Analogy between adsorption and sorption:An elementary mechanistic approach.I.Monolayer adsorption and sorption without solvent cluster formation

The elementary mechanistic model of adsorption and sorption is based on a simple hypothesis:the adsorption sites are uniformly distributed on the surface of the pore walls in the adsorbent,the sorption sites are uniformly distributed in the volume of the polymer.In this first paper we will analyze the simple case where one solute mol-ecule is only allowed to occupy a single adsorption or sorption site.A common elementary occupation law of the free sites is assumed:the differential increase of the number of the adsorbed/sorbed molecules is proportional to the differential increase of the activity of the solute and the concentration of the free(non-occupied)sites in the solid.The proportionality coefficient is called affinity coefficient depending on the solid/solute couple and on the temperature and independent of the concentration of the solute.In adsorption the concentration of the free sites is a surface concentration on the pore walls and in sorption it is expressed by the molarity.The simple mono-layer adsorption law of Jovanovi?is obtained:n=n0(1?e?KP)where n is the number of moles adsorbed when the pressure is P. n0is the total number of adsorption sites and K the affinity coefficient for adsorption.The sorption law writes:a= 1k? ?1??]+1?rk ln?1+1r?1??]where?,r and k hold respectively for the volume fraction of the solvent in the polymer,for the ratio of the molar volumes of the solvent to the elementary polymer chain containing one single adsorption site and for the sorption affinity coefficient.The confrontation of these equations to experimental isotherms is satisfactory in comparison with the classical Langmuir and Flory-Huggins equations:the best results are obtained for adsorption of vapors on a 5A zeolite and for all analyzed sorption results.     

Average outage duration of multihop communication systems with regenerative relays

Closed-form expressions for the average outage duration (AOD) of multihop regenerative communication systems over generalized fading channels are presented. Both noise-limited and interference-limited systems are studied. To show the usefulness of the presented expressions, some specific fading scenarios are considered. In addition, some numerical examples of interest comparing direct versus relayed transmission and studying the effect of increasing the number of hops and/or cochannel interferers are plotted and discussed.     

End-to-end performance of transmission systems with relays over Rayleigh-fading channels

End-to-end performance of two-hop wireless communication systems with nonregenerative relays over flat Rayleigh-fading channels is presented. This is accomplished by deriving and applying some new closed-form expressions for the statistics of the harmonic mean of two independent exponential variates. It is shown that the presented results can either be exact or tight lower bounds on the performance of these systems depending on the choice of the relay gain. More specifically, average bit-error rate expressions for binary differential phase-shift keying, as well as outage probability formulas for noise limited systems are derived. Finally, comparisons between regenerative and nonregenerative systems are presented. Numerical results show that the former systems clearly outperform the latter ones for low average signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). They also show that the two systems have similar performance at high average SNR.     

Optimal power allocation for relayed transmissions over Rayleigh-fading channels

Relayed transmission is a way to attain broader coverage by splitting the communication link from the source to the destination into several shorter links/hops. One of the main advantages of this communication technique is that it distributes the use of power throughout the hops. This implies longer battery life and lower interference introduced to the rest of the network. In this context, this paper investigates the optimal allocation of power over these links/hops for a given power budget. All hops are assumed to be subject to independent Rayleigh fading. Outage probability which is the probability that the link quality from source to destination falls below a certain threshold is used as the optimization criterion. Numerical results show that optimizing the allocation of power enhances the system performance, especially if the links are highly unbalanced in terms of their average fading power or if the number of hops is large. Interestingly, they also show that nonregenerative systems with optimum power allocation can outperform regenerative systems with no power optimization.     

Eco-friendly Geopolymer Composite Based on Non-heat-treated Phosphate Sludge Reinforced With Polypropylene Fibers

Silicon - Geopolymers produced with metakaolin (MK) and thermally untreated phosphate sludge (PS) are beneficial and environmentally advantageous materials, but their fragility limits its...     

