Carbon Paste Electrode Modified with Functionalized Nanoporous Silica Gel as a New Sensor for Determination of Silver Ion

A new dipyridyl‐functionalized silica gel (DPSG) was synthesized. The potentiometric response of silver ion was investigated at a carbon paste electrode chemically modified with functionalized nanoporous silica gel. The electrodes with a DPSG proportions of 10.1% (w/w), showed very stable potential. Calibration plots with Nernstian slopes for Ag⁺ were observed, 58.7 (±0.9) mV decade^?1, over a wide linear range of concentration (5.0×10^?7 to 1.0×10^?1 M). The electrode has a detection limit of 1.0×10^?7 M. The selectivity coefficients measured by the match potential method in acetate buffer, pH 5.5, were investigated. The electrode has fast response time, high performance, high sensitivity in wide cation activity ranges, and good long term stability (more than 6 months). The method was satisfactory and used to determine the concentration of silver ion in waste waters contaminated by this metal.     

Highly Selective and Sensitive Triiodide PVC‐Membrane Electrode Based on a New Charge‐Transfer Complex of Bis(2,4‐Dimethoxybenzaldehyde)butane‐2,3‐Dihydrazone with Iodine

In this work, a highly selective membrane triiodide sensor based on a new charge‐transfer complex of bis(2,4‐dimethoxybenzaldehyde)butane‐2,3‐dihydrazone with iodine (Iodide Charge Transfer complex: ICT) as membrane carrier is introduced. The influences of five different solvent mediators on sensitivity and selectivity of the proposed sensor were considered. The best performance was obtained with the membrane composition containing 30% poly (vinyl chloride), 63% DBP, 5% ICT and 2% HTAB. The electrode shows a Nernstian behavior over a very wide triiodide ion concentration range (1.0 × 10^?7‐1.0 × 10^?2 M), and a detection limit value of 8.0 × 10^?8 M. The effect of pH on the potentiometric response of the sensor was also studied, and it was found that the response of the electrode is independent of the pH of the solution in the pH range of 4.0–10. The proposed sensor has a very fast response time (< 12 s), and good selectivities relative to a wide variety of common inorganic and organic anions, including iodide, acetate, bromide, chloride, fluoride, nitrite, nitrate, sulfite, sulfate, cyanide and thiocyanate. In fact the selectivity behavior of the proposed triiodide ion‐selective electrode shows great improvements compared to the previously reported electrodes for triiodide ion. The proposed membrane sensor can be used for at least 6 months without any divergence in the potentials. The electrode was successfully applied as an indicator electrode in the titration of triiodide with thiosulfate ion.     

Structural study of 2-(1-oxo-1 H-inden-3-yl)-2H-indene-1,3-dione by DFT calculations, NMR and IR spectroscopy

Computational studies have been carried out at the DFT-B3LYP/6-31G(d) level of theory on the structural and spectroscopic properties of 2-(1-oxo-1 H-inden-3-yl)-2H-indene-1,3-dione (OID). Experimental studies were conducted on these parameters, including X-ray, FT-IR and 13C NMR spectroscopy. The optimized geometries of OID and its bonding characteristics as well as IR and NMR spectra have been calculated and analyzed. It was observed that the bond lengths and angles in the molecule, obtained by X-ray, IR and NMR at the level of theory, were in a good agreement with those of the experiment. The correlation between the theoretical and the experimental vibrational frequencies and the chemical shifts of the OID molecule were 0.994 and 0.991, respectively. The agreement mutually verified the accuracy of the experimental method and the validity of the applied mathematical model.     

