Synthesis,spectroscopic study,X-ray diffraction,and comparative antimicrobial study of Schiff bases based on o-toluidine and their Co(II) complexes

Schiff bases are versatile compounds for the design of the ternary complex. An experiment has been made to synthesize two novel complexes of Co(II). Here, The primary ligand, L₁ was prepared by the condensation reaction of o-toluidine with 3-formyl chromone or o-toluidine with 3- methylquinolinecarbaldehyde and the secondary ligand which was 8-Hydroxyquinoline. These potent complexes were prepared by condensation of primary and secondary ligands with Cobalt salt. The reaction was performed through the conventional reflux method. The newly synthesized chromone and quinoline derived novel compounds are proposed to have significant antimicrobial activity against selective strains of bacteria and fungi. This can be great opportunity for researchers and the use of biological applications of the synthesized novel compounds can be a part of unique field of research for the future to be focus. Chromone derivative has great biological diversity in the medicinal and pharmaceutical fields. Along with these compounds, quinoline derivatives also have antibacterial, and antifungal activities. The synthesized ligand and complex were characterized by elemental analysis, molecular weight determination, magnetic moment measurement, melting point determination, spectral analysis (IR, UV–Vis, ¹H NMR, Mass, etc.), and X-ray diffraction. The synthesized complexes were paramagnetic and non-electrolytic in nature. The Uv–Vis, FTIR, NMR, and Mass spectra suggest the octahedral geometry of the complexes. The synthesized compounds were further evaluated for biological studies against selected bacterial and fungal strains. It has been observed that the antimicrobial activity of most of the complexes are better than that of ligands.     

Atomic layer deposition: An efficient tool for corrosion protection

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is now a widely implemented thin film growing method. It is currently used in industrial fabrication processes of microelectronics and luminescent display technologies. Since compact and conformal films can be grown with perfect control of the thickness, ALD is envisioned in numerous other applications fields such as energy, sensing, biomaterials, and photonics. Although few reports can be found on its application to corrosion protection, it has been shown that the qualities of ALD can be highly beneficial to this field. After a brief review of the principle of ALD and the effect of the main parameters on the properties of the films, this report attempts to show the interest of this technique to mitigate corrosion. Various examples of successful uses of ALD to protect metallic and non-metallic surfaces in different fields are reviewed.     

Preparation of carbon-aerogel polypyrrole composite for desalination by hybrid capacitive desalination method

Capacitive Deionization (CDI) is an emerging technology with great potential applications. Most researchers view it as a viable water treatment alternative to reverse osmosis. This research reports the preparation and application of a carbon aerogel polypyrrole (CA-PPy) composite for the desalination of NaCl solution by the hybrid CDI method. The carbon aerogel (CA) was prepared from a Resorcinol / Formaldehyde precursor by the sol–gel method. The aerogel obtained from the sol–gel was then pyrolysed in a tube furnace to form CA. Polypyrrole (PPy) was prepared by the Oxidative chemical polymerisation of pyrrole, ferric chloride hexahydrate (oxidant), and sodium dodecyl sulfate (dopant). A composite of CA and PPy was then prepared and used to modify carbon electrodes. The CA-PPy composite was characterised to verify its composition, morphology, thermal properties, and functional groups. The electrochemical properties of the material were determined by Cyclic voltammetry (CV) and Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) tests. The electrochemical tests were done using a GAMRY potentiostat electrochemical workstation, a 1.0 M KCl was used as the electrolyte, and the applied potential window was (-0.2 to + 0.6) V for the CV test. The EIS test was done with the same concentration of KCl electrolyte at an applied potential of 0.22 V and at a frequency range of (0.1 – 100, 000) Hz. The optimal specific capacitance of the CA is 115F/g, and that of the composite is 360.1F/g, they were both obtained at a scan rate of 5 mV/s. The CDI desalination study of the CA-PPy composite showed a salt adsorption capacity (SAC) of 10.10 mg/g (300 mg/L NaCl solution) – 15.7 mg/g (800 mg/L NaCl solution) at 1.2 V applied voltage. The salt recovery efficiency of the electrode material in the 300 mg/L solution is 27 %, in the 500 mg/L solution, it is 20.12 %, and in the 800 mg/L solution, it is 15.41 %. The electrode material also showed good electrochemical stability after nine cycles of ion adsorption/desorption study.     

Ultrasound-assisted green syntheses of novel pyrimidine derivatives and their comparison with conventional methods

Ultrasound-assisted green syntheses of novel potentially bioactive pyrimidine derivatives have been carried out. The same compounds were obtained by conventional methods of synthesis, and the reaction times and yields of final products obtained by these two methods were compared. It was found that the time of utrasound-promoted reactions was reduced by almost 6–96 times, and their yields were equal or turn out to be greater compared to the traditional approach. The synthesized compounds showed a pronounced stimulating effect on plant growth. The most active derivatives were selected for deeper biological studies and subsequent field trials.     

