An innovative pressure swing adsorption cycle

Over the last century, fresh water and cooling demand have been increased tremendously due to improved living standard, industrial and economic development. The conventional air-conditioning and refrigeration processes consume 15% of total global electricity and it is expected to increase any fold due to harsh weather conditions. In terms of fresh water supplies, the current 38 billion m3 per year desalination capacity is projected to increase to 54 billion m3 per year by 2030, 40% more compared to 2016. The current business as usual trend of cooling and desalination is not sustainable due to high energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In contrast, the adsorption (AD) cycle operate at low-grade waste heat or renewable energy and produce fresh water and cooling simultaneously. The major bottleneck of conventional thermally driven AD cycle is its large foot print and capital cost due to complex packed bed arrangements. We proposed pressure swing adsorption cycle (PSAD) that can utilize low-pressure steam (2-5 bar) for regeneration using thermal vapor compressor (TVC). The proposed system has best thermodynamic synergy with CCGT plants where low-pressure bleed steam can be utilized more efficiently to produce cooling and water. In this paper, a preliminary experimental investigation on PSAD has been presented. It is successfully demonstrated that 2 bar primary steam can regenerate silica gel at less then 0.5 kPa through TVC with compression ratio 3-4 and entrainment ratio around 1-1.5. The discharge steam can be re-utilized to operate the desalination cycle, maximizing the bleed steam exergy. The proposed system will not only reduce footprint but also CAPEX and OPEX due to simple design and operation

Electroactive Artificial Muscles Based on Functionally Antagonistic Core–Shell Polymer Electrolyte Derived from PS-b-PSS Block Copolymer

Electroactive ionic soft actuators, a type of artificial muscles containing a polymer electrolyte membrane sandwiched between two electrodes, have been intensively investigated owing to their potential applications to bioinspired soft robotics, wearable electronics, and active biomedical devices. However, the design and synthesis of an efficient polymer electrolyte suitable for ion migration have been major challenges in developing high-performance ionic soft actuators. Herein, a highly bendable ionic soft actuator based on an unprecedented block copolymer is reported, i.e., polystyrene-b-poly(1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium-4-styrenesulfonate) (PS-b-PSS-EMIm), with a functionally antagonistic core–shell architecture that is specifically designed as an ionic exchangeable polymer electrolyte. The corresponding actuator shows exceptionally good actuation performance, with a high displacement of 8.22 mm at an ultralow voltage of 0.5 V, a fast rise time of 5 s, and excellent durability over 14 000 cycles. It is envisaged that the development of this high-performance ionic soft actuator could contribute to the progress toward the realization of the aforementioned applications. Furthermore, the procedure described herein can also be applied for developing novel polymer electrolytes related to solid-state lithium batteries and fuel cells

Synthesis of pyrimidines, aromatic and heteroaromatic acids as Biginelli reaction catalysts

Aromatic as well as heteroaromatic acids were found to beexcellent catalysts for the Biginelli three component synthesisof dihydropyrimidinones. Benzoic acid, substituted benzoic acids, five- and six- membered heterocyclic acids can be used for this purpose

Emotions and Incivility in Vaccine Mandate Discourse: Natural Language Processing Insights.

BACKGROUND: Despite vaccine availability, vaccine hesitancy has inhibited public health officials efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Although some US elected officials have responded by issuing vaccine mandates, others have amplified vaccine hesitancy by broadcasting messages that minimize vaccine efficacy. The politically polarized nature of COVID-19 information on social media has given rise to incivility, wherein health attitudes often hinge more on political ideology than science. OBJECTIVE: To the best of our knowledge, incivility has not been studied in the context of discourse regarding COVID-19 vaccines and mandates. Specifically, there is little focus on the psychological processes that elicit uncivil vaccine discourse and behaviors. Thus, we investigated 3 psychological processes theorized to predict discourse incivility-namely, anxiety, anger, and sadness. METHODS: We used 2 different natural language processing approaches: (1) the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computational tool and (2) the Google Perspective application programming interface (API) to analyze a data set of 8014 tweets containing terms related to COVID-19 vaccine mandates from September 14, 2021, to October 1, 2021. To collect the tweets, we used the Twitter API Tweet Downloader Tool (version 2). Subsequently, we filtered through a data set of 375,000 vaccine-related tweets using keywords to extract tweets explicitly focused on vaccine mandates. We relied on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count computational tool to measure the valence of linguistic anger, sadness, and anxiety in the tweets. To measure dimensions of post incivility, we used the Google Perspective API. RESULTS: This study resolved discrepant operationalizations of incivility by introducing incivility as a multifaceted construct and explored the distinct emotional processes underlying 5 dimensions of discourse incivility. The findings revealed that 3 types of emotions-anxiety, anger, and sadness-were uniquely associated with dimensions of incivility (eg, toxicity, severe toxicity, insult, profanity, threat, and identity attacks). Specifically, the results showed that anger was significantly positively associated with all dimensions of incivility (all P<.001), whereas sadness was significantly positively related to threat (P=.04). Conversely, anxiety was significantly negatively associated with identity attack (P=.03) and profanity (P=.02). CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that our multidimensional approach to incivility is a promising alternative to understanding and intervening in the psychological processes underlying uncivil vaccine discourse. Understanding specific emotions that can increase or decrease incivility such as anxiety, anger, and sadness can enable researchers and public health professionals to develop effective interventions against uncivil vaccine discourse. Given the need for real-time monitoring and automated responses to the spread of health information and misinformation on the web, social media platforms can harness the Google Perspective API to offer users immediate, automated feedback when it detects that a comment is uncivil