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Improvements within the Synthesis and Application of Anti-Fouling Membranes Employing Two-Dimensional Nanomaterials.
In the present investigation, a one-step synthesis of hydrochar (HC) supported zero-valent iron (ZVI) was performed through hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) of granatum and ZVI. According to XRD, XPS, and FTIR data, ZVI was evenly distributed on the surface of the hydrochar. In addition, the external ZVI oxide layer and the functional groups present in the hydrochar remained on the surface of the HC/ZVI composites after HTC treatment. The surface area of the HC/ZVI composites was between 31.11 and 44.16 m2/g. These numbers were higher than those obtained for hydrochar (20.36 m2/g) and ZVI (12.14 m2/g) separately. The Pb2+ adsorption capacity of hydrochar and ZVI was 28.64 and 192.44 mg/g, respectively (25 °C, pH = 6.05, Pb2+ concentration of 200 mg/L with 0.05 g HC and 0.01 g ZVI). In addition, the adsorption capacity of the composites was between 49.63 and 88.09 mg/g. The data obtained for Pb2+ removal by the samples used in this experiments fitted well the pseudo-second-order kinetics and Langmuir isotherm models. Therefore, hydrochar may represent a promising supporting material for the synthesis of ZVI composites.In this work, sugarcane bagasse waste (SBW) was used as a lignocellulosic precursor to develop a high-surface-area activated carbon (AC) by thermal treatment of the SBW impregnated with KOH. This SBW activated carbon (SBWAC) was characterized by crystallinity, porosity, surface morphology and functional groups availability. The SBWAC exhibited Type I isotherm which corresponds to microporosity with high specific surface area of 709.3 m2/g and 6.6 nm of mean pore diameter. Further application of SBWAC as an adsorbent for methylene blue (MB) dye removal demonstrated that the adsorption process closely followed the pseudo-second order kinetic and Freundlich isotherm models. Conversely, a thermodynamic study revealed the endothermic nature and spontaneity of MB dye adsorption on SBWAC with high acquired adsorption capacity (136.5 mg/g). The MB dye adsorption onto SBWAC possibly involved electrostatic interaction, H-bonding and π-π interaction. This work demonstrates SBW as a potential lignocellulosic precursor to produce high-surface-area AC that can potentially remove more cationic dyes from the aqueous environment.Rainfall infiltration, rainwater retention, runoff and evapotranspiration (ET) are important components of the water balance in green roofs. These components are expected to be influenced by variations in the structural configurations (i.e., substrate layers) of green roofs. This study explores the influence of layered soil and green roof configurations on the rainwater retention capacity (RRC) of the roofs as compared to conventional improvements (i.e., soil conditioning and enhanced substrate depth). Ten different extensive green roof modules were designed by varying the substrate materials, substrate depths, storage/drainage layers and vegetation layers. For all modules, the RRCs ranged from 34 to 59%. The RRCs of layered soil were 1-4% higher than that for single-layer soil. The RRC increased by 13% in the presence of a water storage module. It can be concluded that highest RRC corresponds to a combination of high-permeability soil in the upper layer along with a relatively large water holding capacity in the deep layer. Water storage layer and layered soil could significantly delay the water stress in vegetation. The importance of wick irrigation, vegetation types, back-to-back rain events and the ET rate on the RRC were also discussed.Anaerobic digestion (AD) or methanization is a biological process that allows the treatment of organic wastes and the production of renewable energy as biogas. This research describes assessment and optimization of dates pedicels rich in organic components under the conditions of mesophiles in co-digestion in association with the cattle manure and sludge of the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). To realize this objectives, we investigated the impact of substrate load (date pedicel) on the co-digestion anaerobic of date pedicels and the sludge in wastewater treatment plants. The different parameters of the digester stability such as the pH, VFA, CAT, ammoniacal nitrogen, and the volume of biogas produced were followed. The results show that by increasing the mass of the pedicels and therefore the percentage of the substrate in the reactor, from 0.5 to 1% (W/V), the volume of produced biogas increases by five times. However, an increase in the percentage of the substrate introduced into the digester from 1 to 2% resulted in a slight decrease in the volume of biogas produced. The use of fresh cattle manure as inoculum shown a significant improvement (40%) in the production of biogas, which can be attributed to the nature of the inoculum. Indeed, cattle manure fresh is more adapted for the fermentation of lignocellulosic materials unlike sludge of wastewater treatment plants which may contain toxic substances that limit their use in AD.When considering regenerative approaches, the efficient creation of a functional vasculature, that can support the metabolic needs of bioengineered tissues, is essential for their survival after implantation. However, it is widely recognized that the post-implantation microenvironment of the engineered tissues is often hypoxic due to insufficient vascularization, resulting in ischemia injury and necrosis. CX-5461 nmr This is one of the main limitations of current tissue engineering applications aiming at replacing significant tissue volumes. Here, we have explored the use of a new biomaterial, the cell-assembled extracellular matrix (CAM), as a biopaper to biofabricate a vascular system. CAM sheets are a unique, fully biological and fully human material that has already shown stable long-term implantation in humans. We demonstrated, for the first time, the use of this unprocessed human ECM as a microperforated biopaper. Using microvalve dispensing bioprinting, concentrated human endothelial cells (30 millions ml-1) were deposited in a controlled geometry in CAM sheets and cocultured with HSFs. Following multilayer assembly, thick ECM-based constructs fused and supported the survival and maturation of capillary-like structures for up to 26 d of culture. Following 3 weeks of subcutaneous implantation in a mice model, constructs showed limited degradative response and the pre-formed vasculature successfully connected with the host circulatory system to establish active perfusion.This mechanically resilient tissue equivalent has great potential for the creation of more complex implantable tissues, where rapid anastomosis is sine qua non for cell survival and efficient tissue integration.
