Laser-induced aerosols,predominantly submicron in size,pose significant environmental and health risks during the decommissioning of nuclear reactors.This study experimentally investigated the removal of laser-generat...Laser-induced aerosols,predominantly submicron in size,pose significant environmental and health risks during the decommissioning of nuclear reactors.This study experimentally investigated the removal of laser-generated aerosol particles using a water spray system integrated with an innovative system for pre-injecting electrically charged mist in our facility.To simulate aerosol generation in reactor decommissioning,a high-power laser was used to irradiate various materials(including stainless steel,carbon steel,and concrete),generating aerosol particles that were agglomerated with injected water mist and subsequently scavenged by water spray.Experimental results demonstrate enhanced aerosol removal via aerosol-mist agglomeration,with charged mist significantly improving particle capture by increasing wettability and size.The average improvements for the stainless steel,carbon steel,and concrete were 40%,44%,and 21%,respectively.The results of experiments using charged mist with different polarities(both positive and negative)and different surface coatings reveal that the dominant polarity of aerosols varies with the irradiated materials,influenced by their crystal structure and electron emission properties.Notably,surface coatings such as ZrO_(2)and CeO_(2)were found to possibly alter aerosol charging characteristics,thereby affecting aerosol removal efficiency with charged mist configurations.The innovative aerosol-mist agglomeration approach shows promise in mitigating radiation exposure,ensuring environmental safety,and reducing contaminated water during reactor dismantling.This study contributes critical knowledge for the development of advanced aerosol management strategies for nuclear reactor decommissioning.The understanding obtained in this work is also expected to be useful for various environmental and chemical engineering applications such as gas decontamination,air purification,and pollution control.展开更多
Rice straw,which is produced after the harvest of rice,is a major agricultural waste in the world.Rice straw has a high carbon/nitrogen ratio and is more resistant to microbial degradation than other straws because it...Rice straw,which is produced after the harvest of rice,is a major agricultural waste in the world.Rice straw has a high carbon/nitrogen ratio and is more resistant to microbial degradation than other straws because its main constituents are cellulose and hemicelluloses encrusted by lignin.When rice straw is burned,hazardous substances such as carbon dioxide,methane,carbon monoxide,and nitrogen monoxide are released into the air as smoke(less than 10μm-sized particles).The rise in the burning of rice straw has contributed to too many accidents and health issues in the general population residing in Haryana,Punjab,and Uttar Pradesh of India.These states are being urged by the National Green Tribunal to generate money instead of burning rice straw.Even though these lignocellulosic materials might be beneficial,not much has been carried out with them.This overview covers the properties of rice straw and husks,the numerous procedures used to create valuable products,and various applications that may be made for them.These include energy sources,environmental adsorbents,building supplies,and specialist commodities.展开更多
To keep the concept of a safe food supply to the consumers, animal feed industries world over are showing an increasing interest in the direct-fed microbials（DFM） for improved animal performance in terms of growth o...To keep the concept of a safe food supply to the consumers, animal feed industries world over are showing an increasing interest in the direct-fed microbials（DFM） for improved animal performance in terms of growth or productivity. This becomes all the more essential in a situation, where a number of the residues of antibiotics and/or other growth stimulants reach in milk and meat with a number of associated potential risks for the consumers. Hence, in the absence of growth stimulants, a positive manipulation of the rumen microbial ecosystem to enhance the feedstuff utilization for improved production efficiency by ruminants has become of much interest to the researchers and entrepreneurs. A few genera of live microbes（i.e., bacteria, fungi and yeasts in different types of formulations from paste to powder） are infrequently used as DFM for the domestic ruminants. These DFM products are live microbial feed supplements containing naturally occurring microbes in the rumen. Among different DFM possibilities, anaerobic rumen fungi（ARF） based additives have been found to improve ruminant productivity consistently during feeding trials. Administration of ARF during the few trials conducted, led to the increased weight gain, milk production, and total tract digestibility of feed components in ruminants. Anaerobic fungi in the rumen display very strong cell-wall degrading cellulolytic and xylanolytic activities through rhizoid development, resulting in the physical disruption of feed structure paving the way for bacterial action. Significant improvements in the fiber digestibility were found to coincide with increases in ARF in the rumen indicating their role. Most of the researches based on DFM have indicated a positive response in nutrient digestion and methane reducing potential during in vivo and/or in vitro supplementation of ARF as DFM. Therefore, DFM especially ARF will gain popularity but it is necessary that all the strains are thoroughly studied for their beneficial properties to have a confirmed ‘generally regarded as safe＇ status for ruminants.展开更多
