No abstract

Hydrophilic modification of polyvinylidene fluoride (HP-PVDF) membrane has gained more and more attention in recent years for oil/water separation. Nevertheless, there are still challenges in simple fabrication of inexpensive, eco-friendly...

After ultrasonic irradiation of sugar-cane bagasse (SCB) in distilled water at 55 • C for 40 min and continuing stirring for 80 min, the irradiated SCB was sequentially treated with 0.5 M NaOH, 0.5 %, 1.0 %, 1.5 %, 2.0 % and 3.0 % H 2 O 2 at pH 11.5, and 2 M NaOH at 55 • C for 2 h, which solubilized 3.3, 59.7, 15.5, 4.4, 5.5, 1.7, 0.6 and 0.6 % of the original lignin, and 13.4, 38.2, 11.9, 4.5, 9.0, 2.4, 1.2, and 11.3 % of the original hemicelluloses, respectively. In total, the sequential extractions resulted in a release of 91.2 % of the original lignin and 91.9 % of the original hemicelluloses, which were higher than in the case of corresponding extractions without ultrasound pre-treatment. The eight lignin fractions were comparatively characterized by chemical composition, structural features, molecular weights, and thermal stability using alkaline nitrobenzene oxidation, acid hydrolysis, UV, FT-IR, 1 H and 13 C NMR spectroscopy, GPC, and thermal analysis. Compared to the lignins obtained without ultrasound, the lignin fractions prepared with the assistance of ultrasound had the same primary structure, composition, and similar or slightly higher purity.

The high fall rate of the elderly brings enormous challenges to families and the medical system; therefore, early risk assessment and intervention are quite necessary. Compared to other sensor-based technologies, in-shoe plantar pressure sensors, effectiveness and low obtrusiveness are widely used for long-term fall risk assessments because of their portability. While frequently-used bipedal center-of-pressure (COP) features are derived from a pressure sensing platform, they are not suitable for the shoe system or pressure insole owing to the lack of relative position information. Therefore, in this study, a definition of "weak foot" was proposed to solve the sensitivity problem of single foot features and facilitate the extraction of temporal consistency related features. Forty-four multidimensional weak foot features based on single foot COP were correspondingly extracted; notably, the relationship between the fall risk and temporal inconsistency in the weak foot were discussed in this study, and probability distribution method was used to analyze the symmetry and temporal consistency of gait lines. Though experiments, foot pressure data were collected from 48 subjects with 24 high risk (HR) and 24 low risk (LR) ones obtained by the smart footwear system. The final models with 87.5% accuracy and 100% sensitivity on test data outperformed the base line models using bipedal COP. The results and feature space shown the novel features of wearable plantar pressure could comprehensively evaluate the difference between HR and LR groups. Our fall risk assessment models Manuscript

The paper reports a green synthetic route for nanosized hematite colloids with an excellent monodispersity, using green vitriol and ammonia as raw materials. The reaction conditions of the synthetic route were studied and the as-prepared samples were characterized by XRD, TEM, TG-DTA, DLS, and XPS. The results indicated that the key factors for the monodispersity of the colloidal product were preheating reactants and washing repeatedly the intermediate Fe(OH)3. When the initial pH was set as 4 or 5, the transformation product of Fe(OH)3was the pureα-Fe2O3with the minim adsorptive sulfate ions. Contrarily, the mixtures ofα-Fe2O3andα-FeOOH were obtained at the pH 6 or 7, which were related to the mechanism of transformation reaction. In addition, the concentration of Fe(OH)3should be less than or equal to 0.2 mol/L in order to prepare the qualified nanosized hematite colloids. The researches proved that the excellent monodispersity of the colloidal product resulted from a fine dispersion state of the synthetic system during the whole process and that it was a significant way to obtain the nanosized metallic oxide colloids from the corresponding metal hydroxide due to avoidance of hyperspeed centrifugal separation or dialysis operation.