Effective removal of 4-Aminophenol from aqueous environment by pea (Pisum sativum) shells activated with sulfuric acid: Characterization,isotherm, kinetics and thermodynamics

The threat of phenol contamination in aquatic ecosystems is significant for the health of the earth's water systems as well as all humans on it. The present study was conducted to synthesize a cost-effective adsorbent (pea shells activated with sulfuric acid, PSASA) from agriculture waste (pea shells) and its use for effective removal of toxic 4-Aminophenol (4-AP). Newly designed PSASA exhibited significant adsorption of 4-AP which was confirmed by SEM, FT-IR, and XRD analysis. Surface topography confirmed high unevenness of the PSASA surface and the macroporous feature of the PSASA was confirmed by BET analysis. . Multiple testing was done to see how various factors affected adsorption such as adsorbent dose, temperature, pH, PZC, the effect of KCl and urea addition and the effect of the initial concentration of 4-AP. A drop in adsorption uptake of 4-AP was observed as the temperature increases from 25 °C to 45 °C. Maximum adsorption uptake (q_m) was found to be 106.11 mg/g at an optimum pH of 7.0 and 25 °C. Among various adsorption isotherm models tested, Langmuir Isotherm gave the best explanation with high R² values of experimental data. The pseudo-first-order model was found to explain the kinetics of adsorption well. The thermodynamic finding confirms the adsorption process was physical and exothermic. The adsorption of 4-AP was primarily governed by electrostatic interaction, hydrogen-bonding and π-π exchange mechanism. Because of the positive outcomes of the present research, we can use the PSASA as a cost-effective adsorbent for removing phenolic compounds.     

Existence of positive solution for a sixth–order differential system with variable parameters

This paper investigates the existence of positive solutions for a sixth-order differential system with three variable parameters. Using a fixed point theorem and an operator spectral theorem we give some new existence results.     

GPU‐accelerated direct numerical simulations of decaying compressible turbulence employing a GKM‐based solver

Gas Kinetic Method‐based flow solvers have become popular in recent years owing to their robustness in simulating high Mach number compressible flows. We evaluate the performance of the newly developed analytical gas kinetic method (AGKM) by Xuan et al. in performing direct numerical simulation of canonical compressible turbulent flow on graphical processing unit (GPU)s. We find that for a range of turbulent Mach numbers, AGKM results shows excellent agreement with high order accurate results obtained with traditional Navier–Stokes solvers in terms of key turbulence statistics. Further, AGKM is found to be more efficient as compared with the traditional gas kinetic method for GPU implementation. We present a brief overview of the optimizations performed on NVIDIA K20 GPU and show that GPU optimizations boost the speedup up‐to 40x as compared with single core CPU computations. Hence, AGKM can be used as an efficient method for performing fast and accurate direct numerical simulations of compressible turbulent flows on simple GPU‐based workstations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

High temperature enthalpy increment and thermodynamic functions of U2Ti

This study investigated thermodynamic properties of uranium–titanium alloy to determine its suitability for storage of hydrogen isotopes. The enthalpy increments of U₂Ti were measured using a high temperature inverse drop calorimeter in the temperature range of 299–1,169 K. Temperature dependence of the molar enthalpy increment and molar heat capacity is expressed in the form $ H^\circ_{\text{m}} (T) - H^\circ_{\text{m}} (298.15\,{\text{K}})({\text{J }}\,{\text{mol}}^{ - 1} ) = 23.236(T/{\text{K}}) + 53.292 \times 10^{ - 3} (T/{\text{K}})^{2} - 21.294 \times 10^{5} ({\text{K}}/T) - 4523 $ and $ C^\circ_{\text{p,m}} ({\text{J}}\,{\text{K}}^{ - 1} \,{\text{g}}^{ - 1} ) = 23.236 + 10.6584 \times 10^{ - 2} (T/{\text{K}}) + 21.294 \times 10^{5} ({\text{K}}/T)^{2} (300 \le T/{\text{K}} \le 900) $ , respectively. A set of self consistent thermodynamic functions such as entropy, Gibbs energy function, heat capacity, and Gibbs energy and enthalpy values for U₂Ti have been computed using data obtained in this study and required data from the literature.     

Regiospecific Functionalization of Cyclic Allenes with Catecholeorane

Reaction of diborane¹ and disiamylborane² with cyclic allenes, resulted in the formation of a mixture of products resulting from the addition of boron at the central carbon as well as terminal carbon. Fish has reported that addition of 4, 4, 6-trimethyl-1, 3, 2-dioxaborinane to 1, 3-disubstituted allenes takes place at the central carbon atom preferentially when the hydroboration was done at 130° for 35–50 h in a sealed tube.³ The reactivity and stability of catecholborane at high temperatures which is known to provide greater stearic