Nylon 66, which is an important membrane class used in manufacturing of chitin and chitosan, have a number of features that can be improved by surface functionalizations into a novel composite structure with support of ultrasound and silica gel (SiG) catalyst in a doubled amidation reaction. Firstly, nylon 66/para-phenylenediamine thin film composite (NP-TFC) is prepared from commercial nylon 66 membrane in an ultrasound assisted hydrolysis-amidation reaction. Secondly, carboxylic functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT-COOH) are grafted on the NP fiber in an ultrasound assisted/SiG-catalyzed amidation reaction, where para-phenylenediamine (pPD) role is cross-linking. As an excellent result confirmed by either Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), Raman spectrometry or scanning electron microscopic (SEM), bundled MWCNTs bridges are easily built in SiG-catalyzed ethanol media to connect nylon 66 fibers at distances of 0.3-1 lm. The vacuum filtration test confirmed that as-prepared nylon 66/pPD/MWCNTs structure has superior Ca 2þ rejection efficiency to that of original nylon 66.

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Taxi plays a crucial role in the transportation system because of the characteristic that can be hailed conveniently. Most of the taxi drivers obtain passengers by hunting on the road or waiting in a fixed taxi queuing point; however these methods have poor performance, high vacancy rate, and several critical problems such as air pollution and foul up traffic. This study proposed a taxi carrying management system by using location based services and zone queuing techniques on Internet of things. The proposed system allows drivers to both hunt on the road and wait in a queuing zone. A queuing table is used in the control center and neighbor tables are used in RSUs for zone queuing establishment. Joining and leaving mechanisms are developed for zone queuing management. To enhance service efficiency and quality, we present a scheme to prevent the ping-pong effect which is based on the location based services, a hunting rate calculation scheme, and a path planning service for taxi drivers according to the history carrying record. PRISM is used to simulate the proposed system, and the results indicated that our scheme outperforms the waiting and hunting models in terms of number of customers, vacancy rate, and profit.

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Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is the potential process in high porosity thin films’ fabrication or complex surface coating for perovskite photovoltaics. Here, the electrostatic simulation is introduced to optimize the EPD cell design for the cathodic EPD process based on functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes (f-MWCNTs). The similarity between the thin film structure and the electric field simulation is evaluated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) results. The thin-film surface at the edge has a higher roughness (Ra) compared to the center position (16.48 > 10.26 nm). The f-MWCNTs at the edge position tend to be twisted and bent due to the torque of the electric field. The Raman results show that f-MWCNTs with low defect density are more easily to be positively charged and deposited on the ITO surface. The distribution of oxygen and aluminum atoms in the thin film reveals that the aluminum atoms tend to have adsorption/electrostatic attraction to the interlayer defect positions of f-MWCNTs without individually depositing onto the cathode. Finally, this study can reduce the cost and time for the scale-up process by optimizing the input parameters for the complete cathodic electrophoretic deposition process through electric field inspection.

Taxis have a vital role in the transportation system and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) techniques can be used to improve the fuel and time efficiencies of taxis. However, the existing work does not address the traffic congestion that may occur when a large amount of taxis gathers in certain queuing areas. This paper proposes an adaptive and hotspot-aware taxi zone queuing system to deal with the problem while still guarantees the fuel and time efficiencies. The adaptive scheme features data collection, hotspot extraction, an adaptive zone queuing protocol, and navigation services for taxi drivers. Real data were collected from Taiwan Taxi Inc., the largest taxi company in Taiwan. Queuing zone hotspots were identified through the analysis of the collected data. The hotspots represented. A navigation service was based on the proposed protocol. To verify the feasibility of the proposed system, a prototype was implemented. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme outperformed other schemes in reducing waiting time and the average number of taxis.