Primary aldosteronism is one of the most common (affecting up to 10%) yet treatable causes of hypertension in our community, notable due to an associated elevated risk of atrial fibrillation, stroke and myocardial infarction compared to essential hypertension. Guidelines have focussed on improving case detection due to significant underdiagnosis in the community. While our case experienced significant delay in diagnosis, we highlight a state of protracted, persistent post-operative hypoaldosteronism which manifested with severe hyponatraemia and hyperkalaemia, necessitating long-term mineralocorticoid replacement. We discuss whether pre-operative mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists to stimulate aldosterone secretion from the contralateral gland may have prevented this complication.

Hypoaldosteronism is an uncommon complication of adrenalectomy for primary aldosteronism, typically manifesting with hyperkalaemia and hyponatraemia. While most cases are transient, it may be persistent, necessitating ongoing mineralocorticoid replacement. Routine electrolyte monitoring is recommended post-adrenalectomy. Risk factors for hypoaldosteronism include age >50 years, duration of hypertension >10 years, pre-existing renal impairment and adrenal adenoma size >2 cm. Mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists may assist in the management of hypokalaemia and hypertension pre-operatively. However, it is unclear whether this reduces the risk of post-operative hypoaldosteronism.
2 cm. Mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists may assist in the management of hypokalaemia and hypertension pre-operatively. However, it is unclear whether this reduces the risk of post-operative hypoaldosteronism.This article studies neural-network (NN) adaptive control for strict-feedback nonlinear systems with matched uncertainties and event-triggered communication. Radial basis function NNs (RBFNNs) are used in the backstepping design approach to compensate for nonlinear uncertain functions. The concept of valid compact sets for RBFNN adaptive controllers is proposed, where a local RBFNN approximator is defined and the closed-loop state can remain. To guarantee the existence of such valid compact sets, a new property on RBFNNs is presented, which shows that, in some properly designed RBFNNs, the norm of their ideal weight vectors can always become arbitrarily small. By utilizing this property, the selections on valid compact sets are investigated, resulting in rigorous proof on RBFNN adaptive controllers to solve a local tracking problem with a given smooth enough reference signal. Subsequently, to save limited communication resources, a Zeno-free event-triggering mechanism in controller-to-actuator channels is proposed. Under this event-triggered adaptive controller, the corresponding tradeoff among the tracking performance, computational burden, and communication consumption is analyzed. Furthermore, two extensions are made to the general local function approximator, which is in the form of a weight vector multiplying a group of basis functions, and to the communication in sensor-to-controller channels. Finally, several simulation results are provided to illustrate the efficiency and feasibility of the obtained results.Audio and vision are two main modalities in video data. Multimodal learning, especially for audiovisual learning, has drawn considerable attention recently, which can boost the performance of various computer vision tasks. However, in video summarization, most existing approaches just exploit the visual information while neglecting the audio information. In this brief, we argue that the audio modality can assist vision modality to better understand the video content and structure and further benefit the summarization process. Motivated by this, we propose to jointly exploit the audio and visual information for the video summarization task and develop an audiovisual recurrent network (AVRN) to achieve this. Specifically, the proposed AVRN can be separated into three parts 1) the two-stream long-short term memory (LSTM) is used to encode the audio and visual feature sequentially by capturing their temporal dependency; 2) the audiovisual fusion LSTM is used to fuse the two modalities by exploring the latent consistency between them; and 3) the self-attention video encoder is adopted to capture the global dependency in the video. Finally, the fused audiovisual information and the integrated temporal and global dependencies are jointly used to predict the video summary. Practically, the experimental results on the two benchmarks, i.e., SumMe and TVsum, have demonstrated the effectiveness of each part and the superiority of AVRN compared with those approaches just exploiting visual information for video summarization.
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