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To assess the performance of biplane area-length method in measuring left atrial (LA) volume and sphericity index and to investigate the correlation of LA reservoir function and sphericity index with atrial fibrosis on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in patients with mitral valve disease (MVD). Forty-eight patients with MVD undergoing cardiac MRI scan were enrolled in this retrospective study. LA reservoir function, measured as maximum volume (LAVmax), minimum volume (LAVmin) and ejection fraction (LAEF), and sphericity index were quantified using the biplane area-length method and standard short-axis approach, respectively. Comparisons of LA reservoir function and sphericity index between the two different methods were performed, as well as between positive (n = 17, 35%) and negative atrial wall fibrosis groups (n = 31, 65%). There was no difference in the values of LAVmax index and sphericity index between the two different methods. The biplane area-length method had poor performance in assessing LAVmin index and LAEF compared to standard short-axis approach, with an underestimation of 13.5% for LAVmin index and an overestimation of 27% for LAEF. Patients with positive atrial fibrosis had larger LAVmax index, LAVmin index and sphericity index, and lower LAEF levels in comparison to the negative atrial fibrosis group. The biplane area-length method has good performance in assessing LA sphericity index for patients with MVD, not in LA reservoir function. Patients with positive atrial fibrosis tend to suffer from more adverse LA remodelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preparation of functional material titanium carbide by the carbothermal reduction of Ti-bearing blast furnace slag with microwave heating is an effective method for valuable metals recovery; it can alleviate the environmental pressure caused by slag stocking. The dynamic dielectric parameters of Ti-bearing blast furnace slag/pulverized coal mixture under high-temperature heating are measured by the cylindrical resonant cavity perturbation method. Combining the transient dipole and large n bond delocalization polarization phenomena, the interaction mechanism of the microwave macroscopic non-thermal effect on the titanium carbide synthesis reaction was revealed. The material thickness range during microwave heating was optimized by the joint analysis of penetration depth and reflection loss, which is of great significance to the design of the microwave reactor for the carbothermal reduction of Ti-bearing blast furnace slag. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copper and cobalt usually coexist in the leachate of waste lithium ion batteries, sea nodules and other copper ore or by-product. Conventional methods for the separation of copper and cobalt hardly avoid some defects, such as longer extraction time, co-extraction and too many stages. In this paper, a microfluidic extraction procedure for simultaneously separating copper (Cu2+) and cobalt (Co2+) ions in a microchannel was investigated. In addition, some key operation parameters, such as initial pH, volume flow rate and extractant concentration, were optimized by a method of response surface methodology (RSM). The result showed that under the optimized operation parameters of initial pH of 2.5, volume flow rate of 0.035mLmin-1 and extractant concentration of 17.36%, the extraction rate of copper could be as high as 96.73%, with a low cobalt extraction rate, which was only 2.41%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Composite cathodes composed of LiV(PO) and multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) for high-performance Li-ion batteries were synthesized via a fast sol-gel method, using ascorbic acid as reductive reagent and carbon source, while using MWCNTs as high conductivity modifier. Due to the synergistic effect between functional groups of MWCNTs and reductive functionality of ascorbic acid, MWCNTs were uniformly embedded into LiV(PO)@C for constructing a unique three-dimensional architecture with excellent electronic and ionic conductivity to achieve superior high rate performance. When tested as a cathode material in lithium-ion batteries, the optimal LiV(PO)@MWCNTs@C composite can deliver 123.5 mAh g of specific capacity at 5 C and maintain a capacity retention of 96.3% after 300 cycles; even after cycled at 15-C rate for 300 times, it still possesses 90.2 mAh g of specific capacity, demonstrating a great promising result for cathode alternative in high-power lithium-ion batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preparation of microsized hematite powder from ferrous sulfate using microwave calcination was investigated based on the TG/DTG curves. The decomposition of industrial ferrous sulfate under air atmosphere was divided into three stages, and a ferrous sulfate sample added with 15% FeO could strongly absorb microwave energy. Therefore, preparing hematite powder from ferrous sulfate using microwave calcination was feasible. Hematite was obtained under the following optimized conditions: calcination temperature, 