Biolubricants and the potential of waste cooking oil

In the current decade, development of recycle, renewable, and sustainable products to replace fossil products is an essential and important matter from industrial,environment, and academic point of views. The excessive usage of Petroleum-based oils significantly contributes to the pollution of the environment and had caused environmental pollution and awareness from the environmental sectors. Researchers start exploring an alternative oil from natural resource aiming to replace the fossil oil and this becomes the main ambitious of many researchers, environmental, and government bodies. In this chapter, a comprehensive literature review is introduced and several issues are addressed with regards of the usage of newly developed lubricants that are based on vegetable oils. Furthermore, it is exploring the potential of using waste cooking oil as lubricant for tribological applications

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE): technical overview III

IXPE, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, is a NASA SMEX mission with an important contribution of ASI that will be launched with a Falcon 9 in 2021 and will reopen the window of X-ray polarimetry after more than 40 years. The payload features three identical telescopes each one hosting one light-weight X-ray mirror fabricated by MSFC and one detector unit with its in-orbit calibration system and the Gas Pixel Detector sensitive to imaging X-ray polarization fabricated by INAF/IAPS, INFN and OHB Italy. The focal length after boom deployment from ATK-Orbital is 4 m, while the spacecraft is being fabricated by Ball Aerospace. The sensitivity will be better than 5.5% in 300 ks for a 1E-11 erg/s/cm2 (half mCrab) in the energy band of 2-8 keV allowing for sensitive polarimetry of extended and point-like X-ray sources. The focal plane instrument is completed, calibrated and it is going to be delivered at MSFC. We will present the status of the mission at about one year from the launch