In this problem,simultaneous effects of Joule and viscous dissipation in three-dimensional flow of nanoliquid have been addressed in slip flow regime under time dependent rotational oscillations.Silver nanoparticles a...In this problem,simultaneous effects of Joule and viscous dissipation in three-dimensional flow of nanoliquid have been addressed in slip flow regime under time dependent rotational oscillations.Silver nanoparticles are submerged in the base fluid(water)due to their chemical and biological features.To increment the novelty,effects of cubic autocatalysis chemical reactions and radiative heat transfer have been incorporated in the related boundary layer equations.Dimensionless partial differential system is solved by employing the proposed implicit finite difference approach.Convergence conditions and stability criteria are obtained to ensure the convergence and accuracy of solutions.A comparative analysis is proposed for no-slip nanofluid flow(NSNF)and slip nanofluid flow(SNF).Variations in skin-friction coefficients,Sherwood and Nusselt numbers against physical parameters are tabulated.It is investigated that velocity slip and temperature jump significantly control drag forces and rate of heat transfer.展开更多
We have studied the single-neutron stripping reaction induced by ^23O on carbon target at beam energy of 72 MeV//A with a motive to analyze its ground state structure. The partial stripping cross sections as well as l...We have studied the single-neutron stripping reaction induced by ^23O on carbon target at beam energy of 72 MeV//A with a motive to analyze its ground state structure. The partial stripping cross sections as well as longitudinal momentum distribution of ^22O core have been calculated within the framework of the eikonal approximation approach. Several core-neutron spin coupling configurations, corresponding to J^π= 1/2 ＋ as ground state spin parity of ^23O, along with their suitable admixtures have been considered. The major outcome of the present work is that the s and d admixed configuration with a large contribution of s state seems to explain the longitudinal momentum distribution data more satisfactorily.展开更多
Agentic AI represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence,enabling proactive agents that can set goals,make decisions,and adapt to changing situations.However,the performance of these systems is heavi...Agentic AI represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence,enabling proactive agents that can set goals,make decisions,and adapt to changing situations.However,the performance of these systems is heavily dependent on the quality and relevance of the data they process.This research highlights the critical risk posed by faulty,insecure,or contextually inappropriate input data in modern Agentic AI systems.To address this challenge,this study proposes the Autonomous Data Integrity Layer(ADIL).This flexible architecture integrates best practices from security engineering and data science to ensure that Agentic AI systems operate with clean,validated,and contextually relevant data.By focusing on data integrity,ADIL enhances the reliability,accountability,and effectiveness of Agentic AI systems,leading to more trustworthy and robust intelligent agents.展开更多
In agricultural farms in Indiawhere the staple diet formost of the households is potato,plant leaf diseases,namely Potato Early Blight(PEB)and Potato Late Blight(PLB),are quite common.The class label Plant Healthy(PH)...In agricultural farms in Indiawhere the staple diet formost of the households is potato,plant leaf diseases,namely Potato Early Blight(PEB)and Potato Late Blight(PLB),are quite common.The class label Plant Healthy(PH)is also used.If these diseases are not identified early,they can causemassive crop loss and thereby incur huge economic losses to the farmers in the agricultural domain and can impact the gross domestic product of the nation.This paper presents a hybrid approach for potato plant disease severity estimation and classification of diseased and healthy leaves,combining the strengths of classical image processing,computer vision,and deep learning.We propose a pipeline that initially employs OpenCV’s cv2 led color-based image segmentation to isolate and highlight diseased brown,yellowcolored lesions or regions and healthy green colored lesion areas associated with various potato leaf diseases.Adaptive Thresholding for illumination and texture feature extraction and U-Net Segmentation for mask refinement for severity estimation.It has a mathematical framework for quantifying the severity based on the spatial area distribution of these regions.This allows for both visual representation of the segmented regions in the form of overlay masks