Tegoprens in anaerobic digestion of a mixture of cheese whey,poultry waste,and cattle dung for improved biomethanation

To obtain enriched methane content and improve the anaerobic digestion of a mixture of cattle dung, poultry waste, and cheese whey, the effect of various doses of Tegoprens: T-3012, T-3022, T-5842, T-5843, T-5851, T-5852 has been studied, in bench-scale digesters. Among them, Tegoprens 3022 showed more than a 45% increase in gas production with higher methane content.     

The stability of poly(m-carborane-siloxane) elastomers exposed to heat and gamma radiation

Poly(m-carboranyl-siloxane) elastomers containing a mixture of di-methyl- and methylphenyl-silyl units were synthesised using the ferric chloride catalysed condensation reaction between di-chloro-diorganosilane and bis(di-methylmethoxysilyl)-m-carborane. These elastomeric materials were originally developed to have greater stability to extreme thermal environments and retain tailorable physical and chemical properties relative to comparable non-carborane containing elastomers. Prepared samples were aged either by heating in air at elevated temperatures or by gamma irradiation from a ⁶⁰Co source. Multinuclear (¹H, ¹³C and ¹¹B) solid and solution state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) was used to assess degradation. This included measurements of segmental chain dynamics using a solid-echo pulse sequence reflecting changes in crosslink density and assessing changes to the carborane fragment by ¹¹B and ¹H Magic Angle Spinning (MAS) methods. Thermogravimetric measurements were also performed to assess thermal stability. Gamma radiation (to a dose of 1 MGy) was found to induce only a small degree of elastomer hardening as evidenced by a reduction in segmental chain dynamics. The carborane cage however, remained intact at these dose levels. Thermal degradation was observed to lead to oxidative crosslinking, the degree of which is dependent on temperature. At temperatures below 350 °C, only small changes in segmental dynamics were observed commensurate with only minor weight loss at this temperature. At temperatures above 350 °C, the degradation of the elastomer increased dramatically with decreased segmental dynamics and presumed partial oxidation of the carborane cage. The integrity of the m-carborane cage and the segmental dynamics were found to be significantly reduced at temperatures above 580 °C, in line with the known cage rearrangement temperature for icosahedral carboranes.     

A chemically consistent graph architecture for massive reaction networks applied to solid-electrolyte interphase formation

Modeling reactivity with chemical reaction networks could yield fundamental mechanistic understanding that would expedite the development of processes and technologies for energy storage, medicine, catalysis, and more. Thus far, reaction networks have been limited in size by chemically inconsistent graph representations of multi-reactant reactions (e.g. A + B → C) that cannot enforce stoichiometric constraints, precluding the use of optimized shortest-path algorithms. Here, we report a chemically consistent graph architecture that overcomes these limitations using a novel multi-reactant representation and iterative cost-solving procedure. Our approach enables the identification of all low-cost pathways to desired products in massive reaction networks containing reactions of any stoichiometry, allowing for the investigation of vastly more complex systems than previously possible. Leveraging our architecture, we construct the first ever electrochemical reaction network from first-principles thermodynamic calculations to describe the formation of the Li-ion solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), which is critical for passivation of the negative electrode. Using this network comprised of nearly 6000 species and 4.5 million reactions, we interrogate the formation of a key SEI component, lithium ethylene dicarbonate. We automatically identify previously proposed mechanisms as well as multiple novel pathways containing counter-intuitive reactions that have not, to our knowledge, been reported in the literature. We envision that our framework and data-driven methodology will facilitate efforts to engineer the composition-related properties of the SEI – or of any complex chemical process – through selective control of reactivity.

A chemically consistent graph architecture enables autonomous identification of novel solid-electrolyte interphase formation pathways from a massive reaction network.