Search

Nanoplastics (NPs) generated from plastic debris weathering pose a significant threat to ecosystems. The ubiquity of plastics driven by their advantageous physical properties, necessitates the development of efficient degradation and removal methods. Polystyrene (PS), a common and hazardous aquatic NP is a long-chain hydrocarbon with alternating phenyl groups. This study investigates the photooxidative degradation of PS NPs under UV light irradiation using synthesized MoO3nanoflakes, nanobelts, and MoO3/SWCNT nanocomposites. Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray, Brunauer–Emmett–Teller, and UV–vis spectroscopy were employed to characterize the photocatalyst. Field emission scanning electron microscopy was used to visualize morphological changes in the spherical PS NPs upon interaction with the photocatalysts. MoO3nanoflakes acting as a photocatalyst under UV irradiation for 24 h achieved an impressive degradation efficiency exceeding 19%. This treatment significantly reduced the average diameter of PS NPs from 220 to 178 nm. Notably, even higher degradation efficiencies were observed with MoO3nanobelts and nanocomposites as a complete change in the spherical morphology of PS NPs is observed. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy elucidated the chemical transformations of PS during degradation. The observed changes in PS NPs structure due to photocatalytic oxidation at different time intervals indicate a promising approach.

This paper describes how to produce a wearable dry electrode at a reasonable cost and how to use it for the monitoring of biopotentials in electrocardiography. Smart textiles in wearable technologies have made a great advancement in the health care management and living standards of humans. Graphene was manufactured using the low-cost single-step process, laser ablation of polyimide, a commercial polymer. Graphene dispersions were made using solvent isopropyl alcohol which has low boiling point, nontoxicity, and environmental friendliness. After successive coating of the graphene dispersion on the cotton fabric to make it conductive, the sheet resistance of the resulting fabric dropped to 3% of its initial value. The laser-induced graphene (LIG) cotton dry electrodes thus manufactured are comparable to Ag/AgCl wet electrodes in terms of the skin-to-electrode impedance, measuring between 78.0 and 7.2 kΩ for the frequency between 40 Hz and 1 kHz. The LIG cotton electrode displayed a signal-to-noise ratio of 20.17 dB. Due to its comfort, simplicity, and good performance over a longer period of time, the textile electrode appears suited for medical applications.

We consider a time-slotted distributed multiple access channel model with energy harvesting transmitters, where each transmitter is equipped with a battery of finite capacity. At the start of each time slot, a random amount of harvested energy is available from an exogenous energy source. Each transmitter only knows its own arrival process, and is unaware of the energy arrival processes at the other terminals, leading to a distributed access system. For this set up, we design efficient rate and power scheduling policies to maximize the average throughput (sum-rate) under slot-wise coding and decoding requirements. We show that the proposed policies achieve the same gap to optimality as the recently proposed ergodic averaging schemes which require coding and decoding over a large number of slots in our setting.