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Enrichment and recovery of valuable components in industrial waste waters by traditional liquid-liquid solvent extraction is not economic due to extremely low concentrations of those targets. Large-phase-ratio extraction exhibits potential advantages for recovery of small quantities of target components from large volume of aqueous solutions. A novel bubbling extraction tower is proposed toward performing solvent extraction at large aqueous-to-oil phase ratios in this work. Organic extractants were covered onto surface of gas bubbles to form a layer of organic liquid membrane and the dispersed organic phase in tower could be small enough. The target components are extracted from aqueous feed solution onto the surface of the bubbles, and the enrichment ratios could be extremely high. We develop a feasible methodology to calculate tower height and operation phase ratios of the bubbling extraction tower, which is essential for future industrial scale-up. Experimental results in pilot test are highly consistent with calculations. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 3889-3897, 2015 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A UiO type MOF with Lewis basic bipyridyl sites was synthesized and structurally characterized. After being activated by Soxhlet-extraction, this MOF exhibits high storage capacities for H2, CH4 and CO2, and shows unusual stepwise adsorption for liquid CO2 and solvents, indicating a sequential filling mechanism on different adsorption sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optomechanical systems couple light to the motion of nanomechanical objects. Intriguing new effects are observed in recent experiments that involve the dynamics of more than one optical mode. There, mechanical motion can stimulate strongly driven multi-mode photon dynamics that acts back on the mechanics via radiation forces. We show that even for two optical modes Landau–Zener–Stueckelberg oscillations of the light field drastically change the nonlinear attractor diagram of the resulting phonon lasing oscillations. Our findings illustrate the generic effects of Landau–Zener physics on back-action induced self-oscillations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a scheme for realizing nonreciprocal microwave photon routing with two cascaded magnon-cavity coupled systems, which work around the exceptional points of a parity-time (PT)-symmetric Hamiltonian. An almost perfect nonreciprocal transmission can be achieved with a broad bandwidth, where the transmission for a forward-propagating photon can be flexibly controlled with the backpropagating photon being isolated. The transmission or isolated direction can be reversed via simply controlling the magnetic field direction applied to the magnons. The isolation bandwidth is improved by almost three times in comparison with the device based on a single PT-symmetric system. Moreover, the effect of intrinsic cavity loss and added thermal noises is considered, confirming the experimental feasibility of the nonreciprocal device and potential applications in quantum information processing.

In this paper, we propose an optomechanical scheme for generating mechanical squeezing over the 3 dB limit, with the mechanical mirror being driven by a strong and linear harmonic force. In contrast to parametric mechanical driving, the linearly driven force shakes the mechanical mirror periodically oscillating at twice the mechanical eigenfrequency with large amplitude, where the mechanical mirror can be dissipatively stabilized by the engineered cavity reservoir to a dynamical squeezed steady state with a maximum degree of squeezing over 8 dB. The mechanical squeezing of more than 3 dB can be achieved even for a mechanical thermal temperature larger than 100 mK. The scheme can be implemented in a cascaded optomechanical setup, with potential applications in engineering continuous variable entanglement and quantum sensing.

We study the enhanced sensing of optomechanically induced nonlinearity (OMIN) in a cavity-waveguide coupled system. The Hamiltonian of the system is anti-PT symmetric, with the two involved cavities being dissipatively coupled via the waveguide. The anti-PT symmetry may break down when a weak waveguide-mediated coherent coupling is introduced. However, we find a strong bistable response of the cavity intensity to the OMIN near the cavity resonance, benefiting from linewidth suppression caused by the vacuum induced coherence. The joint effect of optical bistability and the linewidth suppression is inaccessible by the anti-PT symmetric system involving only dissipative coupling. Due to that, the sensitivity measured by an enhancement factor is greatly enhanced by two orders of magnitude compared to that for the anti-PT symmetric model. Moreover, the enhancement factor shows resistance to a reasonably large cavity decay and robustness to fluctuations in the cavity-waveguide detuning. Based on the integrated optomechanical cavity-waveguide systems, the scheme can be used for sensing different physical quantities related to the single-photon coupling strength and has potential applications in high-precision measurements with systems involving Kerr-type nonlinearity.

Nonreciprocal transmission of optical or microwave signals is indispensable in various applications involving sensitive measurements. In this paper, we study optomechanically induced directional amplification and isolation in a generic setup including two cavities and two mechanical oscillators by exclusively using blue-sideband drive tones. The input and output ports defined by the two cavity modes are coupled through coherent and dissipative paths mediated by the two mechanical resonators, respectively. By choosing appropriate transfer phases and strengths of the driving fields, either a directional amplifier or an isolator can be implemented at low thermal temperature, and both of them show bi-directional nonreciprocity working at two mirrored frequencies. The nonreciprocal device can potentially be demonstrated by opto- and electromechanical setups in both optical and microwave domains.

We report an efficient mechanism to generate mechanical entanglement in a two-cascaded cavity optomechanical system with optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) inside the two coupled cavities. We use the especially tuned OPAs to squeeze the hybrid mode composed of two mechanical modes, leading to strong macroscopic entanglement between the two movable mirrors. The squeezing parameter as well as the effective mechanical damping are both modulated by the OPA gains. The optimal degree of mechanical entanglement therefore depends on the balanced process between coherent hybrid mode squeezing and dissipation engineering. The mechanical entanglement is robust to strong cavity decay, going beyond simply resolved sideband regime, and is resistant to reasonable high thermal noise. The scheme provides an alternative way for generating strong macroscopic entanglement in cascaded optomechanical systems.

In this study, new pull-push arylamine-fluorene based organic dyes zzx-op1, zzx-op2, and zzx-op3 have been designed and synthesized for p-type dye-sensitized solar cells (p-DSCs). In zzx-op1, a di(p-carboxyphenyl)amine (DCPA) was used as an electron donor, a perylenemonoimide (PMID) as an electron acceptor, and a fluorene (FLU) unit with two aliphatic hexyl chains as a π-conjugated linker. In zzx-op2 and zzx-op3, a 3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) and a thiophene were inserted consecutively between PMID and FLU to tune the energy levels of the frontier molecular orbitals of the dyes. The structural modification broadened the spectral coverage from an onset of 700 nm for zzx-op1 to 750 nm for zzx-op3. The electron-rich EDOT and thiophene lifted up the HOMO (highest occupied molecular orbital) levels of zzx-op2 and zzx-op3, making their potential more negative than zzx-op1. When three dyes were employed in p-type DSCs with I(-)/I3(-) as a redox couple and NiO nanoparticles as hole materials, zzx-op1 exhibited impressive energy conversion efficiency of 0.184% with the open-circuit voltage (VOC) of 112 mV and the short-circuit current density (JSC) of 4.36 mA cm(-2) under AM 1.5G condition. Density functional theory calculations, transient photovoltage decay measurements, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopic studies revealed that zzx-op1 sensitized solar cell exhibited much higher charge injection efficiency (90.3%) than zzx-op2 (53.9%) and zzx-op3 (39.0%), indicating a trade-off between spectral broadening and electron injection driving force in p-type DSCs.