Adsorption of Methylene Blue Dye using Functionalized Granular Activated Carbon

Urbanization and rapid industrial development in recent years have created a major threat to the environment especially water pollution. Pollution from wastewater not only depreciates land values; it also increases municipal costs for wastewater treatment and causes harm to biological and human health. Industries such as ceramic, printing, plastic and paper use dyes in their coloring process and these dyes are usually disposed to streams, ponds, lakes and river which then cause water pollution. Not only that the dyes can be very toxic even at low concentration, they are also generally non-biodegradable and difficult to be removed using conventional biological treatment. Many researches have been done on ways to treat wastewater effectively namely membrane separation, aerobic and anaerobic degradation using various microorganisms, chemical oxidation, coagulation and flocculation, adsorption using various kinds of adsorbents and reverse osmosis. However, most of the current wastewater treatment techniques are selective and expensive. Adsorption process has been identified as the most feasible wastewater treatment technique as it is cheap economically, simplicity in design and has the ability to adsorb a wide range of both organic and inorganic pollutants. With that, this project aims to study methylene blue dye removal using functionalized granular activated carbon

Solar Electricity from Concentrator Photovoltaic Systems

This thesis examines the prediction of concentrator photovoltaic system performance, and a model is presented where estimates are made using basic, fundamental material and atmospheric parameters, and successfully validated against measurements from a deployed system, to within 2% accuracy. A method to characterise the impact of individual atmospheric parameters on concentrator photovoltaic system performance is detailed and results are presented for potential deployment locations around the globe, demonstrating substantial differences in energy yield prediction accuracy if insufficient information is available, with up to 75% relative difference in energy yield and levelised cost of energy between basic and detailed simulations. In addition, the competitiveness of concentrator photovoltaic systems in different locations are benchmarked against existing technologies, showing significant geographical variation in their financial viability. The material quality in single and multijunction solar cells and its effect on the selection of optimal solar cell designs is investigated and the radiative efficiency of a device is proposed as a figure of merit to evaluate material quality. The optimal band gaps are shown to vary substantially depending on material quality at low solar concentrations, by hundred of milli-electron-volts, with ramifications for future solar cell designs. The impact of photon management, through radiative coupling, on cell performance is quantified for current and future high efficiency multijunction solar cell structures. Up to 5% enhancement due to radiative coupling can be expected for quad-junction solar cells, but current designs can expect below 1% enhancement. The work covered in this thesis has investigated and highlighted the potential problems associated with not fully understanding the atmospheric conditions in which concentrator photovoltaic systems operate, providing evidence and impetus for additional ground measurements or a drastic improvement in satellite-based measurement of atmospheric conditions. By integrating atmospheric parameters into an existing concentrator photovoltaic system modelling tool, new methods to characterise these conditions has been developed rigorously and accurately simulate system behaviour, a valuable resource to the field. In the design of optimal band gaps for multijunction solar cells, the work in this thesis shows that the material quality must be carefully considered in any design. A novel method has been developed to quantify material quality and provide a benchmark of state-of-the-art achieved values. The role of photon management in the form of radiative coupling is quantified, through the first examination of enhancement due to the effect, under realistic atmospheric conditions. This gives cell designers realistic expectations for performance enhancement.Open Acces

Effect of neurostimulation on cognition and mood in refractory epilepsy.

Epilepsy is a common, debilitating neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures. Mood disorders and cognitive deficits are common comorbidities in epilepsy that, like seizures, profoundly influence quality of life and can be difficult to treat. For patients with refractory epilepsy who are not candidates for resection, neurostimulation, the electrical modulation of epileptogenic brain tissue, is an emerging treatment alternative. Several forms of neurostimulation are currently available, and therapy selection hinges on relative efficacy for seizure control and amelioration of neuropsychiatric comorbidities. Here, we review the current evidence for how invasive and noninvasive neurostimulation therapies affect mood and cognition in persons with epilepsy. Invasive therapies include vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), deep brain stimulation (DBS), and responsive neurostimulation (RNS). Noninvasive therapies include trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS), repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Overall, current evidence supports stable cognition and mood with all neurostimulation therapies, although there is some evidence that cognition and mood may improve with invasive forms of neurostimulation. More research is required to optimize the effects of neurostimulation for improvements in cognition and mood

