Characterization of triple electrospun layers of PVDF for direct contact membrane distillation process

Recently, electrospinning technique was applied successfully to fabricate porous hydrophobic membranes for MD applications. In this work, a novel triple layer configuration with diameter gradient for PVDF nanofiber membranes is proposed, with the objective of to minimize mass transfer resistance and heat loss. In outer layers of these membranes, the minimum concentration of PVDF (20 wt%) was used to produce bead-free nanofibers with thinner diameters and middle layers were composed of thicker nanofibers formed at higher polymer concentrations (21.5-26 wt%). Characterization of prepared membranes was conducted by the measurement of porosity, thickness, liquid entry pressure (LEP), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), contact angle, thermal and mechanical properties. Direct contact membrane distillation performance of fabricated membranes was tested using 42 g/L NaCl as feed solution. Water permeate flux of triple layer membranes (27.8-31.5 kg/m² h) was found to be considerably higher than that obtained from single layer membrane (15.4 kg/m² h), indicating the proposed configuration can effectively improve evaporation efficiency.     

Synthesis of Titanium Oxycarbide from Titanium Slag by Methane-Containing Gas

In this study, reaction steps of a process for synthesis of titanium oxycarbide from titanium slag were demonstrated. This process involves the reduction of titanium slag by a methane-hydrogen-argon mixture at 1473 K (1200 °C) and the leaching of the reduced products by hydrofluoric acid near room temperature to remove the main impurity (Fe₃Si). Some iron was formed by disproportionation of the main M₃O₅ phase before gaseous reduction started. Upon reduction, more iron formed first, followed by reduction of titanium dioxide to suboxides and eventually oxycarbide.     

A New Approach to Dearomatization of Gasoline by Ionic Liquid and Liquid–Liquid Extraction

Abstract

The objective of this article was the development of a separation technology for the selective recovery of the aromatic compounds such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX) from gasoline by extraction. A liquid–liquid extraction method using ionic liquid (IL) was optimized simultaneously for some aromatic hydrocarbons in gasoline. 1-Butyl-3-methyl imidazolium tetrachloroaluminate ionic liquid or [BMIM][AlCl₄] was used to extract aromatic compounds from gasoline. [BMIM][AlCl₄] was found to be effective for the selective removal of aromatic hydrocarbons from gasoline. The dearomatization experiments were carried out with a 1:1 volume ratio of ionic liquid to gasoline for 60 min at 50°C. The aromatic hydrocarbons removal selectivity followed the order benzene > toluene > xylene > ethylbenzene.     

Desulfurization From Model of Gasoline by Extraction With Synthesized [BF4]−- and [PF6]−-based Ionic Liquids

Abstract

The authors report that 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate, [OMIM][BF₄], and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate, [BMIM][PF₆], ionic liquids were synthesized and tested for their capability to desulfurization from model of gasoline. The results show that the aromatic sulfur compounds with higher π-electron density were favorably adsorbed. The results also show that [BF₄]^?-based ionic liquid displays higher extraction efficiencies than [PF₆]^?-based ionic liquid. Thus, it was shown that the extractive ability of the imidazolium ionic liquids was dominated by the structure of cation and anion. It is also found that the sizes of ionic liquids are important factors affecting the absorption capacity for aromatic sulfur compounds.     

Graph structure in the Web

The study of the Web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into Web algorithms for crawling, searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and global properties of the Web graph using two AltaVista crawls each with over 200 million pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the macroscopic structure of the Web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale.     

How Can We Improve Vaccination Response in Old People? Part I: Targeting Immunosenescence of Innate Immunity Cells

Vaccination, being able to prevent millions of cases of infectious diseases around the world every year, is the most effective medical intervention ever introduced. However, immunosenescence makes vaccines less effective in providing protection to older people. Although most studies explain that this is mainly due to the immunosenescence of T and B cells, the immunosenescence of innate immunity can also be a significant contributing factor. Alterations in function, number, subset, and distribution of blood neutrophils, monocytes, and natural killer and dendritic cells are detected in aging, thus potentially reducing the efficacy of vaccines in older individuals. In this paper, we focus on the immunosenescence of the innate blood immune cells. We discuss possible strategies to counteract the immunosenescence of innate immunity in order to improve the response to vaccination. In particular, we focus on advances in understanding the role and the development of new adjuvants, such as TLR agonists, considered a promising strategy to increase vaccination efficiency in older individuals.     

Plasma treatment of zinc oxide-nanoparticles:polyaniline blend as an active layer for the hybrid bulk heterojunction solar cell applications

In this experimental work, plasma treatment of the active layer in the bulk heterojunction solar cells was studied. The active layers consisting of zinc oxide nanoparticles:polyaniline were spin-coated on indium tin oxide covered glasses then kept in the cold plasma medium for different treatment times. The J-V characteristics were considered under air mass 1.5G standard illumination, and variations of the open-circuit voltages and short circuit currents were studied under different treatment times. The results show that there is an optimum treatment time to improve the properties of the layers. In order to understand the origin of this effect, the Hall coefficient, along with ultraviolet-visible spectra were measured, and for studying the topological impact of plasma on the surface of the layers, atomic force microscopy and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy were considered. The measurements confirmed the time dependency of the open-circuit voltages and short circuit currents of the cells on the plasma treatment times. Atomic force microscopy of the layers shows the significant topological effects of the plasma treatments on the surface of the active layers for different treatment times.     

Characterization and Properties of Sodium Hexa-Fluorosilicate and its Potential Application in the Production of Sodium Fluoride

Silicon - Sodium hexa-fluorosilicate (Na2SiF6) is a synthetic inorganic material with distinguished chemical, thermal and optical properties. In this research, a pure sodium hexa-fluorosilicate...     

A new reduced-reference image quality assessment based on the SVD signal projection

Multimedia Tools and Applications - A new image quality metric is proposed in this paper based on the degradation of structural information. It uses the singular value decomposition (SVD) as a...     

Silhouette-based occluded object recognition through curvature scale space

A complete and practical system for occluded object recognition has been developed which is very robust with respect to noise and local deformations of shape (due to weak perspective distortion, segmentation errors and non-rigid material) as well as scale, position and orientation changes of the objects. The system has been tested on a wide variety of free-form 3D objects. An industrial application is envisaged where a fixed camera and a light-box are utilized to obtain images. Within the constraints of the system, every rigid 3D object can be modeled by a limited number of classes of 2D contours corresponding to the object's resting positions on the light-box. The contours in each class are related to each other by a 2D similarity transformation. The Curvature Scale Space technique [26, 28] is then used to obtain a novel multi-scale segmentation of the image and the model contours. Object indexing [16, 32, 36] is used to narrow down the search space. An efficient local matching algorithm is utilized to select the best matching models. Received: 5 August 1996 / Accepted: 19 March 1997