and quantification of distinct disease severity.We detail the implementation of the approach,including color space selection,segmentation strategies,mask creation,area calculation,and a potential mathematical model for severity calculation.Overlay masks generated are then used as input to a CBAM-EfficientNetB0 model,leveraging transfer learning for improved classification accuracy and efficiency.For the Plant Village dataset,the test accuracy achieved is 0.99,whereas the test loss is 0.02,respectively.For the Plant Doc dataset,the test accuracy achieved is 0.97,whereas the test loss is 0.06,respectively.Also,the CBAM attention mechanism model lays emphasis on relevant features within the lesions and overall image context.The results achieved with the Plant Village dataset are slightly better in comparison to the Plant Doc dataset.展开更多
The Division of Research and Development at Lovely Professional University,Punjab organized the International Conference on Sustainable Energy Sources,Technologies and Systems 2023(ICSESTS-2023),which took place on 3-...The Division of Research and Development at Lovely Professional University,Punjab organized the International Conference on Sustainable Energy Sources,Technologies and Systems 2023(ICSESTS-2023),which took place on 3-5 August 2023.Selected papers from the ICSESTS-2023 conference are collected in a Special Issue of Clean Energy.展开更多
Emerging contaminants(ECs)represent a small fraction of the large chemical pollution puzzle where a wide variety of potentially hazardous chemicals reach the environment,and new compounds are continuously synthesized ...Emerging contaminants(ECs)represent a small fraction of the large chemical pollution puzzle where a wide variety of potentially hazardous chemicals reach the environment,and new compounds are continuously synthesized and released in wastewater treatment plants and ultimately in effluent and biosolids.ECs have been classified into various categories;however,this article focuses on the fate of major categories,namely pharmaceutical and personal care products(PPCPs),per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances(PFAS),flame retardants,surfactants,endocrine-disrupting chemicals(EDCs),and microplastics(MPs).These ECs when discharged to sewer and downstream wastewater treatment plants can undergo further transformations and either degrade,persist or convert into by-products which have the potential in some cases to be more hazardous.Because of potential dangerous impacts of the availability of these contaminants in the environment,information on the fate and behavior of these pollutants is highly important to develop new strategies,such as the regulation of chemicals imported into Australia and Australian consumer goods and environmental policies to mitigate them in a sustainable way.Moreover,advanced technologies are required for the detection and identification of novel contaminants emerging in the environment at ultra low levels.The application of chromatographic techniques coupled with mass spectroscopy has provided attractive breakthroughs to detect new emerging contaminants.However,it is crucially important to understand the sensitivity and robustness of these analytical techniques when dealing with complex matrices such as biosolids.In addition,most of the literature was focused on selected compounds or a family of compounds and the existing reviews have paid less attention to examine the formation of metabolites during the wastewater treatment process and their impacts on the ecosystem.This review presents an overview of the presence of different classes of ECs around the world,their quantification from different sources like wastewater(influents or effluents),sludge and biosolids.In addition,the transformation of ECs during the treatment process,the formation of intermediate products and their impacts on the environment are also critically discussed.Three major steps of ECs analysis include sample preparation,extraction and clean-up,and analysis;hence,different methods employed for extraction and clean-up,and analytical techniques for identification are thoroughly discussed,their advantages and limitations are also highlighted.This comprehensive review article is believed to enhance the understanding of ECs in sewage sludge and would be useful to the readers of the relevant communities and various stakeholders to investigate potential technologies to maximize destruction of ECs.展开更多
Energy is the backbone of any society for its sustainability.However,the sustainability of society is at risk due to continuously increasing energy demand,rampant use of limited fossil fuels and their adverse impact o...Energy is the backbone of any society for its sustainability.However,the sustainability of society is at risk due to continuously increasing energy demand,rampant use of limited fossil fuels and their adverse impact on the environment.展开更多
基金financial support from the Nuclear Energy Science&Technology and Human Resource Development Project of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency/Collaborative Laboratories for Advanced Decommissioning Science(No.R04I034)The author Ruicong Xu appreciates the scholarship(financial support)from the China Scholarship Council(CSC,No.202106380073).
