This open access book provides integrated treatment technology of rural domestic sewage, and highlights ten typical cases in China. The integrated sewage treatment system (ISTE) combine sewage ...pretreatment, biological treatment, sedimentation, and disinfection, which particularly suitable for decentralized domestic wastewater treatment in rural areas without pipe networks. The main advantages of ISTE include the compact structure, small footprint, short construction period, high treatment efficiency, and economical rationality. First applied in Japan, ISTE has recently achieved rapid growth in China in the last decade. The relevant technological R&D, practice, and promotion experience accumulated by Chinese enterprises can offer significant reference to other developing countries and regions. The book consists of five chapters. The first chapter introduces characteristics, environmental risks and management styles of rural domestic sewage. The second chapter illustrates the collection and treatment approaches for rural domestic sewage.The third chapter presents the integrated sewage treatment process of high efficiency. The fourth chapter involves the design concept, manufacturing requirements, automatic control, and the cloud management system for ISTE. Chapter five covers ten typical application cases of ISTE in multiple regions of China. This book is suitable for graduate students, engineers, university teachers and government administrators engaged in decentralized sewage treatment.
Technology innovation has accelerated progress in Information and Communications Technology (ICT), especially in the mobile phones sector. Concurrently, local, national, and international governments ...are enforcing stricter regulations to protect natural resources and human health. The paper attempts to address the question: Have technological innovations and regulation development had a positive impact on ecosystems and public health? We identified 36 waste mobile phones (WMPs) manufactured between 2002 and 2013, assessed their metals concentration, leachability, and potential impact on environment and human health using digestion, Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP), and USEtox model, respectively. The results highlight that regulations did not have significant impact on total metal content, except some heavy metals, while technology innovation recorded stronger impact. WMPs should be classified as hazardous due to excessive lead content. Copper posed the most significant ecotoxicity risk, and chromium showed the most significant risk for both cancerous and non-cancerous diseases. Additionally, we demonstrated that WMPs toxicity increased with technology innovation.
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) suffer from notorious light trapping, resulting in only moderate external quantum efficiencies. Here, we report a facile, scalable, lithography-free method to ...generate controllable nanostructures with directional randomness and dimensional order, significantly boosting the efficiency of white OLEDs. Mechanical deformations form on the surface of poly(dimethylsiloxane) in response to compressive stress release, initialized by reactive ions etching with periodicity and depth distribution ranging from dozens of nanometers to micrometers. We demonstrate the possibility of independently tuning the average depth and the dominant periodicity. Integrating these nanostructures into a two-unit tandem white organic light-emitting diode, a maximum external quantum efficiency of 76.3% and a luminous efficacy of 95.7 lm W
are achieved with extracted substrate modes. The enhancement factor of 1.53 ± 0.12 at 10,000 cd m
is obtained. An optical model is built by considering the dipole orientation, emitting wavelength, and the dipole position on the sinusoidal nanotexture.
To enhance removal efficiency of natural sorbent with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), single-solute and bi-solute sorption of phenanthrene and pyrene onto raw and modified pine bark were ...investigated. Pine bark was modified using Soxhlet extraction, saponification and acid hydrolysis, yielding six bark fractions with different chemical compositions. Raw pine bark exhibited high affinities with PAHs, and sorption was dominated by partitioning. The relatively nonlinear sorption isotherms of modified bark were attributed to the specific interaction between sorbate and aromatic core of sorbent. Comparison with lipid and suberin, lignin was the most powerful sorption medium, but which was almost completely suppressed by coexisting polysaccharide. After consuming polysaccharide by acid hydrolysis, sorption of pine bark fractions was notably increased (4–17 folds); and sorption of pyrene just decreased 16–34% with phenanthrene as a competitor. These observations suggest that pine bark is of great potential for PAHs removal and can be significantly promoted by acid hydrolysis for environmental application.
In the process of rehabilitation training for stroke patients, the rehabilitation effect is positively affected by how much physical activity the patients take part in. Most of the signals used to ...measure the patients' participation are EMG signals or oxygen consumption, which increase the cost and the complexity of the robotic device. In this work, we design a multi-sensor system robot with torque and six-dimensional force sensors to gauge the patients' participation in training. By establishing the static equation of the mechanical leg, the man-machine interaction force of the patient can be accurately extracted. Using the impedance model, the auxiliary force training mode is established, and the difficulty of the target task is changed by adjusting the K value of auxiliary force. Participation models with three intensities were developed offline using support vector machines, for which the C and σ parameters are optimized by the hybrid quantum particle swarm optimization and support vector machines (Hybrid QPSO-SVM) algorithm. An experimental statistical analysis was conducted on ten volunteers' motion representation in different training tasks, which are divided into three stages: over-challenge, challenge, less challenge, by choosing characteristic quantities with significant differences among the various difficulty task stages, as a training set for the support vector machines (SVM). Experimental results from 12 volunteers, with tasks conducted on the lower limb rehabilitation robot LLR-II show that the rehabilitation robot can accurately predict patient participation and training task difficulty. The prediction accuracy reflects the superiority of the Hybrid QPSO-SVM algorithm.
