Search

Water pollution has become a global problem. Sources of wastewater majorly include industrial and commercial sectors. To cater to the exponential increase in clean water, efficient technologies are needed to treat wastewater. Several techniques such as redox reactions, membrane filtrations, mechanical processes, chemical treatment and adsorption techniques have been employed. However, their cost and effectiveness is still a major problem. In this study, we employed an effective wastewater treatment technique by synthesizing NiCoMn MOFs using a simple hydrothermal technique and characterized the properties using XRD and SEM for their possible characteristics. XRD analysis confirmed the successful synthesis of NiCoMn MOFs. Sufficient information regarding the surface morphology and topology was given by the SEM analysis which proved a nanoporous structure with high surface area effective for adsorption and oxidative catalysis of contaminants in wastewater. Moreover, a high electrostatic attraction between the MOFs was observed which could attract oppositely charged contaminants. The results showed a high potential for the synthesized NiCoMn MOFs for wastewater treatment applications., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

Answering the shortest-path distance between two arbitrary locations is a fundamental problem in road networks. Labelling-based solutions are the current state-of-the-arts to render fast response time, which can generally be categorised into hub-based labellings, highway-based labellings, and tree decomposition labellings. Hub-based and highway-based labellings exploit hierarchical structures of road networks with the aim to reduce labelling size for improving query efficiency. However, these solutions still result in large search spaces on distance labels at query time, particularly when road networks are large. Tree decomposition labellings leverage a hierarchy of vertices to reduce search spaces over distance labels at query time, but such a hierarchy is generated using tree decomposition techniques, which may yield very large labelling sizes and slow querying. In this paper, we propose a novel solution \emph{hierarchical cut 2-hop labelling (HC2L)} to address the drawbacks of the existing works. Our solution combines the benefits of hierarchical structures from both perspectives - reduce the size of a distance labelling at preprocessing time and further reduce the search space on a distance labelling at query time. At its core, we propose a new hierarchy, \emph{balanced tree hierarchy}, which enables a fast, efficient data structure to reduce the size of distance labelling and to select a very small subset of labels to compute the shortest-path distance at query time. To speed up the construction process of HC2L, we further propose a parallel variant of our method, namely HC2L$^p$. We have evaluated our solution on 10 large real-world road networks through extensive experiments.

Hypothesis: Nanofluidic systems provide an emerging and efficient platform for thermoelectric conversion and fluid pumping with low-grade heat energy. As a basis of their performance enhancement, the effects of the structures and properties of the nanofluidic systems on the thermoelectric response (TER) and the thermoosmotic response (TOR) are yet to be explored. Methods: The simultaneous TER and TOR of electrolyte solutions in nanofluidic membrane pores on which an axial temperature gradient is exerted are investigated numerically and semi-analytically. A semi-analytical model is developed with the consideration of finite membrane thermal conductivity and the reservoir/entrance effect. Findings: The increase in the access resistance due to the nanopore-reservoir interfaces accounts for the decrease of short circuit current at the low concentration regime. The decrease in the thermal conductivity ratio can enhance the TER and TOR. The maximum power density occurring at the nanopore radius twice the Debye length ranges from several to dozens of mW K$^{-2}$ m$^{-2}$ and is an order of magnitude higher than typical thermo-supercapacitors. The surface charge polarity can heavily affect the sign and magnitude of the short-circuit current, the Seebeck coefficient, and the open-circuit thermoosmotic coefficient, but has less effect on the short-circuit thermoosmotic coefficient. Furthermore, the membrane thickness makes different impacts on TER and TOR for zero and finite membrane thermal conductivity., Comment: 38 pages, 10 figures

Many real-world applications operate on dynamic graphs that undergo rapid changes in their topological structure over time. However, it is challenging to design dynamic algorithms that are capable of supporting such graph changes efficiently. To circumvent the challenge, we propose a batch-dynamic framework for answering distance queries, which combines offline labelling and online searching to leverage the advantages from both sides - accelerating query processing through a partial distance labelling that is of limited size but provides a good approximation to bound online searches. We devise batch-dynamic algorithms to dynamize a distance labelling efficiently in order to reflect batch updates on the underlying graph. In addition to providing theoretical analysis for the correctness, labelling minimality, and computational complexity, we have conducted experiments on 14 real-world networks to empirically verify the efficiency and scalability of the proposed algorithms.