文摘Laser-induced aerosols,predominantly submicron in size,pose significant environmental and health risks during the decommissioning of nuclear reactors.This study experimentally investigated the removal of laser-generated aerosol particles using a water spray system integrated with an innovative system for pre-injecting electrically charged mist in our facility.To simulate aerosol generation in reactor decommissioning,a high-power laser was used to irradiate various materials(including stainless steel,carbon steel,and concrete),generating aerosol particles that were agglomerated with injected water mist and subsequently scavenged by water spray.Experimental results demonstrate enhanced aerosol removal via aerosol-mist agglomeration,with charged mist significantly improving particle capture by increasing wettability and size.The average improvements for the stainless steel,carbon steel,and concrete were 40%,44%,and 21%,respectively.The results of experiments using charged mist with different polarities(both positive and negative)and different surface coatings reveal that the dominant polarity of aerosols varies with the irradiated materials,influenced by their crystal structure and electron emission properties.Notably,surface coatings such as ZrO_(2)and CeO_(2)were found to possibly alter aerosol charging characteristics,thereby affecting aerosol removal efficiency with charged mist configurations.The innovative aerosol-mist agglomeration approach shows promise in mitigating radiation exposure,ensuring environmental safety,and reducing contaminated water during reactor dismantling.This study contributes critical knowledge for the development of advanced aerosol management strategies for nuclear reactor decommissioning.The understanding obtained in this work is also expected to be useful for various environmental and chemical engineering applications such as gas decontamination,air purification,and pollution control.
文摘Rice straw,which is produced after the harvest of rice,is a major agricultural waste in the world.Rice straw has a high carbon/nitrogen ratio and is more resistant to microbial degradation than other straws because its main constituents are cellulose and hemicelluloses encrusted by lignin.When rice straw is burned,hazardous substances such as carbon dioxide,methane,carbon monoxide,and nitrogen monoxide are released into the air as smoke(less than 10μm-sized particles).The rise in the burning of rice straw has contributed to too many accidents and health issues in the general population residing in Haryana,Punjab,and Uttar Pradesh of India.These states are being urged by the National Green Tribunal to generate money instead of burning rice straw.Even though these lignocellulosic materials might be beneficial,not much has been carried out with them.This overview covers the properties of rice straw and husks,the numerous procedures used to create valuable products,and various applications that may be made for them.These include energy sources,environmental adsorbents,building supplies,and specialist commodities.
