Abstract The regulation of anions and cations at the atomic scale is great significance in membrane-based separation technologies. Ionic transport techniques could also play a crucial role developing high-performance alkali metal batteries such as metal-sulfur metal-selenium batteries, which suffer from non-uniform ions (e.g., Li + or Na ) detrimental shuttling effect polysulfide/polyselenide a...

In this work, post-consumer polypropylene and wood flour from Pinus elliottii were used to produce wood plastic composites. The effect of polypropylene grafted with itaconic acid used as a coupling agent on mechanical properties, thermal stability and morphology of the composites was investigated and compared with the composite developed with polypropylene grafted with maleic anhydride, commonl...

The performance of the electric submersible pump (ESP) significantly affected by Gas Void Fraction (GVF). Thus, using of a Rotary Gas Separator (RGS) is a suitable solution for this issue. The performance of the RGS is function of different parameters such as geometry of impeller, rotating speed, boundary conditions, media viscosity and GVF. In this study, the influences of GVF, viscosity, ...

Polypropylene is extensively used for varied applications due to its low cost, low density, high thermal stability and resistance to corrosion. Enhanced mechanical properties of Polypropylene can be achieved by mixing it with clays to form nanocomposites which increases its utility. Polypropylene Nano composites are formed by mixing polypropylene with calcium carbonate nano particles. This resu...

We report the thermal degradation of a solid film of polypropylene carbonate, driven by the photothermal effect of gold nanoparticles. We provide characterization of the products of this chemical reaction and use the known activation barrier for this chemical reaction to discuss the temperatures obtained in the film. In addition, we report the efficiency of the reaction as a function of nanopar...

For a given graph G, the Separator Problem asks whether a vertex or edge set of small cardinality (or weight) exists whose removal partitions G into two disjoint graphs of approximately equal sizes. Called the Vertex Separator Problem when the removed set is a vertex set, and the Edge Separator Problem when it is an edge set, both problems are NP-complete for general unweighted graphs [6]. Desp...

Example 1: The tree in Figure 1(a) has 26 vertices in which v1 is a centroid. The vertex v1 is a minimal 1/2-separator. As shown in (b), each branch contains no more than 13 vertices. But v1, or even the edge (v1, v2), is not a 1/3-separator because there exists a subtree whose number of vertices is nine, which is greater than 26/3. The path between v2 and v3 is a minimal 1/3-separator (Frame (...

Crystallization behavior of melt-blended polypropylene (PP)/single wall carbon nanotube (SWNT) composites has been studied using optical microscopy and differential scanning calorimetry. Polypropylene containing 0.8 wt% SWNT exhibits faster crystallization rate as compared to pure polypropylene. PP/SWNT fibers have been spun using typical polypropylene melt spinning conditions. The PP crystalli...

A bilayered cellulose-based separator design is presented that can enhance the electrochemical performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) via the inclusion of a porous redox-active layer. The proposed flexible redox-active separator consists of a mesoporous, insulating nanocellulose fiber layer that provides the necessary insulation between the electrodes and a porous, conductive, and redox-ac...

Four NP-hard optimization problems on graphs are studied: The vertex separator problem, the edge separator problem, the maximum clique problem, and the maximum independent set problem. We show that the vertex separator problem is equivalent to a continuous bilinear quadratic program. This continuous formulation is compared to known continuous quadratic programming formulations for the edge sepa...