Impact of thickness of spin-coated P3HT thin films,over their optical and electronic properties

Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry - A study of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) thin films by spin-coating process, deposited on conducting glass substrates of fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO), is...     

PTML modeling for peptide discovery: in silico design of non-hemolytic peptides with antihypertensive activity

Molecular Diversity - Hypertension is a medical condition that affects millions of people worldwide. Despite the high efficacy of the current antihypertensive drugs, they are associated with...     

Carbon nanotube-carbon black hybrid counter electrodes for dye-sensitized solar cells and the effect on charge transfer kinetics

In this work, the catalytic activity of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), carbon black (CB), and CNT-CB counter electrodes in the I⁻/I₃⁻ reduction reaction is reported and compared with the Pt counter electrode. The fabricated counter electrodes were evaluated in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The results indicate that the best cathodes were made from CNT₁₀ (240 μm) and CB with a charge transfer resistance (R_CT) of 2.70 Ω, and when the complete device shows 19.83 Ω of internal series resistance (R_S), the photovoltaic parameters of these cells were J_SC = 10.47 mA cm⁻²; V_OC = 0.70 V; and FF = 57.90, with an efficiency of 4.29%, indicating a better interaction between the CNT₁₀ in the 3D network of the counter electrode, generating a good charge transfer kinetics, in comparison with only CNT₁₀ or CB.

     

Multi-scale simulation reveals that an amino acid substitution increases photosensitizing reaction inputs in Rhodopsins

Evaluating the availability of molecular oxygen (O₂) and energy of excited states in the retinal binding site of rhodopsin is a crucial challenging first step to understand photosensitizing reactions in wild-type (WT) and mutant rhodopsins by absorbing visible light. In the present work, energies of the ground and excited states related to 11-cis-retinal and the O₂ accessibility to the β-ionone ring are evaluated inside WT and human M207R mutant rhodopsins. Putative O₂ pathways within rhodopsins are identified by using molecular dynamics simulations, Voronoi-diagram analysis, and implicit ligand sampling while retinal energetic properties are investigated through density functional theory, and quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical methods. Here, the predictions reveal that an amino acid substitution can lead to enough energy and O₂ accessibility in the core hosting retinal of mutant rhodopsins to favor the photosensitized singlet oxygen generation, which can be useful in understanding retinal degeneration mechanisms and in designing blue-lighting-absorbing proteic photosensitizers.     

Cost-allocation problems for fuzzy agents in a fixed-tree network

Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making - Cost-allocation problems in a fixed network are concerned with distributing the costs for use by a group of clients who cooperate in order to reduce such...     

Effect of pretreatment on pyrolysis products of Pennisetum purpureum Schum. by Py-GC/MS

Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry - Elephant grass (Pennisetum purpureum Schum.) is one such resource with a great amount of carbohydrate and lignin polymers that together represent high...     

Simultaneous preference estimation and heterogeneity control for choice-based conjoint via support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVMs) have been successfully used to identify individuals’ preferences in conjoint analysis. One of the challenges of using SVMs in this context is to properly control for preference heterogeneity among individuals to construct robust partworths. In this work, we present a new technique that obtains all individual utility functions simultaneously in a single optimization problem based on three objectives: complexity reduction, model fit, and heterogeneity control. While complexity reduction and model fit are dealt using SVMs, heterogeneity is controlled by shrinking the individual-level partworths toward a population mean. The proposed approach is further extended to kernel-based machines, conferring flexibility to the model by allowing nonlinear utility functions. Experiments on simulated and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach in its linear form outperforms existing methods for choice-based conjoint analysis.