基金financial support provided under the Network Project of ICAR on ‘VTCC’ to carry the research further in this direction
文摘To keep the concept of a safe food supply to the consumers, animal feed industries world over are showing an increasing interest in the direct-fed microbials（DFM） for improved animal performance in terms of growth or productivity. This becomes all the more essential in a situation, where a number of the residues of antibiotics and/or other growth stimulants reach in milk and meat with a number of associated potential risks for the consumers. Hence, in the absence of growth stimulants, a positive manipulation of the rumen microbial ecosystem to enhance the feedstuff utilization for improved production efficiency by ruminants has become of much interest to the researchers and entrepreneurs. A few genera of live microbes（i.e., bacteria, fungi and yeasts in different types of formulations from paste to powder） are infrequently used as DFM for the domestic ruminants. These DFM products are live microbial feed supplements containing naturally occurring microbes in the rumen. Among different DFM possibilities, anaerobic rumen fungi（ARF） based additives have been found to improve ruminant productivity consistently during feeding trials. Administration of ARF during the few trials conducted, led to the increased weight gain, milk production, and total tract digestibility of feed components in ruminants. Anaerobic fungi in the rumen display very strong cell-wall degrading cellulolytic and xylanolytic activities through rhizoid development, resulting in the physical disruption of feed structure paving the way for bacterial action. Significant improvements in the fiber digestibility were found to coincide with increases in ARF in the rumen indicating their role. Most of the researches based on DFM have indicated a positive response in nutrient digestion and methane reducing potential during in vivo and/or in vitro supplementation of ARF as DFM. Therefore, DFM especially ARF will gain popularity but it is necessary that all the strains are thoroughly studied for their beneficial properties to have a confirmed ‘generally regarded as safe＇ status for ruminants.
文摘In this problem,simultaneous effects of Joule and viscous dissipation in three-dimensional flow of nanoliquid have been addressed in slip flow regime under time dependent rotational oscillations.Silver nanoparticles are submerged in the base fluid(water)due to their chemical and biological features.To increment the novelty,effects of cubic autocatalysis chemical reactions and radiative heat transfer have been incorporated in the related boundary layer equations.Dimensionless partial differential system is solved by employing the proposed implicit finite difference approach.Convergence conditions and stability criteria are obtained to ensure the convergence and accuracy of solutions.A comparative analysis is proposed for no-slip nanofluid flow(NSNF)and slip nanofluid flow(SNF).Variations in skin-friction coefficients,Sherwood and Nusselt numbers against physical parameters are tabulated.It is investigated that velocity slip and temperature jump significantly control drag forces and rate of heat transfer.
文摘We have studied the single-neutron stripping reaction induced by ^23O on carbon target at beam energy of 72 MeV//A with a motive to analyze its ground state structure. The partial stripping cross sections as well as longitudinal momentum distribution of ^22O core have been calculated within the framework of the eikonal approximation approach. Several core-neutron spin coupling configurations, corresponding to J^π= 1/2 ＋ as ground state spin parity of ^23O, along with their suitable admixtures have been considered. The major outcome of the present work is that the s and d admixed configuration with a large contribution of s state seems to explain the longitudinal momentum distribution data more satisfactorily.
文摘Agentic AI represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence,enabling proactive agents that can set goals,make decisions,and adapt to changing situations.However,the performance of these systems is heavily dependent on the quality and relevance of the data they process.This research highlights the critical risk posed by faulty,insecure,or contextually inappropriate input data in modern Agentic AI systems.To address this challenge,this study proposes the Autonomous Data Integrity Layer(ADIL).This flexible architecture integrates best practices from security engineering and data science to ensure that Agentic AI systems operate with clean,validated,and contextually relevant data.By focusing on data integrity,ADIL enhances the reliability,accountability,and effectiveness of Agentic AI systems,leading to more trustworthy and robust intelligent agents.
基金done under Department of Biotechnology(DBT)project titled“Application of Machine Learning for Hyperspectral Imaging and Remote Sensing aimed at Early Detection of Fungal Foliar Diseases and Bacterial Wilt Diseases in Potato Crop”,DBT/Reference.No.BT/PR45388/133/58/2022.
