VOC

To decrease the secondary pollution of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during adsorbent regeneration by microwave, electrodeless lamp was added in the microwave field to oxidize VOCs in the gas phase. Ultraviolet has a significant improvement on mineralization of VOCs generated from adsorbate during adsorbent regeneration. However, the mechanism and main influence factors on the degradation of VOCs are not clear. The effect of microwave power, regeneration time, airflow rate, and humidity content on the mineralization of adsorbed tetracycline during adsorbent regeneration was studied...

BACKGROUND: Vaso-occlusive crisis (VOC) is one of the acute complications of sickle-cell disease (SCD). Treatment mainly relies on hydration and pain control by analgesics. The specific aim of this study was to assess potential health outcomes within the first 72 h of admission between intermittent and patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) by opioids among VOC patients. METHODS: A retrospective chart review study was conducted to determine SCD patients with VOC. Using the hospital electronic system, the following data were collected: patient's age, gender, blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and pain score on admission and daily for 3 days as well as the cumulative opioid analgesic dose for 72 h which is reported as morphine equivalent...

Starting with an experiment to authenticate walnut oils based on GC-MS analysis of the volatolome, this paper aims to demonstrate the relevance of a two-step alignment-based strategy for the systematic research of VOC markers. The first step of the treatment consists of roughly reducing the time shifts with efficient, known warping techniques like COW (Correlation Optimized Warping). The second step relies on an accurate peak apex alignment in order to refine residual local misalignments and to enable further systematic marker research through univariate or multivariate data treatments...

A novel and efficient headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) method, followed by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS), was developed to study volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emerging from microorganisms. Two homemade SPME fibers, a semi-polar poly (dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) fiber, and a polar polyethylene glycol (PEG) fiber, along with two commercial fibers (PDMS and PDMS/DVB) were used to collect VOCs emerging from Clostridium tetani which was cultured in different media. The adsorbed VOCs were desorbed and identified, in vitro, using GC-MS...

Perovskite solar cells have been demonstrated as promising low-cost and highly-efficient next-generation solar cells. Enhancing VOC by minimization the interfacial recombination kinetics can further improve device performance. In this work, we for the first time reported on surface passivation of perovskite layers with chemical modified graphene oxides, which acts as efficient interlayer to reduce interfacial recombination and enhance hole extraction as well. Our modeling points out that the passivation effect mainly comes from the interaction between functional group (4-Fluorophenyl) and under-coordinated Pb ions...

Assessing dermal exposure of workers to noxious chemicals becomes increasingly important in industrial settings. Among various chemicals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are widely used in industrialized countries, but still there are no validated methodologies able to accurately quantify skin exposure. In this study, we developed a sensitive methodology based on activated charcoal cloth (ACC) to quantitatively assess skin exposure to 181 VOCs. The majority of the VOCs (156) showed a constant desorption efficiency (DE) of ~100% over the studied concentration range...

Floral volatile organic compounds (VOCs) play important roles in plant-pollinator interactions. We investigated the reproductive ecology and floral VOCs of Zygopetalinae orchids to understand the relationship between floral scents and pollinators. We performed focal observations, phenological censuses and breeding system experiments in eight species in southeast Brazil. Floral scents were collected and analysed using SPME/GC-MS. We performed multivariate analyses to group species according to affinities of their VOCs and define compounds associated to each plant...

Electron-selective layers (ESLs) and hole-selective layers (HSLs) are critical in high-efficiency organic-inorganic lead halide perovskite (PS) solar cells for charge-carrier transport, separation, and collection. We developed a procedure to assess the quality of the ESL/PS junction by measuring potential distribution on cross-section of SnO2-based perovskite solar cells using Kelvin probe force microscopy. Using the potential profiling, we compared three types of cells made of different ESLs but otherwise having identical device structure: 1) cells with PS deposited directly on bare fluorine-doped SnO2 (FTO)-coated glass; 2) cells with an intrinsic SnO2 thin layer on the top of FTO as an effective ESL; and 3) cells with the SnO2 ESL and adding a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of fullerene...

Open-circuit photovoltage (Voc) is among critical parameters for achieving an efficient light-to-charge conversion in existing solar photovoltaic devices. Natural photosynthesis exploits light-harvesting chlorophyll (Chl) protein complexes to transfer sunlight energy efficiently. We describe the exploitation of photosynthetic fucoxanthin-chlorophyll protein (FCP) complexes for realizing photoelectrochemical cells with a high Voc. An antenna-dependent photocurrent response and a Voc up to 0.72V are observed and demonstrated in the bio-photovoltaic devices fabricated with photosynthetic FCP complexes and TiO2 nanostructures...

Hypoxia-like incidents in-flight have increased over the past decade causing severe safety concerns across the aviation community. As a result, the need to monitor flight crews in real-time for the onset of hypoxic conditions is paramount for continued aeronautical safety. Here, hypoxic events were simulated in the laboratory via a reduced oxygen-breathing device to determine the effect of recovery gas oxygen concentration (21% and 100%) on exhaled breath volatile organic compound (VOC) composition. Data from samples collected both serially (throughout the exposure), prior to, and following exposures yielded 326 statistically significant features, 203 of which were unique...

