Low melting point alkali metal borohydride mixtures for hydrogen storage

With relatively high gravimetric and volumetric hydrogen capacities and low hydrogen operating pressures, borohydrides are being investigated for their potential use as solid-state hydrogen storage media. This work focuses on investigating the hydrogen sorption mechanisms for $LiBH_4$-based low-melting-point borohydride mixtures (e.g. $0.62LiBH_4$-$0.38NaBH_4$, $0.75LiBH_4$-$0.25KBH_4$), and their destabilized systems using selected additives. Solid solutions and bimetallic borohydride are found in the as-prepared $0.62LiBH_4$-$0.38NaBH_4$ and $0.75LiBH_4$-$0.25KBH$ mixtures, respectively. Under Ar, the $0.62LiBH_4$-$0.38NaBH_4$ mixture releases 10.8 wt.% of hydrogen at 650 °C; whilst the $0.75LiBH_4$-$0.25KBH_4$ mixture releases 8.9 wt.% of hydrogen at 700 °C. Their dehydrogenation peak temperatures are strongly affected by Na+ or K+ and therefore higher than $LiBH_4$. These mixtures have poor cycling stabilities. Additives, such as micron-sized $SiO_2$ and nano-sized Ni, cannot affect their melting points; but they cause lower dehydrogenation temperatures, decrease the hydrogen evolution, and facilitate the formation of metal dodecaborates. Besides, the addition of nano-sized Ni cannot significantly improve the cycling stability; however, it leads to partial reversible $LiBH_4$. Therefore, a further compositional optimization with respect to the rehydrogenation conditions, in parallel with the use of nano-confinement of the mixture via an infiltration approach, is needed before practical use of a low-melting-point alkali metal borohydride mixture

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF NOVEL VULNERABILITIES FOR THE TREATMENT OF PANCREATIC CANCER

46 pagesA vast majority of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDACs) have mutations in KRAS. This type of cancer is also notoriously difficult to treat, often resulting in patient death. Thus, there is a clear need to better understand PDAC progression. Here, I have discovered that the cell survival protein Survivin is highly upregulated in KRAS-driven pancreatic cancer cells and blocking Survivin expression using YM155 causes cell death. Moreover, treating PDAC cells with small doses of YM155 and the heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) inhibitor, Geldanamycin, was found to strongly kill certain PDAC cells, suggesting that drug combinations that include Survivin inhibition may hold promise as treatments for PDAC. Moreover, a YM155-resistant PDAC cell line was generated, which could be a powerful tool to investigate the mechanisms of drug resistance. These findings highlight Survivin as an important player in PDAC, and provide new insights regarding potential treatments for this disease

Design a project of sewage plant to make the cross-section water quality reach standard

According to regulations, the cross-section of Wangjiawopeng is regarded as a national control section of the Daling River. The water quality of the section must meet the surface water level III standard. According to the survey, the total phosphorus in the effluent from the sewage plant in Jianchang exceeds the standard is the main reason for the failure of the water quality. In order to make the cross-section water quality reaching standard, it is necessary to carry out the advanced treatment of phosphorus in the sewage plant. (1) The precipitation reaction of phosphorus and coagulant in sewage is strengthened by optimizing the type of coagulant, optimizing the dosage of coagulant, and selecting suitable coagulant aids. (2) The removal efficiency of phosphorus is improved by high-speed fiber filtration technology. (3) Phosphorus is removed by flocculation-sedimentation-high-speed fiber filtration technology. Experiments show that the SS in the sewage plant effluent is less than 5mg/L and filter effluent TP is less than 0.2mg/L. The process construction investment is estimated to be 3.9 million yuan, and the operating electricity cost is estimated to be 0.2 cents/m3. The process has the characteristics of reliable processing technology, stable operation, easy maintenance

Semantic-Aware Top-k Multirequest Optimal Route

In recent years, research on location-based services has received a lot of interest, in both industry and academic aspects, due to a wide range of potential applications. Among them, one of the active topic areas is the route planning on a point-of-interest (POI) network. We study the top-k optimal routes querying on large, general graphs where the edge weights may not satisfy the triangle inequality. The query strives to find the top-k optimal routes from a given source, which must visit a number of vertices with all the services that the user needs. Existing POI query methods mainly focus on the textual similarities and ignore the semantic understanding of keywords in spatial objects and queries. To address this problem, this paper studies the semantic similarity of POI keyword searching in the route. Another problem is that most of the previous studies consider that a POI belongs to a category, and they do not consider that a POI may provide various kinds of services even in the same category. So, we propose a novel top-k optimal route planning algorithm based on semantic perception (KOR-SP). In KOR-SP, we define a dominance relationship between two partially explored routes which leads to a smaller searching space and consider the semantic similarity of keywords and the number of single POI’s services. We use an efficient label indexing technique for the shortest path queries to further improve efficiency. Finally, we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on multiple real-world graphs to demonstrate that the proposed methods deliver excellent performance

A Review of the MSCA ITN ECOSTORE Novel Complex Metal Hydrides for Efficient and Compact Storage of Renewable Energy as Hydrogen and Electricity

Hydrogen as an energy carrier is very versatile in energy storage applications. Developments in novel, sustainable technologies towards a CO2-free society are needed and the exploration of all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) as well as solid-state hydrogen storage applications based on metal hydrides can provide solutions for such technologies. However, there are still many technical challenges for both hydrogen storage material and ASSBs related to designing low-cost materials with low-environmental impact. The current materials considered for all-solid-state batteries should have high conductivities for Na+, Mg2+ and Ca2+, while Al3+-based compounds are often marginalised due to the lack of suitable electrode and electrolyte materials. In hydrogen storage materials, the sluggish kinetic behaviour of solid-state hydride materials is one of the key constraints that limit their practical uses. Therefore, it is necessary to overcome the kinetic issues of hydride materials before discussing and considering them on the system level. This review summarizes the achievements of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) innovative training network (ITN) ECOSTORE, the aim of which was the investigation of different aspects of (complex) metal hydride materials. Advances in battery and hydrogen storage materials for the efficient and compact storage of renewable energy production are discusse

Alignment of Common Wheat and Other Grass Genomes Establishes a Comparative Genomics Research Platform

Grass genomes are complicated structures as they share a common tetraploidization, and particular genomes have been further affected by extra polyploidizations. These events and the following genomic re-patternings have resulted in a complex, interweaving gene homology both within a genome, and between genomes. Accurately deciphering the structure of these complicated plant genomes would help us better understand their compositional and functional evolution at multiple scales. Here, we build on our previous research by performing a hierarchical alignment of the common wheat genome vis-à-vis eight other sequenced grass genomes with most up-to-date assemblies, and annotations. With this data, we constructed a list of the homologous genes, and then, in a layer-by-layer process, separated their orthology, and paralogy that were established by speciations and recursive polyploidizations, respectively. Compared with the other grasses, the far fewer collinear outparalogous genes within each of three subgenomes of common wheat suggest that homoeologous recombination, and genomic fractionation should have occurred after its formation. In sum, this work contributes to the establishment of an important and timely comparative genomics platform for researchers in the grass community and possibly beyond. Homologous gene list can be found in Supplemental material