文摘In agricultural farms in Indiawhere the staple diet formost of the households is potato,plant leaf diseases,namely Potato Early Blight(PEB)and Potato Late Blight(PLB),are quite common.The class label Plant Healthy(PH)is also used.If these diseases are not identified early,they can causemassive crop loss and thereby incur huge economic losses to the farmers in the agricultural domain and can impact the gross domestic product of the nation.This paper presents a hybrid approach for potato plant disease severity estimation and classification of diseased and healthy leaves,combining the strengths of classical image processing,computer vision,and deep learning.We propose a pipeline that initially employs OpenCV’s cv2 led color-based image segmentation to isolate and highlight diseased brown,yellowcolored lesions or regions and healthy green colored lesion areas associated with various potato leaf diseases.Adaptive Thresholding for illumination and texture feature extraction and U-Net Segmentation for mask refinement for severity estimation.It has a mathematical framework for quantifying the severity based on the spatial area distribution of these regions.This allows for both visual representation of the segmented regions in the form of overlay masks and quantification of distinct disease severity.We detail the implementation of the approach,including color space selection,segmentation strategies,mask creation,area calculation,and a potential mathematical model for severity calculation.Overlay masks generated are then used as input to a CBAM-EfficientNetB0 model,leveraging transfer learning for improved classification accuracy and efficiency.For the Plant Village dataset,the test accuracy achieved is 0.99,whereas the test loss is 0.02,respectively.For the Plant Doc dataset,the test accuracy achieved is 0.97,whereas the test loss is 0.06,respectively.Also,the CBAM attention mechanism model lays emphasis on relevant features within the lesions and overall image context.The results achieved with the Plant Village dataset are slightly better in comparison to the Plant Doc dataset.
文摘The Division of Research and Development at Lovely Professional University,Punjab organized the International Conference on Sustainable Energy Sources,Technologies and Systems 2023(ICSESTS-2023),which took place on 3-5 August 2023.Selected papers from the ICSESTS-2023 conference are collected in a Special Issue of Clean Energy.
文摘Emerging contaminants(ECs)represent a small fraction of the large chemical pollution puzzle where a wide variety of potentially hazardous chemicals reach the environment,and new compounds are continuously synthesized and released in wastewater treatment plants and ultimately in effluent and biosolids.ECs have been classified into various categories;however,this article focuses on the fate of major categories,namely pharmaceutical and personal care products(PPCPs),per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances(PFAS),flame retardants,surfactants,endocrine-disrupting chemicals(EDCs),and microplastics(MPs).These ECs when discharged to sewer and downstream wastewater treatment plants can undergo further transformations and either degrade,persist or convert into by-products which have the potential in some cases to be more hazardous.Because of potential dangerous impacts of the availability of these contaminants in the environment,information on the fate and behavior of these pollutants is highly important to develop new strategies,such as the regulation of chemicals imported into Australia and Australian consumer goods and environmental policies to mitigate them in a sustainable way.Moreover,advanced technologies are required for the detection and identification of novel contaminants emerging in the environment at ultra low levels.The application of chromatographic techniques coupled with mass spectroscopy has provided attractive breakthroughs to detect new emerging contaminants.However,it is crucially important to understand the sensitivity and robustness of these analytical techniques when dealing with complex matrices such as biosolids.In addition,most of the literature was focused on selected compounds or a family of compounds and the existing reviews have paid less attention to examine the formation of metabolites during the wastewater treatment process and their impacts on the ecosystem.This review presents an overview of the presence of different classes of ECs around the world,their quantification from different sources like wastewater(influents or effluents),sludge and biosolids.In addition,the transformation of ECs during the treatment process,the formation of intermediate products and their impacts on the environment are also critically discussed.Three major steps of ECs analysis include sample preparation,extraction and clean-up,and analysis;hence,different methods employed for extraction and clean-up,and analytical techniques for identification are thoroughly discussed,their advantages and limitations are also highlighted.This comprehensive review article is believed to enhance the understanding of ECs in sewage sludge and would be useful to the readers of the relevant communities and various stakeholders to investigate potential technologies to maximize destruction of ECs.
文摘Energy is the backbone of any society for its sustainability.However,the sustainability of society is at risk due to continuously increasing energy demand,rampant use of limited fossil fuels and their adverse impact on the environment.