Stripping Voltammetry of Cerium(IIl) with a Chemically Modified Carbon Paste Electrode Containing Functionalized Nanoporous Silica Gel

This research introduces the design of an adsorptive stripping voltammetric method for the cerium(III) determination at a carbon paste electrode, chemically modified with dipyridyl‐functionalized nanoporous silica gel (DPNSG‐CPE). The electroanalytical procedure comprised two steps: the Ce(III) chemical accumulation at ?200 mV followed by the electrochemical detection of the Ce(III)/dipyridyl complex, using anodic stripping voltammetry. The factors, influencing the adsorptive stripping performance, were optimized including the modifier quantity in the paste, the electrolyte concentrations, the solution pH and the accumulation potential or time. The resulting electrode demonstrated a linear response over a wide range of Ce(III) concentration (1.0–28 ng mL^?1). The precision for seven determinations of 4 and 10 ng mL^?1 Ce(III) was 3.2% and 2.5% (relative standard deviation), respectively. The prepared electrode was used for the cerium determination in real samples and very good recovery results were obtained.     

Effect of thickness on the capacitive behavior and stability of ultrathin polyaniline for high speed super capacitors

In this work four polyaniline (PANI) film electrode with different thickness were synthesized by electrochemical method on the surface of glassy carbon (GC) electrode. Four polymer films with various thicknesses from 0.5 to 11 μm were synthesized. Electropolymerization occurs in low monomer concentration. Morphology study of electrode shows that surface structure of polymers depends on film thickness. Capacitance of electrode was studied by CV and charge-discharge (CD) methods. Specific capacitance (SC) of electrodes using cyclic voltammetry were calculated 620, 247 F g^–1 for thinnest and thickest polymer film, respectively. Stability of electrodes was studied during 1000 voltammogram cycles. Results show that with the increase of thickness the stability of electrodes enhanced and reach to a maximum and then decreased.     

An efficient algorithm based on the differential quadrature method for solving Navier–Stokes equations

In this paper, an approach to improve the application of the differential quadrature method for the solution of Navier–Stokes equations is presented. In using the conventional differential quadrature method for solving Navier–Stokes equations, difficulties such as boundary conditions' implementation, generation of an ill conditioned set of linear equations, large memory storage requirement to store data, and matrix coefficients, are usually encountered. Also, the solution of the generated set of equations takes a long running time and needs high computational efforts. An approach based on the point pressure–velocity iteration method, which is a variant of the Newton–Raphson relaxation technique, is presented to overcome these problems without losing accuracy. To verify its performance, four cases of two‐dimensional flows in single and staggered double lid‐driven cavity and flows past backward facing step and square cylinder, which have been often solved by researchers as benchmark solution, are simulated for different Reynolds numbers. The results are compared with existing solutions in the open literature. Very good agreement with low computational efforts of the approach is shown. It has been concluded that the method can be applied easily and is very time efficient. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prediction of melatonin excretion patterns in the rat exposed to ELF magnetic fields based on support vector machine and linear discriminant analysis

Bioeffects of magnetic field exposure have been motivated accomplishing various studies. However, no consensus or guideline is available for experimental designs relating exposure conditions as yet. In the present work, in order to analyze and predict the melatonin excretion patterns in the rat exposed to extremely low frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MF), linear discriminate analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVMs) were utilized. Subsequently, performances of LDA and SVMs were compared through resubstitution and jackknife tests on a database containing 33 experiments. Predictor variables were more effective parameters including frequency, polarization, exposure duration and strength of magnetic fields. Also, five performance measures including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC) and normalized percentage better than random (S) were used to evaluate the performance of models. The LDA as a conventional model obtained poor prediction performance. On the other hand, SVMs as a more powerful model, which has not been introduced in predicting melatonin excretion patterns in the rat exposed to ELF-MF, showed 0.38 value of MCC through jackknife test that confirms the higher reliability of the SVMs.     

Solid drop based liquid-phase microextraction

Solid drop based liquid-phase microextraction (SDLPME) is a novel sample preparation technique possessing obvious advantages of simple operation with a high pre-concentration factor, low cost and low consumption of organic solvent. SDLPME coupled with gas chromatography (GC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) has been widely applied to the analyses of a different variety of samples. The basic principles, parameters affecting the extraction efficiency, and the latest applications of SDLPME are reviewed in this article.