Early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) is of great importance due its progressive phenotype. Neuroprotective drugs could potentially slow down disease progression if used at early stages. Previously, we have reported an altered content of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath of rats following a 50% reduction in striatal dopamine (DA) content induced by 6-hydroxydopamine. We now report on the difference in the breath-print and content of VOCs between rats with mild and severe lesions of DA neurons, serotonergic neuronal lesions, and transgenic (Tg) rats carrying the PD-producing A53T mutation of the SNCA (alpha-synuclein) gene...

The human toxicity impact (HTI) of electricity produced from shale gas is lower than the HTI of electricity produced from coal, with 90% confidence using a Monte Carlo Analysis. Two different impact assessment methods estimate the HTI of shale gas electricity to be one-to-two orders of magnitude less than the HTI of coal electricity (0.016-0.024 DALY/GWh versus 0.69-1.7 DALY/GWh). Further, an implausible shale gas scenario where all fracturing fluid and untreated produced water is discharged directly to surface water throughout the lifetime of a well also has a lower HTI than coal electricity...

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Dietary interventions are effective in management of patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), although responses vary. We investigated whether fecal levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) associate with response to dietary interventions in patients with IBS. METHODS: Adults who fulfilled the Rome III criteria for IBS were recruited to a 2x2 factorial randomized controlled trial. Patients were randomly assigned to a group counselled to follow a diet low in fructans, galacto-oligosaccharides, lactose, fructose, and polyols (low-FODMAP diet, n=46) or a group that received placebo dietary advice (sham diet, n=47) for 4 weeks...

The "Spiritu re fascitrari" (SRF) is a typical Sicilian distillate obtained from the by-products of traditional process of honey production. Although some alcoholic fermentation of honey based products have been described, the present research represents the first investigation on the yeast ecology and the physico-chemical characteristics of honey by-products subjected to an alcoholic fermentation followed by distillation. All samples collected during manufacturing process were analysed for the count of total, osmophilic and osmotolerant yeasts...

Humans and many other species sense visual information with varying spatial resolution across the visual field (foveated vision) and deploy eye movements to actively sample regions of interests in scenes. The advantage of such varying resolution architecture is a reduced computational, hence metabolic cost. But what are the performance costs of such processing strategy relative to a scheme that processes the visual field at high spatial resolution? Here we first focus on visual search and combine object detectors from computer vision with a recent model of peripheral pooling regions found at the V1 layer of the human visual system...

The energy disorder that arises from colloidal quantum dot (CQD) polydispersity limits the open-circuit voltage (VOC ) and efficiency of CQD photovoltaics. This energy broadening is significantly deteriorated today during CQD ligand exchange and film assembly. Here, a new solution-phase ligand exchange that, via judicious incorporation of reactivity-engineered additives, provides improved monodispersity in final CQD films is reported. It has been found that increasing the concentration of the less reactive species prevents CQD fusion and etching...

The need for low-cost and highly efficient dyes for dye-sensitized solar cells under both the sunlight and dim light environments is growing. We have devised GJ-series push-pull organic dyes which require only four synthetic steps. These dyes feature a linear molecular structure of donor-perylene-ethynylene-arylcarboxylic acid where donor represents N,N-diarylamino group and arylcarboxylic groups represents benzoic, thienocarboxylic, 2-cyano-3-phenylacrylic, 2-cyano-3-thienoacrylic and 4-benzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazol-4-yl-benzoic groups...

The concept of electrical energy generation based on asymmetric chemical doping (ACD) of single-walled carbon nano-tube (SWNT) papers is presented. We explore 27 small, organic, electron-acceptor molecules that are shown to tune the output open circuit voltage (VOC) across three types of pristine SWNT papers with varying (n, m) chirality distributions. A considerable enhancement in the observed VOC, from 80 to 440 mV, is observed for SWNT/molecule acceptor pairs that have molecular volume below 120 Å(3) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) energies centered around -0...

In order for an olfactory signal to be effective, it must persist in the environment for an extended period. White rhino dung odours transmit information about sex, age, territorial and oestrous states. As these odours relay important information, temporal changes in the odour emission rate and/or composition may be critical in order for other individuals to obtain this information. Here, we examine how the dung odours of adult white rhinos (male: territorial and non-territorial; female: oestrous and non-oestrous) change over the short (hours) and long (seasons) term using headspace extraction...

A p-a-SiC:H window layer was used in amorphous Si thin film solar cells to boost the conversion efficiency in an indoor lighting of 500 lx. The p-a-SiC:H window layer/p-a-Si:H buffer layer scheme moderates the abrupt band bending across the p/i interface for the enhancement of VOC, JSC and FF in the solar spectra of short wavelengths. The optimized thickness of i-a-Si:H absorber layer is 400 nm to achieve the conversion efficiency of ~9.58% in an AM1.5 G solar spectrum. However, the optimized thickness of the absorber layer can be changed from 400 to 600 nm in the indoor lighting of 500 lx, exhibiting the maximum output power of 25...