture are prevalent. To overcome this, we make use of the ability of the rover to actively steer the visual sensor to improve fault tolerance and maximize the perception performance. This paper answers the question of where and when to look by presenting a method for predicting the sensor trajectory that maximizes the localization performance of the rover. This is accomplished by an online assessment of possible trajectories using synthetic, future camera views created from previous observations of the scene. The proposed trajectories are quantified and chosen based on the expected localization performance. In this study, we validate the proposed method in field experiments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Mars Yard. Furthermore, multiple performance metrics are identified and evaluated for reducing the overall runtime of the algorithm. We show how actively steering the perception system increases the localization accuracy compared with traditional fixed‐sensor configurations.     

In-fibre LP11–LP21 mode conversion using force-induced long-period fibre gratings with polarization controllers

ABSTRACT

Mode conversion between higher-order modes is attained in a step-index four mode fibre using an in-line polarization controller followed by a force-induced long period fibre grating. By adjusting the field orientation of the LP₁₁ mode to the antisymmetric fibre grating, the LP₁₁ mode is converted to the LP₂₁ mode with a spatially periodic force of 50 N along the fibre length of 50?mm. The mode conversion is evaluated by observing the far-field and near-field patterns of the fibre output and by comparing the transmitted optical power with and without the additional two-mode fibre. The phase-matching grating period is required of the accuracy of roughly ±5?μm and the radiation loss during the mode conversion is as low as 0.01?dB.