850 °C; microwave power, 650 W; and sample amount, 40 g. The obtained hematite satisfied the first-grade quality requirements. The total ferrum value was more than 58%, and the total sulfur and phosphorus contents were less than 0.5% and 0.2%, respectively. X-ray powder diffraction and scanning electron microscopy were used to characterize the structure and morphology of microsized hematite powder. The particles were non-spherical in shape, and the average particle size distribution was 10.45 μm. This work provides new potential applications for waste ferrous sulfate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, powder metallurgy technology combined with high-pressure sintering (HPS) were used to fabricate MnTe ( x = −0.02, 0, 0.04) alloys at 743 K. The products of synthesis were identified by x-ray diffraction; microstructures were examined by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM); the electrical conductivity and the Seebeck coefficient were measured in the temperature range of 300-800 K. The results show that all HPS samples consisted of nanoparticles. MnTe ( x = −0.02, 0, 0.04) thermoelectric materials with a high Seebeck coefficient and low electrical conductivity have potential to warrant further study in the future. The peak figure of the merit, ZT, reaches 0.59 for MnTe at 773 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a solution to satisfy the increasing requirement of real-time secure image transmission over public networks. The main advantage of the proposed cryptosystem is high efficiency. The confusion and diffusion operations are both performed based on a lookup table. Therefore, the time-consuming floating point arithmetic in chaotic map iteration and quantization procedures of traditional chaos-based image cipher can be avoided. Besides, this cryptosystem possesses satisfactory resistance to noise perturbation and loss of cipher data, which are inevitable and unpredictable in real-world channels. The channel disturbance and the deliberate damage from the opponents are both tolerated. The recovered image from the damaged cipher data has satisfactory visual perception. Simulations prove the advantages of the proposed scheme, which render it a good candidate for real-time secure image applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technology that waste activated carbon after extracting gold is regenerated with steam under microwave heating was studied. The influence of the activation temperature, activation duration and steam flow rate on iodine adsorption value and regeneration yield of activated carbon was investigated. The response surface methodology (RSM) technique was utilized to optimize the process conditions. The optimum conditions for the preparation of activated carbon are identified to be activation temperature of 831 °C, activation duration of 40 min and steam flow rate of 2.67 mL/min. The optimum conditions result in an activated carbon with an iodine number of 1048 mg/g and a yield of 40%, and the BET surface area evaluated using nitrogen adsorption isotherm is 1493 m/g, with total pore volume of 1.242 cm/g. And the pore structure of activated carbon regenerated is mainly composed of micropores and a small amount of mesopores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional treatments of zinc dross have many disadvantages, such as complicated recovering process and serious environmental pollution. In this work, a new process of chlorine removal from zinc dross by microwave was proposed for solving problem of recycling the zinc dross. With better ability of absorbing the microwave than zinc oxide, the main material in zinc dross, chlorides, can be heated and evaporated rapidly during microwave roasting. Various parameters including roasting temperature, duration time and stirring speed were optimized. The microstructure of roasted materials was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). The content of the chloride was analyzed by the method of chlorine ion selective electrode. The experiments indicate that the best duration time is 60 min with a stirring speed of 15 r/min during the microwave roasting process. The dechlorination rate reaches peak value of 88% at 700 °C. The chlorine is removed as HCl gas when water vapor is used as activating agent, which means that it can be recovered into hydrochloride acid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Zn hydrometallurgy factories adopt CuSO as a dechlorination reagent from zinc solution nowadays, thus much CuCl residue is produced. The existing process of treating this residue is washing with water or sodium carbonate solution, which would cause a lot of troubles to water treatment and waste discharge. A method of microwave roasting was adopted for dechlorination of CuCl residue. A 1.5 kW microwave roasting equipment with dust collection and tail gas adsorption systems was set up and applied during the experiment. By investigating the effect of temperature, heat preservation time, moisture content of raw material and grain size of samples on the dechlorination, the optimal experimental condition is obtained. When the samples with 