Removal of Evans Blue by using Nickel-Iron Layered Double Hydroxide (LDH) Nanoparticles: Effect of Hydrothermal Treatment Temperature on Textural Properties and Dye Adsorption

Summary: The use of low-cost adsorbent has been investigated as a replacement for the current expensive methods of removing dyes from wastewater. The sorption of acid dye (Evans Blue) from aqueous effluents onto anionic clays (hydrotalcite-like) has been studied. Hydrotalcite may be an effective adsorbent of organic molecules due to its hydrophobic nature and the accessibility of its interlayer region. Ni/Fe layered double hydroxide (LDH), with a molar ratio of 3, were synthesised by coprecipitation followed by hydrothermal treatment at different temperatures (85, 100 and 140 °C) for 4 days. The materials were characterised by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and N₂ adsorption-desorption (BET). The diffractograms and FT-IR spectroscopy of the fresh materials showed that the hydrotalcite is present in all samples. The XRD pattern obtained was typical of a hydrotalcite, where the interlayer anion is CO, XRD and Infrared spectroscopy complemented each other by showing that with treatment the degree of order increased regardless of the type of treatment. Furthermore, it was shown that aging at increased temperature and pressure increased crystallinity. TEM showed that crystal size increased with aging temperature, so that growth occurred on the edges resulting in the formation of hexagonal plate shaped hydrotalcite crystals. The surface area decreased with increasing the hydrothermal treatment temperature. The effects of various parameters such as hydrothermal treatment temperature, crystallite size, contact time and calcination on the extent of adsorption were investigated. The studies of the removal efficiency of the reactive textile dye: Evans Blue (Direct Blue 53) by NiFeCO₃ HDLs showed that the effect of hydrothermal treatment temperature on adsorption increases with aging temperature. The Evans Blue (EB) removal percent increased with increasing contact time. Above the 70%, 50% and 20% of EB adsorption occurred in the first 2 min for HDL-140, HDL-100 and HDL-85°C respectively. Furthermore, it was found that the calcined materials are much more effective than the original LDH in removing Evans Bleu dye from an aqueous solution.     

Numerical and theoretical calculation of breakdown voltage in the electrical discharge for rare gases

This work has been devoted to a numerical and analytical calculus of the voltage breakdown in electrical discharge for several rare gases such as argon, krypton, neon, xenon and helium. It was performed using a fluid model 2D, which is based on the numerical solution of the two Boltzmann equations (equation of continuity and momentum), coupled to Poisson's equation to measure the breakdown voltage according to the product of the electrode spacing and the pressure. This study allowed a better comprehension of the physical phenomena occurring in the discharges. We, thus, developed a calculation, based on the empirically Paschen's law, allowing the determination of the breakdown voltage, which describes the transition from insulating gas to the conductive state. Paschen's curves of the different gases are plotted and a comparison between numerical and experimental as well as analytical results is also presented and analyzed.     

Nonlinear effects in chiral nihility metamaterial

In this paper, the characteristics of chiral nihility nonlinearities have been investigated theoretically. In the case of this medium, permittivity and permeability are equal to zero, regardless of the existence of nonlinear effects, which is due to the presence of cross-susceptibilities in chiral medium. We have made a study of hyperbolic secant (sech) pulse to define the influence of nonlinear chiral parameter on the propagation of an electromagnetic wave in chiral nihility media. Numerical results are given and discussed to confirm the characteristics investigated theoretically.     

Quantum Secret Sharing with Error Correction

We investigate in this work a quantum error correction on a five-qubits graph state used for secret sharing through five noisy channels. We describe the procedure for the five, seven and nine qubits codes. It is known that the three codes always allow error recovery if only one among the sent qubits is disturbed in the transmitting channel. However, if two qubits and more are disturbed, then the correction will depend on the used code. We compare in this paper the three codes by computing the average fidelity between the sent secret and that measured by the receivers. We will treat the case where, at most, two qubits are affected in each one of five depolarizing channels.     

