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Synthetic dyes have caused serious ecological and environmental threats in our daily lives. Effective and inexpensive dye-degradation methods are desperately perused for decades. In this work, ultrasonic-vibration treatment is found as an effective approach that can dramatically improve the degradation performance of industrial Fe78Si9B13 amorphous powders towards methylene blue. As demonstrated by synchrotron X-ray nano-computed tomography and scanning electron microscope combined with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, the micro-channels on the surface or inside of Fe78Si9B13 particles offer a shortcut for fast mass transfer and supply plenty of reactive sites with low density and high energy due to the structural rejuvenation after ultrasonic vibration. It leads to the reduction of the reaction activation energy of degradation under the pseudo-first-order kinetic model and an exceptional decomposition capacity. Our work not only extremely drives down the current costs of wastewater treatments, but also provides a promising approach for tuning the effectivity of alloying catalysts via manipulating the potential energy state of metallic glasses based on the high-frequency mechanical vibration technique.

Here we report an entirely new method for the non-intrusive interrogation and characterisation of emulsions based on the microwave cavity perturbation technique., A rapid and non-invasive method to determine the dispersity of emulsions is developed based on the interrelationship between the droplet size distribution and the dielectric properties of emulsions. A range of water-in-oil emulsions with different water contents and droplet size distributions were analysed using a microwave cavity perturbation technique together with dynamic light scattering. The results demonstrate that the dielectric properties, as measured by non-invasive microwave cavity analysis, can be used to characterise the dispersity of emulsions, and is also capable of characterizing heavy oil emulsions. This technique has great potential for industrial applications to examine the sedimentation, creaming and hence the stability of emulsions.