Plasma modified steel processing by-product for removing heavy metals and antibiotics from water

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The presence of heavy metals (HMs) and antibiotics (ABs) in the aquatic environment causes critical problems to human health and the environment. The adsorptive removal of HMs and ABs onto cost-effective adsorbents has a high potential. In this study, adsorbents were prepared from steel shavings (StS), a by-product generated from the steel processing industries. Among adsorbents, nitrogen plasma modified StS (M₃-plN₂) has highest adsorption capacities of HMs and ABs. Adsorption and co-precipitation were the mechanisms for HMs removal by the adsorbents, while main driving forces for ABs adsorption were hydrogen bonding, electrostatic and non-electrostatic interactions, and redox reaction. Thermodynamic data demonstrated that both adsorption processes of HMs and ABs onto the adsorbents were feasible, spontaneous and endothermic. Solution pH, particle size, adsorbent dose and contact time exerted great influences on the adsorption process. Optimal conditions for the adsorptive removal of HMs were pH 5, adsorbent dose 5g/L, at 25℃. The best removal of sulfamethazine (SMT) and chloramphenicol (CP) was observed at pH 3, while tetracycline (TC) was ultimately removed at pH 5 (with the same adsorbent dose of 2 g/L and at 25℃). The Pseudo-first-order kinetic and Pseudo-second-order kinetic models described the adsorptive kinetics of HMs and ABs very well. The Langmuir maximum single adsorption capacities of Pb²⁺, Cu²⁺, Cd²⁺, Cr³⁺ and Zn²⁺ onto M₃-plN₂ were: 27.04, 20.64, 16.87, 14.89 and 18.47 mg/g, respectively. In competitive adsorption of multi-metals solutions, each competitive solute adsorption capacities were approximately 2-fold less than the single adsorption capacities. However, the total of competitive adsorption capacities was higher than those of single solute sorption. Single Langmuir adsorption capacities of SMT, TC and CP onto M₃-plN₂ were 2702.55, 2158.36 and 2920.11 μg/g, respectively. Adsorption capacities of mixed-ABs onto the adsorbents were nearly 2-fold less than individual adsorption capacities. Furthermore, the metals-loaded M₃-plN₂ was well regenerated using sulphuric acid 0.1N after 5 cycles of adsorption-desorption, while the most effective reagent to regenerate ABs-loaded M₃-plN₂ was methanol 0.1N solution after 2-3 adsorption-desorption cycles. The semi-pilot scale experiments confirmed that fixed-bed column using M₃-plN₂ could efficient abate both HMs and ABs from water with the highest removal efficiencies at a flow rate of 3.47 L/min and bed height of 35 cm. The column adsorption data was well described by The Thomas, Yoon-Nelson and BDST models. Overall, the application of M₃-plN₂ for removing HMs and ABs from aqueous solution can provide tremendous benefits in treating water and reducing solid wastes

Explanations Generation For Web Service Workflow

The motivation for the work is the challenge of providing textual explanations of automatically generated scientific workflows (e.g., paragraphs that scientists can include in their publications). The extended abstract presents a system which generates explanations for a web service workflow from sets of atoms derived from a collection of ontologies. The system, called nlgPhylogeny, demonstrates the feasibility of the task in the Phylotastic project, that aims at providing evolutionary biologists with a platform for automatic generation of phylogenetic trees given some suitable inputs

Neighborhood search for solving personal scheduling problem in available time windows with split-min and deadline constraints

The scheduling of individual jobs with certain constraints so that efficiency is a matter of concern. Jobs have deadlines to complete, can be broken down but not too small, and will be scheduled into some available time windows. The goal of the problem is to find a solution so that all jobs are completed as soon as possible. This problem is proved to be a strongly $NP$-hard problem. The implementation of the proposed MILP model using a CPLEX solver was also conducted to determine the optimal solution for the small-size dataset. For large-size dataset, heuristic algorithms are recommended such as First Come First Served (FCFS), Earliest Deadline (EDL), and neighborhood search including  Stochastic Hill Climbing (SHC), Random Restart Hill Climbing (RRHC), Simulated Annealing (SA) to determine a good solution in an acceptable time. Experimental results will present in detail the performance among the groups of exact, heuristic, and neighborhood search methods

Minimizing makespan of Personal Scheduling problem in available time-windows with split-min and setup-time constraints

This paper deals with personal scheduling problem in available time-windows with split-min and setup-time constraints. The jobs are splitable into sub-jobs and a common lower bound on the size of each sub-job is imposed. The objective function aims to find a feasible schedule that minimizes the maximum completion time of all jobs. The proposed scheduling problem was proved to be strongly NP-hard by a reduction to 3-SAT problem in the preliminary results. We propose in this paper an exact method based on MILP model to find optimal solution, some heuristics to find feasible solution and a meta-heuristic based on tabu search algorithm to find good solution. The computational results show the performance of proposed exact method, some heuristics and tabu search algorithm

QUALITY OF PERSONNEL ETHNIC MINORITY IN THE MOUNTAIN AREA OF VIETNAM IN THE TIME OF PROMOTING INDUSTRIAL, MODERNIZING THE COUNTRY

Human resources are the most significant asset, a decisive factor for the existence and development of every country. Human resource development has become an urgent task not only of each country but also of each region and region according to the characteristics of geography, population and requirements of economic development orientation - society. In the mountainous areas of Vietnam, ethnic minority human resources are considered a central factor, playing a decisive role in socio-economic growth and development. Human resource training is a fundamental factor determining socio-economic development in ethnic minority areas in mountainous areas; it plays a decisive role in the education, professional and technical qualifications of human resources, training people capable of leading and gathering ethnic minority communities in production organization and social management; create human resources capable of applying new scientific and technological achievements in parallel with promoting indigenous knowledge and experiences of ethnic minorities in socio-economic development, and at the same time capable of solving new problems, problems arising in practice, production and social life.  Article visualizations