INSULATING TUNNELING CONTACT FOR EFFICIENT AND STABLE PEROVSKITE SOLAR CELLS

Perovskite-based photoactive devices, such as solar cells, include an insulating tunneling layer inserted between the perovskite photoactive material and the electron collection layer to reduce charge recombination and concomitantly provide water resistant properties to the device

Pattern Recognition for Steam Flooding Field Applications based on Hierarchical Clustering and Principal Component Analysis

Steam flooding is a complex process that has been considered as an effective enhanced oil recovery technique in both heavy oil and light oil reservoirs. Many studies have been conducted on different sets of steam flooding projects using the conventional data analysis methods, while the implementation of machine learning algorithms to find the hidden patterns is rarely found. In this study, a hierarchical clustering algorithm (HCA) coupled with principal component analysis is used to analyze the steam flooding projects worldwide. The goal of this research is to group similar steam flooding projects into the same cluster so that valuable operational design experiences and production performance from the analogue cases can be referenced for decision-making. Besides, hidden patterns embedded in steam flooding applications can be revealed based on data characteristics of each cluster for different reservoir/fluid conditions. In this research, principal component analysis is applied to project original data to a new feature space, which finds two principal components to represent the eight reservoir/fluid parameters (8D) but still retain about 90% of the variance. HCA is implemented with the optimized design of five clusters, Euclidean distance, and Ward\u27s linkage method. The results of the hierarchical clustering depict that each cluster detects a unique range of each property, and the analogue cases present that fields under similar reservoir/fluid conditions could share similar operational design and production performance

Modification of microcrystalline cellulose with acrylamide under microwave irradiation and its application as flocculant

Abstract(#br)Grafting polyacrylamide (PAM) chains onto microparticles may combine the advantages of the flocculation property of the former and the fast sedimentation of the later to realize better flocculation performance. In this work, inexpensive microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) microparticles, and monomer of acrylamide (AM) were mixed, and then irradiated under microwave. The obtained material was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, and the results demonstrated successful modification of MCC with AM on the particle surface. The modification procedure has been carefully investigated to obtain an optimum preparation condition. Kaolin suspension was selected as a model to evaluate the flocculation properties of the obtained AM-MCC. Our results..

Modification of microcrystalline cellulose with acrylamide under microwave irradiation and its application as flocculant.

Grafting polyacrylamide (PAM) chains onto microparticles may combine the advantages of the flocculation property of the former and the fast sedimentation of the later to realize better flocculation performance. In this work, inexpensive microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) microparticles, and monomer of acrylamide (AM) were mixed, and then irradiated under microwave. The obtained material was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, and the results demonstrated successful modification of MCC with AM on the particle surface. The modification procedure has been carefully investigated to obtain an optimum preparation condition. Kaolin suspension was selected as a model to evaluate the flocculation properties of the obtained AM-MCC. Our results indicate that the AM-MCC with the highest grafting ratio of 95.5% exhibits the best flocculation performance, which is even better than that of PAM, and the turbidity can be decreased to 1.4% of the naked kaolin suspension within 2.5 min. Therefore, this work provides a low cost strategy to prepare biodegradable AM-MCC, which may have promising potential application in the water treatment and other fields

Low Temperature Solution-Processed Sb:SnO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e Nanocrystals for Efficient Planar Perovskite Solar Cells

Inorganic metal oxide electron-transport layers (ETLs) have the potential to yield perovskite solar cells with improved stability, but generally need high temperature to form conductive and defect-less forms, which is not compatible with the fabrication of flexible and tandem solar cells. Here, we demonstrate a facile strategy for developing efficient inorganic ETLs by doping SnO2 nanocrystals (NCs) with a small amount of Sb using a low-temperature solution-processed method. The electrical conductivity was remarkably enhanced by Sb-doping, which increased the carrier concentration in Sb:SnO2 NCs. Moreover, the upward shift of the Fermi level owing to doping results in improved energy level alignment, which led to reduced charge recombination, and thus longer electron recombination lifetime and improved open-circuit voltage (VOC). Therefore, Sb-doping of SnO2 significantly enhanced the photovoltaic performance of planar perovskite devices by increasing the fill factor and VOC, and reducing photocurrent hysteresis, extending the potential application of low-temperature-processed ETLs in future flexible and tandem solar cells

10 kHz repetition rate picosecond green laser for high-accuracy satellite ranging

Picosecond pulse laser is the main light source for satellite laser ranging. In this paper, a 10 kHz repetition rate picosecond green laser with an average output power of 5.3 W is demonstrated. The laser generates a pulse width of 18.6 ps at a center wavelength of 532.20 nm with a spectral width of .066 nm. The beam quality is well preserved with M2 of 1.1 with the beam divergence measured to be .62 mrad and pointing stability of 7 μrad over 30 min of operation. The laser system was then applied to measure the BeiDou satellite (Compass-I3) and generated a single range accuracy of 3.2 mm, which is the highest reported range accuracy for synchronous orbit satellite laser ranging

Revolutionizing cancer treatment: enhancing CAR-T cell therapy with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology

CAR-T cell therapy, a novel immunotherapy, has made significant breakthroughs in clinical practice, particularly in treating B-cell-associated leukemia and lymphoma. However, it still faces challenges such as poor persistence, limited proliferation capacity, high manufacturing costs, and suboptimal efficacy. CRISPR/Cas system, an efficient and simple method for precise gene editing, offers new possibilities for optimizing CAR-T cells. It can increase the function of CAR-T cells and reduce manufacturing costs. The combination of CRISPR/Cas9 technology and CAR-T cell therapy may promote the development of this therapy and provide more effective and personalized treatment for cancer patients. Meanwhile, the safety issues surrounding the application of this technology in CAR-T cells require further research and evaluation. Future research should focus on improving the accuracy and safety of CRISPR/Cas9 technology to facilitate the better development and application of CAR-T cell therapy. This review focuses on the application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in CAR-T cell therapy, including eliminating the inhibitory effect of immune checkpoints, enhancing the ability of CAR-T cells to resist exhaustion, assisting in the construction of universal CAR-T cells, reducing the manufacturing costs of CAR-T cells, and the security problems faced. The objective is to show the revolutionary role of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in CAR-T cell therapy for researchers

RSQ: a statistical method for quantification of isoform-specific structurome using transcriptome-wide structural profiling data [preprint]

The structure of RNA, which is considered to be a second layer of information alongside the genetic code, provides fundamental insights into the cellular function of both coding and non-coding RNAs. Several high-throughput technologies have been developed to profile transcriptome-wide RNA structures, i.e., the structurome. However, it is challenging to interpret the profiling data because the observed data represent an average over different RNA conformations and isoforms with different abundance. To address this challenge, we developed an RNA structurome quantification method (RSQ) to statistically model the distribution of reads over both isoforms and RNA conformations, and thus provide accurate quantification of the isoform-specific structurome. The quantified RNA structurome enables the comparison of isoform-specific conformations between different conditions, the exploration of RNA conformation variation affected by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) , and the measurement of RNA accessibility for binding of either small RNAs in RNAi-based assays or RNA binding protein in transcriptional regulation. The model used in our method sheds new light on the potential impact of the RNA structurome on gene regulation