Inactivation of the enveloped virus phi6 with hydrodynamic cavitation

The COVID −19 pandemic reminded us that we need better contingency plans to prevent the spread of infectious agents and the occurrence of epidemics or pandemics. Although the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in water has not been confirmed, there are studies that have reported on the presence of infectious coronaviruses in water and wastewater samples. Since standard water treatments are not designed to eliminate viruses, it is of utmost importance to explore advanced treatment processes that can improve water treatment and help inactivate viruses when needed. This is the first study to investigate the effects of hydrodynamic cavitation on the inactivation of bacteriophage phi6, an enveloped virus used as a SARS-CoV-2 surrogate in many studies. In two series of experiments with increasing and constant sample temperature, virus reduction of up to 6.3 logs was achieved. Inactivation of phi6 at temperatures of 10 and 20 °C occurs predominantly by the mechanical effect of cavitation and results in a reduction of up to 4.5 logs. At 30 °C, the reduction increases to up to 6 logs, where the temperature-induced increased susceptibility of the viral lipid envelope makes the virus more prone to inactivation. Furthermore, the control experiments without cavitation showed that the increased temperature alone is not sufficient to cause inactivation, but that additional mechanical stress is still required. The RNA degradation results confirmed that virus inactivation was due to the disrupted lipid bilayer and not to RNA damage. Hydrodynamic cavitation, therefore, has the potential to inactivate current and potentially emerging enveloped pathogenic viruses in water at lower, environmentally relevant temperatures.     

Accelerating fully resolved simulation of particle-laden flows on heterogeneous computer architectures

An efficient computing framework, namely PFlows, for fully resolved-direct numerical simulations of particle-laden flows was accelerated on NVIDIA General Processing Units (GPUs) and GPU-like accelerator (DCU) cards. The framework is featured as coupling the lattice Boltzmann method for fluid flow with the immersed boundary method for fluid-particle interaction, and the discrete element method for particle collision, using two fixed Eulerian meshes and one moved Lagrangian point mesh, respectively. All the parts are accelerated by a fine-grained parallelism technique using CUDA on GPUs, and further using HIP on DCU cards, i.e., the calculation on each fluid grid, each immersed boundary point, each particle motion, and each pair-particle collision is responsible by one computer thread, respectively. Coalesced memory accesses to LBM distribution functions with the data layout of Structure of Arrays are used to maximize utilization of hardware bandwidth. Parallel reduction with shared memory for data of immersed boundary points is adopted for the sake of reducing access to global memory when integrate particle hydrodynamic force. MPI computing is further used for computing on heterogeneous architectures with multiple CPUs-GPUs/DCUs. The communications between adjacent processors are hidden by overlapping with calculations. Two benchmark cases were conducted for code validation, including a pure fluid flow and a particle-laden flow. The performances on a single accelerator show that a GPU V100 can achieve 7.1–11.1 times speed up, while a single DCU can achieve 5.6–8.8 times speed up compared to a single Xeon CPU chip (32 cores). The performances on multi-accelerators show that parallel efficiency is 0.5–0.8 for weak scaling and 0.68–0.9 for strong scaling on up to 64 DCU cards even for the dense flow (φ = 20%). The peak performance reaches 179 giga lattice updates per second (GLUPS) on 256 DCU cards by using 1 billion grids and 1 million particles. At last, a large-scale simulation of a gas-solid flow with 1.6 billion grids and 1.6 million particles was conducted using only 32 DCU cards. This simulation shows that the present framework is prospective for simulations of large-scale particle-laden flows in the upcoming exascale computing era.     

Pathway and mechanism study on improvement of N2 selectivity of catalytic denitrification

Recently, nitrate pollution has attracted more public attention. In order to truly remove nitrate and reduce total nitrate content (TN) in water body, more harmless N₂ should be converted from nitrate. Studies on catalytic removal of nitrate in wastewater have been carried out. However, the catalytic performance still needs to be significantly improved, especially the N₂ selectivity. According to these, strategies that enable to efficiently improve N₂ selectivity of catalytic denitrification were explored in this paper. Results implied that the catalyst with composite carrier that possesses porous structure, large surface area, excellent electronic properties, and stable physical–chemical property tends to have better catalytic performance. It is suggested that acid washing by 2 mol/L HCl for certain carriers be applied to enhancement of N₂ selectivity. Additionally, higher N₂ conversion was also achieved by addition of sodium bis-2-ethylhexyl sulphosuccinate (AOT) onto Pd with the formation of Pd_AOT-Cu catalyst, which may be ascribed to the AOT that partially shields Pd active sites and inhibits hydrogen spillover from Pd to Cu. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) was utilized for experimental design and prediction of the optimal parameters. More N₂ was obtained under the predicted optimal conditions: 5.0 pH, 135 min time, 3.1 Pd: Cu, and 3.1 g/L Fe⁽⁰⁾.     

Biological activities from andiroba (Carapa guianensis Aublet.) and its biotechnological applications: A systematic review

Carapa guianensis is a tree from Meliaceae family traditionally known as andiroba that has a wide range of biological properties, including therapeutic effects, antioxidant activities, insecticidal and repellent effects that can be used in biotechnological approaches to medicine, agriculture, and cosmetic products. Therefore, we aim to explore the biological activities exhibited by this species and their respective biotechnological applications of interest. For this, a systematic review was carried out following the PRISMA guidelines dated from 1993 to 2022 through the Scopus, Web of Science and Agricultural Research Database (Base de Dados da Pesquisa Agropecuária - BDPA), screened for biological activity/bioactive compounds. A total of 129 studies were included in the PRISMA flow analysis. Biological properties and major bioactive compounds, as well as biotechnological approaches could be identified. The biological activity from C. guianensis could be observed in different vegetative parts through diverse methods of extractions. These activities are mainly due to the unsaturated fatty acids and bioactive compounds, such as the limonoids and a small fraction of phenolic compounds. Gedunin-type limonoids, like gedunin and its derivatives, represent the class of compounds that show the highest bioactivities in different applications.