Chemometric Characterization of Eight Monovarietal Algerian Virgin Olive Oils

Differences in triacylglycerol, fatty acid, squalene, and tocopherol compositions were demonstrated between 8 varieties of virgin olive oils (Aberkane, Aguenaou, Aharoun, Aimel, Bouchouk Guergour, Bouichret, Chemlal, and Sigoise) from Petite Kabylie area, north eastern Algeria. Fatty acid and triacylglycerol morphotypes characterized each variety. A principal component analysis, based on triacylglycerol, fatty acid, and squalene compositions, differentiates between varieties. Minor fatty acids and squalene, usually not taken into account individually in authentication studies, are strongly involved in this differentiation, whereas the discriminant power of tocopherols is weak. Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy classification using chemical compositions as variables showed a high potential to authenticate the varietal origin of Algerian virgin olive oils.     

Performance analysis of selective cooperation in amplify‐and‐forward relay networks over identical Nakagami‐m channels

In cooperative communications, multiple relays between a source and a destination can increase the diversity gain. Because all the nodes must use orthogonal channels, multiple‐relay cooperation becomes spectrally inefficient. Therefore, a bestrelay selection scheme was recently proposed. In this paper, we analyzed the performance of this scheme for a system with the relays operating in amplify‐and‐forward mode over identical Nakagami‐m channels using an exact source–relay–destination signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR).We derived accurate closed‐form expressions for various system parameters including the probability density function of end‐to‐end SNR, the average output SNR, the bit error probability, and the channel capacity. The analytical results were verified through Monte Carlo simulations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Antenna subset selection at multi‐antenna relay with adaptive modulation

In this paper, we proposed several antenna selection schemes for cooperative diversity systems with adaptive transmission. The proposed schemes were based on dual‐hop relaying where a relay with multiple‐antenna capabilities at reception and transmission is deployed between the source and the destination nodes. We analyzed the performance of the proposed schemes by quantifying the average spectral efficiency and the outage probability. We also investigated the trade‐off of performance and complexity by comparing the average number of active antennas, path estimations, and signal‐to‐noise ratio comparisons of the different proposed schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Local convective boiling heat transfer and pressure drop of nanofluid in narrow rectangular channels

This paper reports an experimental study on convective boiling heat transfer of nanofluids and de-ionized water flowing in a multichannel. The test copper plate contains 50 parallel rectangular minichannels of hydraulic diameter 800 μm. Experiments were performed to characterize the local heat transfer coefficients and surface temperature using copper–water nanofluids with very small nanoparticles concentration. Axial distribution of local heat transfer is estimated using a non-intrusive method. Only responses of thermocouples located inside the wall are used to solve inverse heat conduction problem. It is shown that the distribution of the local heat flux, surface temperature, and local heat transfer coefficient is dependent on the axial location and nanoparticles concentration. The local heat transfer coefficients estimated inversely are close to those determined from the correlation of Kandlikar and Balasubramanian [An extension of the flow boiling correlation to transition, laminar and deep laminar flows in minichannels and microchannels, Heat Transfer Eng. 25 (3) (2004) 86–93.] for boiling water. It is shown that the local heat flux, local vapor quality, and local heat transfer coefficient increase with copper nanoparticles concentration. The surface temperature is high for de-ionized water and it decreases with copper nanoparticles concentration.     

On the structural and optical properties of gold–polyaniline nanocomposite synthesized via a novel route

Gold nanoparticle embedded polyaniline (PANI) was synthesized by in situ oxidative polymerization of monomer aniline. X‐ray diffraction and Fourier transform IR techniques were used to establish the structure of the gold–PANI composite. UV–visible absorption studies have shown that, along with the normal absorption peak of polyaniline, the composite has an absorption peak characterized by surface plasmon resonance. The presence of surface plasmon resonance is a signature of the nano size of the gold particles embedded in the PANI. Energy‐dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy (EDS) has revealed the elemental composition of the composite sample quantitatively. Raman spectroscopy studies have strengthened the presence of plasmon resonance. Single‐beam Z‐scan results confirm the third‐order optical nonlinearity associated with the nanocomposite. The present investigations show that gold nanoparticle embedded PANI composite can be of potential application in the fields of both linear and nonlinear optics. Copyright © 2012 Society of Chemical Industry