A unified approach via convexity for optimal energy decay rates of finite and infinite dimensional vibrating damped systems with applications to semi-discretized vibrating damped systems

The Liapunov method is celebrated for its strength to establish strong decay of solutions of damped equations. Extensions to infinite dimensional settings have been studied by several authors (see e.g. Haraux, 1991 [11], and Komornik and Zuazua, 1990 [17] and references therein). Results on optimal energy decay rates under general conditions of the feedback is far from being complete. The purpose of this paper is to show that general dissipative vibrating systems have structural properties due to dissipation. We present a general approach based on convexity arguments to establish sharp optimal or quasi-optimal upper energy decay rates for these systems, and on comparison principles based on the dissipation property, and interpolation inequalities (in the infinite dimensional case) for lower bounds of the energy. We stress the fact that this method works for finite as well as infinite dimensional vibrating systems and as well as for applications to semi-discretized nonlinear damped vibrating PDE's. A part of this approach has been introduced in Alabau-Boussouira (2004, 2005) [1] and [2]. In the present paper, we identify a new, simple and explicit criteria to select a class of nonlinear feedbacks, for which we prove a simplified explicit energy decay formula comparatively to the more general but also more complex formula we give in Alabau-Boussouira (2004, 2005) [1] and [2]. Moreover, we prove optimality of the decay rates for this class, in the finite dimensional case. This class includes a wide range of feedbacks, ranging from very weak nonlinear dissipation (exponentially decaying in a neighborhood of zero), to polynomial, or polynomial-logarithmic decaying feedbacks at the origin. In the infinite dimensional case, we establish a comparison principle on the energy of sufficiently smooth solutions through the dissipation relation. This principle relies on suitable interpolation inequalities. It allows us to give lower bounds for the energy of smooth initial data for the one-dimensional wave equation with a distributed polynomial damping, which improves Haraux (1995) [12] lower estimate of the energy for this case. We also establish lower bounds in the multi-dimensional case for sufficiently smooth solutions when such solutions exist. We further mention applications of these various results to several classes of PDE's, namely: the locally and boundary damped multi-dimensional wave equation, the locally damped plate equation and the globally damped coupled Timoshenko beams system but it applies to several other examples. Furthermore, we show that these optimal energy decay results apply to finite dimensional systems obtained from spatial discretization of infinite dimensional damped systems. We illustrate these results on the one-dimensional locally damped wave and plate equations discretized by finite differences and give the optimal energy decay rates for these two examples. These optimal rates are not uniform with respect to the discretization parameter. We also discuss and explain why optimality results have to be stated differently for feedbacks close to linear behavior at the origin.     

Asymptotic behavior for Timoshenko beams subject to a single nonlinear feedback control

We consider systems of Timoshenko type in a one-dimensional bounded domain. The physical system is damped by a single feedback force, only in the equation for the rotation angle, no direct damping is applied on the equation for the transverse displacement of the beam. Moreover the damping is assumed to be nonlinear with no growth assumption at the origin, which allows very weak damping. We establish a general semi-explicit formula for the decay rate of the energy at infinity in the case of the same speed of propagation in the two equations of the system. We prove polynomial decay in the case of different speed of propagation for both linear and nonlinear globally Lipschitz feedbacks.      

Indirect controllability of locally coupled systems under geometric conditions

We consider systems of two wave/heat/Schrödinger-type equations coupled by a zero order term, only one of them being controlled. We prove an internal and a boundary null-controllability result in any space dimension, provided that both the coupling and the control regions satisfy the Geometric Control Condition. This includes several examples in which these two regions have an empty intersection.     

A law of the iterated logarithm for the product limit estimator with doubly censored data

We establish the law of the iterated logarithm for the product limit estimator, when the data are subject to double censoring. This investigation extends the results available for the model for singly censored data.     

Computational investigation of enol/keto chloramphenicol with β-cyclodextrin

PM3 and ONIOM2 were carried out to investigate the structures and properties for the inclusion complexes of chloramphenicol tautomers into β-cyclodextrin (at 1:1 stoichiometry). Two possible orientations into host cavity were considered for both enol and keto chloramphenicol. The PM3 results gives that B orientation is more preferred for enol and keto form, the preference is of 0.63 and 1.67 kcal/mol respectively. This preference is greater in the case of ONIOM2 calculations. Finally, the chemical shifts (ppm) of free and complexed chloramphenicol were calculated at B3LYP/6-31G(d) by (GIAO method) and compared with experimental data taken from the literature.     

Nonlinear stabilization of abstract systems via a linear observability inequality and application to vibrating PDE's

This Note is concerned with the links between nonlinear stabilization of hyperbolic systems and linear observability for the unforced corresponding linear system, for locally distributed and boundary feedbacks as well. We show that if the linear system is observable through a locally distributed (resp. boundary) observation, then any dissipative nonlinear feedback locally distributed (resp. active only on a part of the boundary) stabilize the system and we give a general energy decay formula. Our results generalize previous results by Haraux (1989) and Ammari and Tucsnak (2001) for linear feedbacks. We show by this way that for the locally distributed case, one can combine the optimal geometric conditions of Bardos et al. (1992) and the method of Alabau-Boussouira (2005) to deduce energy decay rates for nonlinear damped systems.