Synthesis and Properties of New Cleavable Cationic Surfactants Containing Carbonate Groups

A novel series of cleavable alkyltrimethylammonium surfactants with different hydrocarbon chain lengths (C8–16) were synthesized. A carbonate break site inserted between the polar head and the hydrocarbon chain makes these compounds hydrolyzable. The reagents used are renewable, (bio)degradable, or reusable. The hydrolysis of these cleavable surfactants will lead to the generation of fatty alcohols and choline, which is an essential biological nutrient. The surface activities in aqueous solution of the synthesized carbonates fulfill the requirement of being good surfactants. In addition, the cleavable compounds containing n-decyl and n-dodecyl chains showed similar or higher antimicrobial activities when compared to a non-cleavable analog.     

Synthesis of magnetic nanocomposite microparticles for binding of chlorinated organics in contaminated water sources

In this work, the development of novel magnetic nanocomposite microparticles (MNMs) via free radical polymerization for their application in the remediation of contaminated water is presented. Acrylated plant-based polyphenols, curcumin multiacrylate (CMA) and quercetin multiacrylate (QMA), were incorporated as functional monomers to create high affinity binding sites for the capture of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), as a model pollutant. The MNMs were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, scanning electron microscopy, dynamic light scattering, and UV–visible spectroscopy. The affinity of these novel materials for PCB 126 was evaluated and fitted to the nonlinear Langmuir model to determine binding affinities (K_D). The results suggest the presence of the polyphenolic moieties enhances the binding affinity for PCB 126, with K_D values comparable to that of antibodies. This demonstrates that these nanocomposite materials have promising potential as environmental remediation adsorbents for harmful contaminants.     

Behaviour of persistent organochlorine micropollutants during primary sedimentation of waste water

The removal of polychlorinated biphenyls and the organochlorine insecticides gamma-HCH, aldrin, dieldrin and endrin during primary sedimentation of raw sewage has been studied using a pilot plant facility. A matrix of sixteen experiments was performed, where the pilot plant was operated at four different hydraulic loadings with four different influent suspended solids loadings. Significant removals of micropollutants into the primary sludge were observed, although no particular relationship with the removal of suspended solids was evident. It is concluded that a proportion of the organic microcontaminants present in raw sewage were associated with non-settleable solids and were also in the dissolved form. The significance of the behaviour of organochlorine micropollutants in waste water treatment processes and the hydrological cycle are discussed in the context of water re-use operations.     

Corrosion of MCrAlY: Pt composites prepared by spark plasma sintering

Cyclic oxidation tests of sintered MCrAlY:Pt composites were carried out at temperatures of 1223 and 1273?K. Composite tablets were previously produced by spark plasma sintering. To assess an effect of platinum dispersed, microstructural characterisation was performed on the tablets before and after the cyclic oxidation treatment. Scanning electron microscopy analysis of the oxide layer showed that the presence of typical α-Al₂O₃ and NiAl₂O₄ spinel had structure columnar and equiaxial in both samples. Fine sintered microstructure and addition of Pt into the MCrAlY matrix enhanced the resistance of the material to cyclic oxidation.     

On Demand Solid Texture Synthesis Using Deep 3D Networks

This paper describes a novel approach for on demand volumetric texture synthesis based on a deep learning framework that allows for the generation of high-quality three-dimensional (3D) data at interactive rates. Based on a few example images of textures, a generative network is trained to synthesize coherent portions of solid textures of arbitrary sizes that reproduce the visual characteristics of the examples along some directions. To cope with memory limitations and computation complexity that are inherent to both high resolution and 3D processing on the GPU, only 2D textures referred to as ‘slices’ are generated during the training stage. These synthetic textures are compared to exemplar images via a perceptual loss function based on a pre-trained deep network. The proposed network is very light (less than 100k parameters), therefore it only requires sustainable training (i.e. few hours) and is capable of very fast generation (around a second for 256³ voxels) on a single GPU. Integrated with a spatially seeded pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) the proposed generator network directly returns a color value given a set of 3D coordinates. The synthesized volumes have good visual results that are at least equivalent to the state-of-the-art patch-based approaches. They are naturally seamlessly tileable and can be fully generated in parallel.     

Hydrodynamic and mechanical behavior of multi-particle confined between two parallel plates

A coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method (CFD-DEM) approach is used to investigate the hydrodynamic and mechanical behavior of multi-particle, which settle and horizontally transport between two parallel plates. The particle-fluid interaction is two-way coupled, while inter-particle and particles-walls interactions are calculated based on the soft-sphere model. The Joint Roughness Coefficient (JRC) is used to represent the roughness of planar walls, and its effect on particle transport is quantitatively studied. When particles transport between two parallel smooth plates, the planar walls exert extra hydrodynamic retardation, which causes particle transport velocity to decrease with the decrease in the aperture between two plates. In contrast, when particles transport between two parallel rough plates, due to frequent interaction between particles, the mechanical interaction-induced retardation starts to work and further decreases particle transport velocity. Particle longitudinal migration is frequent because of inter-particle interaction, which hinders its transverse transport and even causes particle agglomeration in a duct during horizontal transport. In addition, the mechanical retardation is significantly dependent of particle transport regimes, and its effect gradually increases and changes to be dominant at high particle Reynold number regime.