Photoactivity Performance of TiO2/cellulose and ZnO/polystyrene; Intensified Effect of Oxidants on Degradation Efficiency of Acetaminophen

International audienceThe photoactivity of TiO2 nanoparticles and ZnO nanofibers deposited on cellulose and polystyrene was investigated. The synthesized catalysts were characterized by SEM, XRD and FT-IR. The X-rays diffraction pattern showed that the TiO2 materials are mainly composed of anatase phase with a small amount of rutile phase. Peaks found for ZnO are assigned to well crystallized ZnO oxides. The SEM images confirmed the dispersion of TiO2 nanoparticles and ZnO nanofibers on cellulose and polystyrene, respectively. The photoactivity of the two catalysts was tested for the degradation of acetaminophen. Results showed that for an initial drug concentration of 10 mg l(-1), the removal of the pollutant under UV light in the presence of TiO2/cellulose reached 80%. Under the same conditions, ZnO/polystyrene was inactive under UV, visible and solar radiations. The study of the effect of H2O2 and K2S2O8 as oxidants showed an intensified effect of peroxydisulfate (S2O82-) on degradation efficiency of the pollutant; in fact, in the presence of TiO2/cellulose and ZnO/polystyrene, 85.4 and 93.1% of acetaminophen were respectively removed from the contaminated solutions after adding 1 mM of S2O82-. The present findings reveal that under UV light the photocatalytic systems TiO2-K2S2O8/cellulose and ZnO-K2S2O8/polystyrene show promising results for treating effluents charged with acetaminophen

M.: IT support for release management processes in the automotive industry

Abstract. Car development is based on long running, concurrently executed and highly dependent processes. The coordination and synchronization of these processes has become a complex and error-prone task due to the increasing number of functions and embedded systems in modern cars. These systems realize advanced features by embedded software and enable the distribution of functionality as required, for example, by safety equipment. Different life cycle times of mechanical, software and hardware components as well as different duration of their development processes require efficient coordination. Furthermore, productdriven process structures, dynamic adaptation of these structures, and handling real-world exceptions result in challenging demands for any IT system. In this paper we elaborate fundamental requirements for the IT support of car development processes, taking release management as characteristic example. We show to which extent current product data and process management technology meets these requirements, and discuss which essential limitations still exist. This results in a number of fundamental challenges requiring new paradigms for the product-driven design, enactment and adaptation of processes.

The Use and Effectiveness of User Stories in Practice

[Context and motivation] User stories are an increasingly popular textual notation to capture requirements in agile software development. [Question/Problem] To date there is no scientific evidence on the effectiveness of user stories. The goal of this paper is to explore how practicioners perceive this artifact in the context of requirements engineering. [Principal ideas/results] We explore perceived effectiveness of user stories by reporting on a survey with 182 responses from practitioners and 21 follow-up semi-structured interviews. The data shows that practitioners agree that using user stories, a user story template and quality guidelines such as the INVEST mnemonic improve their productivity and the quality of their work deliverables. [Contribution] By combining the survey data with 21 semi-structured follow-up interviews, we present 12 findings on the usage and perception of user stories by practitioners that employ user stories in their everyday work environment

Understanding key motivations for using a hotel gamified application.

While hospitality has been one of the industries that have been keen to adopt and use various technologies, the proliferation of gamification application is still to materialise. It is therefore very interesting to investigate the potential benefits of gamified applications for both demand and supply in the area of the hospitality industry by identifying the motives of individuals’ when they use a hotel-gamified application. Since fun has become the requirement to ensure continuous demands for many products or services, companies and organizations feel the need to involve fun in their offerings to secure continuity in consumption and use. Hence, this study aims to understand the meaning of fun for individuals when they will use a hotel-gamified application. Visual material was prepared so the interviewees would have an idea of how a hotel-gamified application would look if it were in existence today based on the current definitions of gamification.N/