Review on influencing parameters in the performance of concentrated solar power collector based on materials,heat transfer fluids and design

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - The solar collector (reflector and receiver) is the primary device being used in the concentrating solar power technologies for tapping the solar...     

Electrocatalytic oxidation of ethylene glycol on Pt and Pt-Ru nanoparticles modified multi-walled carbon nanotubes

The synthesis and characterization of catalysts based on nanomaterials, supported on multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNT) for ethylene glycol (EG) oxidation is investigated. Platinum (Pt) and platinum-ruthenium (Pt-Ru) nanoparticles are deposited on surface-oxidized multi-walled carbon nanotubes [Pt/CNT; Pt-Ru/CNT] by the aqueous solution reduction of the corresponding metal salts with glycerol. The electrocatalytic properties of the modified electrodes for oxidation of ethylene glycol in acidic solution have been studied by cyclic voltammetry (CV), and excellent activity is observed. This may be attributed to the small particle size of the metal nanoparticles, the efficacy of carbon nanotubes acting as good catalyst support and uniform dispersion of nanoparticles on CNT surfaces. The nature of the resulting nanoparticles decorated multiwalled carbon nanotubes are characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopic (TEM) analysis. The cyclic voltammetry response indicates that Pt-Ru/CNT catalyst displays a higher performance than Pt/CNT, which may be due to the efficiency of the nature of Ru species in Pt-Ru systems. The fabricated Pt and Pt-Ru nanoparticles decorated CNT electrodes shows better catalytic performance towards ethylene glycol oxidation than the corresponding nanoparticles decorated carbon electrodes, demonstrating that it is more promising for use in fuel cells.     

ZnS/SnS/Ag2S photocatalyst with enhanced photocatalytic activity under visible light illumination towards wastewater treatment

Research on Chemical Intermediates - In this study, various compositions of ternary ZnS/SnS/Ag2S nanocatalysts were prepared for the first time through a wet chemical method. The as-prepared...     

Robust Optimization and Data Classification for Characterization of Huntington Disease Onset via Duality Methods

Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications - The features that characterize the onset of Huntington disease (HD) are poorly understood yet have significant implications for research and...     

An extensive review on thermodynamic aspect based solar desalination techniques

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - The shortage of freshwater is becoming a major threat to sustainable environmental development. Water desalination techniques provide solutions for...     

A comparative study for the electrocatalytic oxidation of alcohol on Pt-Au nanoparticle-supported copolymer-grafted graphene oxide composite for fuel cell application

The platinum-gold bimetallic nanoparticles supported poly(cyclotriphosphazene-co-benzidine)-grafted graphene oxide (poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO) composite has been prepared for electrochemical performance studies. Cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometric studies were carried out to check the electrochemical properties of Pt-Au/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO and Pt/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO catalysts for methanol, ethylene glycol and glycerol in alkaline medium. The morphology and crystalline structure of the prepared Pt-Au/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO and Pt/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO and catalysts have been characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). From the electrochemical results, it was concluded that Pt-Au/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO catalyst shows higher catalytic activity and stability compared to Pt/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO catalyst. The catalytic activity of Pt/poly(CP-co-BZ)-g-GO catalyst has been compared with Pt/poly(CP-co-BZ), Pt/GO and Pt/C catalysts. In addition, oxidation current of ethylene glycol is higher than the methanol and glycerol in alkaline medium on the prepared catalyst.     

A new geometric condition for Fenchel's duality in infinite dimensional spaces

In 1951, Fenchel discovered a special duality, which relates the minimization of a sum of two convex functions with the maximization of the sum of concave functions, using conjugates. Fenchel's duality is central to the study of constrained optimization. It requires an existence of an interior point of a convex set which often has empty interior in optimization applications. The well known relaxations of this requirement in the literature are again weaker forms of the interior point condition. Avoiding an interior point condition in duality has so far been a difficult problem. However, a non-interior point type condition is essential for the application of Fenchel's duality to optimization. In this paper we solve this problem by presenting a simple geometric condition in terms of the sum of the epigraphs of conjugate functions. We also establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the ε-subdifferential sum formula in terms of the sum of the epigraphs of conjugate functions. Our results offer further insight into Fenchel's duality. Dedicated to Terry Rockafellar on his 70th birthday     

Characterization and catalytic performances of three-dimensional mesoporous FeSBA-1 catalysts

Iron substituted cubic cage type mesoporous molecular sieves (FeSBA-1) were synthesized for the first time in a highly acidic media using cetyltriethylammonium bromide as a template. The amount of Fe incorporation in SBA-1 can easily be controlled by the simple adjustment of the molar hydrochloric acid-to-silicon ratio. All the materials were unambiguously characterized by AAS, XRD, N2 adsorption, UV-Vis DRS, XPS, and ESR spectroscopy. The results from AAS, XRD, and N2 adsorption reveal that the iron atom can be incorporated in the framework of SBA-1 matrix without altering the structural order and the textural parameters. The nature and the coordination of iron atoms were extensively studied by XPS spectroscopy, and the results revealed that most of the iron atoms in FeSBA-1 are in +3 coordination state. UV-Vis DRS and ESR studies confirmed that the majority of the Fe atoms in FeSBA-1 exist in a tetrahedral coordination environment (most probably occupying framework positions). tert-Butylation of phenol employing tert-butanol as the alkylation agent was carried out over FeSBA-1 catalysts with different iron content and the results are compared with one-dimensional mesoporous catalysts. The influence of various reaction parameters such as reaction temperature, reactant feed ratio, weight hourly space velocity, and time-on-stream affecting the activity and selectivity of FeSBA-1 were also studied. Under the optimized reaction conditions, the FeSBA-1(36) catalyst showed superior catalytic performance for the tert-butylation of phenol as compared to the uni-dimensional mesoporous catalysts.     

Simultaneous classification and feature selection via convex quadratic programming with application to HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder assessment

Support vector machines (SVMs), that utilize a mixture of the _L1$L_1$-norm and the _L2$L_2$-norm penalties, are capable of performing simultaneous classification and selection of highly correlated features. These SVMs, typically set up as convex programming problems, are re-formulated here as simple convex quadratic minimization problems over non-negativity constraints, giving rise to a new formulation – the pq-SVM method. Solutions to our re-formulation are obtained efficiently by an extremely simple algorithm. Computational results on a range of publicly available datasets indicate that these methods allow greater classification accuracy in addition to selecting groups of highly correlated features. These methods were also compared on a new dataset assessing HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder in a group of 97 HIV-infected individuals.     

A simple closure condition for the normal cone intersection formula

In this paper it is shown that if and are two closed convex subsets of a Banach space and , then whenever the convex cone, , is weak* closed, where and are the support function and the normal cone of the set respectively. This closure condition is shown to be weaker than the standard interior-point-like conditions and the bounded linear regularity condition.