Enhancing the device electroluminescence quantum efficiency (EQE
) is a critical factor in mitigating non-radiative voltage losses (V
) and further improving the performance of organic solar cells ...(OSCs). While the common understanding attributes EQE
in OSCs to the dynamics of charge transfer (CT) states, persistent efforts to manipulate these decay dynamics have yielded limited results, with the EQE
of high-efficiency OSCs typically remaining below 10
%. This value is considerably lower than that observed in high efficiency inorganic photovoltaic devices. Here, we report that EQE
is also influenced by the dissociation rate constant of singlet states (k
). Importantly, in contrast to the traditional belief that advocates maximizing k
for superior photovoltaic quantum efficiency (EQE
), a controlled reduction in k
is shown to enhance EQE
without compromising EQE
. Consequently, a promising experimental approach to address the V
challenge is proposed, resulting in a significant improvement in the performance of OSCs.
The surface of plants is covered by a continuous but heterogeneous cuticular membrane (CM). Serving as the first protective barrier, the uptake and transport behavior of organic pollutants at this ...interface continue to engage the research efforts of environmental chemist. To date, the contributions of cuticular components as a defense against the organic pollutants penetration remain unresolved. In this study, the unsteady-state penetration characteristics of phenanthrene (PHE) through isolated fruit CM was investigated. PHE penetration was differentiated by three cuticular compartments: epicuticular waxes (EW), cuticle proper (CP) and cuticular layer (CL). The driving force for PHE penetration was ascribed to the sharp concentration gradient built up endogenously by cuticular compartments with different lipophilic affinities. A modified penetration model was established and verified in terms of its general suitability for the hydrophobic chemicals and CMs of various plant species (apple, tomato and potato). The new three-compartment model demonstrates much higher accuracy in characterizing the uptake and transport behavior of semivolatile chemicals with fewer limitations in terms of environmental conditions and complexity (e.g., coexisting contaminants and temperature). This model could contribute to a more comprehensive understanding on the role of polymeric lipids in the organic pollutant sorption and transport into plants.
Many wide-gap organic semiconductors exhibit imbalanced electron and hole transport, therefore efficient organic light-emitting diodes require a multilayer architecture of electron- and ...hole-transport materials to confine charge recombination to the emissive layer. Here, we show that even for emitters with imbalanced charge transport, it is possible to obtain highly efficient single-layer organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), without the need for additional charge-transport and blocking layers. For hole-dominated emitters, an inverted single-layer device architecture with ohmic bottom-electron and top-hole contacts moves the emission zone away from the metal top electrode, thereby more than doubling the optical outcoupling efficiency. Finally, a blue-emitting inverted single-layer OLED based on thermally activated delayed fluorescence is achieved, exhibiting a high external quantum efficiency of 19% with little roll-off at high brightness, demonstrating that balanced charge transport is not a prerequisite for highly efficient single-layer OLEDs.
Bimolecular charge recombination is one of the most important loss processes in organic solar cells. However, the bimolecular recombination rate in solar cells based on novel non-fullerene acceptors ...is mostly unclear. Moreover, the origin of the reduced-Langevin recombination rate in bulk heterojunction solar cells in general is still poorly understood. Here, we investigate the bimolecular recombination rate and charge transport in a series of high-performance organic solar cells based on non-fullerene acceptors. From steady-state dark injection measurements and drift-diffusion simulations of the current-voltage characteristics under illumination, Langevin reduction factors of up to over two orders of magnitude are observed. The reduced recombination is essential for the high fill factors of these solar cells. The Langevin reduction factors are observed to correlate with the quadrupole moment of the acceptors, which is responsible for band bending at the donor-acceptor interface, forming a barrier for charge recombination. Overall these results therefore show that suppressed bimolecular recombination is essential for the performance of organic solar cells and provide design rules for novel materials.
To better understand interaction mechanisms of pine needles with persistent organic pollutants, single-solute and bi-solute sorption of phenanthrene and pyrene onto isolated cuticular fractions of ...pine needle were investigated. The structures of cuticular fractions were characterized by elemental analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and solid-state
13C NMR. Polymeric lipids (cutin and cutan) exhibited notably higher sorption capabilities than the soluble lipids (waxes), while cellulose showed little affinity with sorbates. With the coexistence of the amorphous cellulose, the sorption of cutan (aromatic core) was completely inhibited, so the cutin components (nonpolar aliphatic moieties) dominated the sorption of bulk needle cuticle. By the consumption of the amorphous cellulose under acid hydrolysis, sorption capacities of the de-sugared fractions were dramatically enhanced, which controlled by the exposed aromatic cores and the aliphatic moieties. Furthermore, the de-sugared fractions demonstrated nonlinear and competitive sorption due to the specific interaction between aromatic cores and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon.
Cellulose components play a regulating role in the relative contribution of aromatic cores and aliphatic moieties to sorption of pine needle cuticular fractions.
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