2% moisture and <150 μm grain size are microwave roasted at 400 °C for 2 h, the Cl content turns from 14.27% to 1.35% and the dechlorination rate is as high as 90%, while that with conventional heating is only 60%-80%. The phase change of the roasting process investigated with X-ray diffraction verifies that CuCl in CuCl residue is removed by being transformed into CuO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central composite process optimization was performed by response surface methodology technique using a design for the treatment of methyltin mercaptide with modified semi-coke. The semi-coke from the coal industry was suitably modified by treating it with phosphoric acid, with a thermal activation process. The objective of the process optimization is to reduce the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and NH-N in the methyltin mercaptide industrial effluent. The process variables considered for process optimization are the semi-coke dosage, adsorption time and effluent pH. The optimized process conditions are identified to be a semi-coke dosage of 80 g/L, adsorption time of 90 min and a pH value of 8.34. The ANOVA results indicate that the adsorbent dosage and pH are the significant parameters, while the adsorption time is insignificant, possibly owing to the large range of adsorption time chosen. The textural characteristics of modified semi-coke were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy and nitrogen adsorption isotherm. The average BET surface area of modified semi-coke is estimated to be 915 m/g, with the average pore volume of 0.71 cm/g and a average pore diameter of 3.09 nm, with micropore volume contributing to 52.36%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive experimental study has been attempted to assess the effect of heating method and the activation agent on the pore characteristics of activated carbon from coconut shell. The results show that the textural characteristics of activated carbon improve with increase in holding time until an optimum, while the yield decrease with an increase in the holding time, using conventional activation method. The microwave heating requires significantly lesser holding time as compared to conventional heating method, to produce activated carbon of comparable quality, with higher yield. The BET surface area of steam activated carbon using microwave heating is significantly higher than the conventional heating, however with CO activation microwave heating shows only a marginal increase in BET surface area as compared to conventional heating. The activated carbon prepared using microwave heating has a surface area of 1,684 m/g with steam activation, while CO activation has a surface area of 1,716 m/g, which is significantly higher than the majority of the surface area reported in literature using conventional physical activation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microwave absorbing characteristics of basic cobalt carbonate, cobalt oxide (CoO), and the mixture of basic cobalt carbonate and cobalt oxide were investigated by means of microwave cavity perturbation, their temperature increasing curves were measured, and their ability to absorb microwave energy was also assessed based on the temperature increasing behavior of the material exposed to microwave field. Analyses of spectrum attenuation and relative frequency shift show that basic cobalt carbonate has weak capability to absorb microwave energy, while cobalt oxide has very strong capability to absorb microwave energy. It is feasible to thermally decompose basic cobalt carbonate though addition of small amount of cobalt oxide in microwave fields. The capability to absorb microwave energy of sample increases with an increase in mixing ratio of CoO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microwave absorbing properties of high titanium slag were investigated by using microwave cavity perturbation technique. High titanium slag containing more than 90% TiO2 was prepared by carbothermal reduction of ilmenite. The temperature rise curve of high titanium slag in microwave heating process was obtained. Crystalline compounds of high titanium slag before and after microwave irradiation were obtained and characterized by X-ray diffractometry (XRD). Effects of particle size of high titanium slag and mixtures of high titanium slag with different mass fractions of V2O5 on microwave absorbing properties were investigated systematically. The results show that high titanium slag has good microwave absorption property; untreated high titanium slag mainly consists of crystalline compounds of anatase and iron titanium oxide, while the microwave-irradiation treated one is mainly composed of crystalline compounds of rutile and iron titanium oxide. Synthetic anatase is transformed completely into rutile at about 1 050 °C for 20 min under microwave irradiation. High frequency shift and low amplitude of voltage make high titanium slag an ideal microwave absorbent. 180 μm of particle size and 10% mass fraction of V2O5 are found to be the optimum conditions for microwave absorption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]