Regeneration of vitamin E in rat polymorphonuclear leucocytes

AbstractThe objectives of this study were to determine whether the recycling of tocopherol occurs in elicited rat polymorphonuclear leukocytes and if so, whether the recycling process is anzymic or chemical. When incubated with hemoglobin. tocopherol was oxidized in cell homogenates in a time-and concentration-dependent manner. The oxidized tocopherol could be regenerated by addition of ascorbate, glutathione or nordihydroguaiaretic acid. Time course studies showed a rapid regeneration of tocopherol which peaked at 1 min after the addition of reductants. Determination of the regeneration reaction in the presence of CHCl3 and MeOH indicated that under these enzyme-denaturing conditions, a considerable amount of tocopherol was still regenerated, suggesting that the regeneration reaction is predominantly a chemical reaction. This study provided direct evidence from mass analysis that oxidized vitamin E can be regenerated by cellular water-soluble reductants such as ascorbate and glutathione

MobiPADS: a reflective middleware for context-aware mobile computing

distributed computing services that essentially abstract the underlying network services to a monolithic “black box. ” In a mobile operating environment, the fundamental assumption of middleware abstracting a unified distributed service for all types of applications operating over a static network infrastructure is no longer valid. In particular, mobile applications are not able to leverage the benefits of adaptive computing to optimize its computation based on current contextual situations. In this paper, we introduce the Mobile Platform for Actively Deployable Service (MobiPADS) system. MobiPADS is designed to support context-aware processing by providing an executing platform to enable active service deployment and reconfiguration of the service composition in response to environments of varying contexts. Unlike most mobile middleware, MobiPADS supports dynamic adaptation at both the middleware and application layers to provide flexible configuration of resources to optimize the operations of mobile applications. Within the MobiPADS system, services (known as mobilets) are configured as chained service objects to provide augmented services to the underlying mobile applications so as to alleviate the adverse conditions of a wireless environment. Index Terms—Middleware, mobile applications, mobile computing support services, mobile environments.

What it Thinks is Important is Important: Robustness Transfers through Input Gradients

Adversarial perturbations are imperceptible changes to input pixels that can change the prediction of deep learning models. Learned weights of models robust to such perturbations are previously found to be transferable across different tasks but this applies only if the model architecture for the source and target tasks is the same. Input gradients characterize how small changes at each input pixel affect the model output. Using only natural images, we show here that training a student model's input gradients to match those of a robust teacher model can gain robustness close to a strong baseline that is robustly trained from scratch. Through experiments in MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet, we show that our proposed method, input gradient adversarial matching, can transfer robustness across different tasks and even across different model architectures. This demonstrates that directly targeting the semantics of input gradients is a feasible way towards adversarial robustness.Comment: Accepted as Oral in CVPR 2020, Camera-Ready Versio

Adsorption of Methylene Blue Dye using Functionalized Granular Activated Carbon

Urbanization and rapid industrial development in recent years have created a major threat to the environment especially water pollution. Pollution from wastewater not only depreciates land values; it also increases municipal costs for wastewater treatment and causes harm to biological and human health. Industries such as ceramic, printing, plastic and paper use dyes in their coloring process and these dyes are usually disposed to streams, ponds, lakes and river which then cause water pollution. Not only that the dyes can be very toxic even at low concentration, they are also generally non-biodegradable and difficult to be removed using conventional biological treatment. Many researches have been done on ways to treat wastewater effectively namely membrane separation, aerobic and anaerobic degradation using various microorganisms, chemical oxidation, coagulation and flocculation, adsorption using various kinds of adsorbents and reverse osmosis. However, most of the current wastewater treatment techniques are selective and expensive. Adsorption process has been identified as the most feasible wastewater treatment technique as it is cheap economically, simplicity in design and has the ability to adsorb a wide range of both organic and inorganic pollutants. With that, this project aims to study methylene blue dye removal using functionalized granular activated carbon