Catalytic Transesterification of Coconut Oil in Biodiesel Production: A Review

Catalysis Surveys from Asia - Biodiesel is one of the renewable energy (RE) sources that has received much interest due to its promising properties. Recently, the use of coconut oil as biodiesel...     

Horizontally networked carbon nanotubes grown on Au–Fe catalyst nanoparticles

Undoped and doped indium tin oxide (ITO) with different concentrations (2, 4, and 6 mol%) of different dopants (CuO, Cr₂O₃, and ZrO₂) were prepared in the nano-size scale (19–33 nm) using Pechini method. The thermal decomposition of the precursors was studied. The electrical properties of all the prepared samples were investigated. All the investigated systems have higher conductivity than that of ITO. For ITO doped with CuO, as the concentration of CuO increases, the conductivity increases. The highest conductivity was obtained for ITO doped with 6 mol% of CuO. For ITO doped with Cr₂O₃, as the concentration of Cr₂O₃ increases the conductivity increases and above 4 mol% Cr₂O₃ the conductivity decreases. For ITO doped with ZrO₂, as the ZrO₂ concentration increases, the conductivity increases up to 4 mol% of ZrO₂ and then decreases. The band gap was detected for all the investigated systems.     

Deflection Measurement and Determination of Young’s Modulus of Micro-cantilever Using Phase-shift Shadow Moiré Method

The deflection of micro-structures have been previously measured using optical interferometry methods. In this study, the classical phase-shift shadow moiré method (PSSM) was applied to measure the deflection of a silicon micro-cantilever and to determine the Young’s modulus of the cantilever material. The modulus value was determined from the profile based on deflection equation. A normal white light source and a grating of 40 line pairs per mm were used to generate the moiré fringes. Since the use of white light and high-resolution grating produces low contrast moiré fringes, the fringe visibility was enhanced by applying contrast enhancement and filtering techniques. The Young’s modulus of the silicon cantilever material was estimated to be 165.9 GPa with an uncertainty of ±11.3 GPa (6.8%). The experimental results show that the PSSM method can be successfully applied for characterizing micro-cantilevers. Comparison of the deflection profile from the proposed method and a commercial 3-D optical profiler showed that the measurement range and sensitivity of PSSM are not affected by the poor contrast images.