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Summary: Hydrodesulfurization (HDS) is a commonly used route for producing clean fuels in modern refinery. Herein, ammonium/amine-intercalated MoS2 catalysts with various content of 1T phase and S vacancies have been successfully synthesized. Along with the increment of 1T phase and S vacancies of MoS2, the initial reaction rate of the HDS of dibenzothiophene (DBT) can be improved from 0.09 to 0.55 μmol·gcat−1·s−1, accounting for a remarkable activity compared to the-state-of-the-art catalysts. In a combinatory study via the activity evaluation and catalysts characterization, we found that the intercalation species of MoS2 played a key role in generating more 1T phase and S vacancies through the ‘intercalation-deintercalation’ processes, and the hydrogenation and desulfurization of HDS can be significantly promoted by 1T phase and S vacancies on MoS2, respectively. This study provides a practically meaningful guidance for developing more advanced HDS catalysts by the intercalated MoS2-derived materials with an in-depth understanding of structure-function relationships.

A combination of starch and hydrocolloids is a facile method for physically modifying native starch. Bletilla striata polysaccharide (BSP) is a glucomannan with various applications in the food and cosmetic industries as a thickening agent. This study focused on investigating the impact of BSP on the pasting, rheological and adhesive properties of wheat starch (WS). Results from a Rapid Visco-Analyzer (RVA) revealed that the addition of BSP (below 0.2%) resulted in increases in peak viscosity, breakdown and setback values. However, for the addition of BSP at a higher concentration (0.3%), the opposite trend was observed. Rheological measurements indicated that the presence of BSP increased the viscoelastic properties of WS–BSP gels. TGA results demonstrated that the presence of BSP promoted the thermal stability of starch. FTIR results indicated the short-range order structure decreased at low addition concentrations of BSP (0.05% and 0.1%) and increased with higher BSP addition concentrations (0.2% and 0.3%). SEM observation showed that the BSP improved the hydrophilic property of starch gels and decreased the size of pores in the starch gels. Further, the mechanical properties of paper samples unveiled that the present of BSP in starch gels obviously increased its bonding strength as an adhesive.

In this article, a CaO-based catalyst was prepared by impregnating chloride salts on CaO to develop a highly efficient heterogeneous catalyst for the synthesis of glycerol carbonate (GC) from glycerol and dimethyl carbonate. LiCl/CaO exhibited a high catalytic activity under moderate reaction conditions. The effects of the LiCl loadings, the amount of catalyst and the calcination temperature on the catalytic activity were investigated. The highest yield of 94.19% glycerol carbonate was obtained at 65 °C on CaO loaded with 10% LiCl after 1 h, and the catalyst had high stability in reusing work. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), BET, CO2-TPD, XPS and thermalgravity (TG) were used to characterize the prepared catalyst. It was found that the high catalytic activity of CaO after modification with LiCl is associated with the structural aspects and the amount of basicity of the catalyst. The Li2O2 species, which is a strong basic site that is formed by the substitution of the Ca2+ in CaO lattice by Li+, has great activity for transesterification. Keywords: Basic catalyst, Dimethyl carbonate, Heterogeneous

In this work, a super-resolution approach based on generative adversary network (GAN) was used to interpolate (up-sample) ultrasound radio-frequency (RF) echo data along the lateral (perpendicular to the acoustic beam direction) direction before motion estimation. Our primary objective was to investigate the feasibility of using a GAN-based super-solution approach to improve lateral resolution in the RF data as a means of improving strain image quality in quasi-static ultrasound strain elastography (QUSE). Unlike natural scene photographs, axial (parallel to the acoustic beam direction) resolution is significantly higher than that of lateral resolution in ultrasound RF data. To better handle RF data, we first modified a super-resolution generative adversary network (SRGAN) model developed by the computer vision community. We named the modified SRGAN model as super-resolution radio-frequency neural network (SRRFNN) model. Our preliminary experiments showed that, compared with axial strain elastograms obtained using the original ultrasound RF data, axial strain elastograms using ultrasound RF data up-sampled by the proposed SRRFNN model were improved. Based on the Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, such improvements were statistically significant ($p