No Arabic abstract
The percentage removal of phenol from aqueous solution by emulsion liquid membrane and emulsion leakage was investigated experimentally for various parameters such as membrane:internal phase ratio, membrane:external phase ratio, emulsification speed, emulsification time, carrier concentration, surfactant concentration and internal agent concentration. These parameters strongly influence the percentage removal of phenol and emulsion leakage. Under optimum membrane properties, the percentage removal of phenol was as high as 98.33%, with emulsion leakage of 1.25%. It was also found that the necessity of carrier for enhancing phenol removal was strongly dependent on the internal agent concentration.
Room temperature ionic liquids show potential as an alternative to conventional organic membrane solvents mainly due to their properties of low vapor pressure, low volatility and they are often stable. In the present work, the technical feasibilities of room temperature ionic liquids as bulk liquid membranes for phenol removal were investigated experimentally. Three ionic liquids with high hydrophobicity were used and their phenol removal efficiency, membrane stability and membrane loss were studied. Besides that, the effects of several parameters, namely feed phase pH, feed concentration, NaOH concentration and stirring speeds on the performance of best ionic liquid membrane were also evaluated. Lastly, an optimization study on bulk ionic liquid membrane was conducted and the maximum phenol removal efficiency was compared with the organic liquid membranes. The preliminary study shows that high phenol extraction and stripping efficiencies of 96.21% and 98.10%, respectively can be achieved by ionic liquid membrane with a low membrane loss which offers a better choice to organic membrane solvents.
The removal of radioactivity from liquid scintillator has been studied in preparation of a low background phase of KamLAND. This paper describes the methods and techniques developed to measure and efficiently extract radon decay products from liquid scintillator. We report the radio-isotope reduction factors obtained when applying various extraction methods. During this study, distillation was identified as the most efficient method for removing radon daughters from liquid scintillator.
The paper presents the results of SERS studies of the dynamic behavior of phenol-semiquinone-quinone system. This system is a key part of chemiluminescent sensors for reactive oxygen species. The dynamics of the system seems to be very important in the processes that determine the secondary metabolism at the cellular level in molecular biology. THz Raman spectra were recorded for the labile products formed in the processes initiated by proton transfer. A mechanism of the proton-transfer-initiated reaction is proposed.
Several harmful or valuable ionic species present in sea, brackish and wastewaters are amphoteric, and thus their properties depend on the local water pH. Effective removal of these species can be challenging by conventional membrane technologies, necessitating chemical dosing of the feedwater to adjust its pH. Capacitive deionization (CDI) is an emerging membraneless technique for water treatment and desalination, based on electrosorption of salt ions into charging microporous electrodes. CDI cells show strong internally-generated pH variations during operation, and thus CDI can potentially remove amphoteric species without chemical dosing. However, development of this technique is inhibited by the complexities inherent to coupling of pH dynamics and amphoteric ion properties in a charging CDI cell. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework predicting the electrosorption of amphoteric species in flow-through electrode CDI cells. We demonstrate that such a model enables deep insight into factors affecting amphoteric species electrosorption, and conclude that important design rules for such systems are highly counter-intuitive. For example, we show both theoretically and experimentally that for boron removal the anode should be placed upstream, which runs counter to accepted wisdom in the CDI field. Overall, we show that to achieve target separations relying on coupled, complex phenomena, such as in the removal of amphoteric species, a theoretical CDI model is essential.
Low-gap conjugated polymers have enabled an impressive increase in the efficiencies of organic solar cells, primarily due to their red absorption which allows harvesting of that part of the solar spectrum. Here, we report that the true optical gap of one prototypical material, PTB7, is in fact at significantly higher energy than has previously been reported, indicating that the red absorption utilized in these materials in solar cells is entirely due to chain aggregation. Using single-molecule spectroscopy we find that PL from isolated nanoscale aggregates consists of multiple independently emitting chromophores. At the single-molecule level, however, straight single chains with a high degree of emission polarization are observed. The PL is found to be ~0.4 eV higher in energy, with a longer lifetime than the red aggregates, and is attributed to single chromophores. Our findings indicate that the impressive light-harvesting abilities of PTB7 in the red spectral region arises solely from chain aggregation.