Podium Session G

ABSTRACT:

Monitoring and management of water resources is a complex process which goes through contentious decision-making processes. Water resources need to be continuously monitored for the restoration and protection of its quality. Monitoring of water quality parameters has been conventionally carried out through field data sampling and laboratory analysis. These approaches are costly, labor-intensive, and time-exhausting. RS and GIS applications, however, offer effective tools for the monitoring of water quality and further aids in bridging gap in the issues associated with conventional approaches. These applications allow for analyses on a large scale. This study provides an overview of efforts utilizing these applications in monitoring of water quality.

Several studies have been carried out that utilized RS applications in the qualitative determination of water quality parameters. Different RS satellite sensors have been reportedly used in these efforts, including Landsat 5, 7, and 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) sensors, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) images, Sentinel-2A/B, Multispectral Instruments (MSI), and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). These sensors have been used extensively to quantify various parameters, including but not limited to chlorophyll-a concentration, turbidity, total suspended solids (TSS), temperature, algae content, and total dissolved solids (TDS) among others.

Studies have reported a good prediction of these water quality parameters from the RS images. Parameters including TSS, temperature, salinity, turbidity, and chlorophyll-a concentration have all been assessed with varying degree of accuracies using surface reflectance. It is estimated that utilization of Landsat images saved users close to $3.5 billion as of 2017.

ABSTRACT:

From pasta to biological tissues to contact lenses, gel and gel-like materials inherently soften as they swell with water. In dry, low-relative-humidity environments, these materials stiffen as they de-swell with water. We use semi-dilute polymer theory to develop a simple power-law relationship between hydrogel elastic modulus and swelling. From this relationship, we can predict hydrogel stiffness or swelling at arbitrary relative humidities. This predictive capability can enable more rapid material discovery and selection for hydrogel applications in varying humidity environments.

ABSTRACT:

Improvements to boiling performance are challenging due to the intrinsically complex bubble dynamics. One way to improve boiling is through surfactants, which are amphiphilic molecules that alter the interfacial properties of water. Past research suggests that heat transfer enhancement increases with surfactant concentration with an optimal enhancement near the critical micelle concentration (CMC)—a characteristic concentration for each type of surfactant. However, in contrast to previous work, we found that there is a universal optimized concentration range of heat transfer enhancement, independent of the CMC, across a wide range of surfactants. We show that this universal concentration is governed by a balance of the incoming advected surfactants, and the departing absorbed surfactants to bubble interfaces, indicating that surfactant-enhanced boiling is a mass-transfer-limited behavior. The results of this work could ultimately pave the way to conclusively understand how surfactants enhance boiling leading to improvements to two-phase heat transfer processes.

ABSTRACT:

The characteristics of ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) based capacitors depends on the pH of the working solution. However, their basic mechanism is not well studied. Therefore, this study investigates the IPMC based capacitor with Platinum electrodes in various pH solutions. Cyclic voltammetry (CV), alternating-current (AC) impedance, and capacitance measurements were then performed to investigate the effects of the pH on the electrochemical properties of the IPMC capacitors. The results are helpful for the use and control of IPMC based capacitors.

Although IPMCs are widely studied for their electromechanical or electrochemical properties, most studies have been performed at the ambient conditions. The electrochemical performance of IPMC at higher temperatures is still far from understood. In this study, the effect of temperature on electrochemical behavior of IPMCs is examined. The electrochemical study was conducted in different pH solutions at temperatures ranging from 25 °C to 80°C. The current flow across the IPMC electrode increases with increasing temperature up to 60°C during the charging and discharging cycles.

ABSTRACT:

This presentation discusses a novel approach based on the recent work of Liao, Saul, and Shiue (Liao et al., 2022) to formulate Ramanujan Type Identities from cubic polynomials. Currently, the method used to derive Ramanujan Type Identities involves large amounts of calculation involving the roots of the cubic (Wang K., 2021). Our algorithm simplifies the results in Liao et al. for finding solutions to certain cubic equations. Using this result on the associated Ramanujan equation of a cubic polynomial results in a vast improvement in efficiency in generating Ramanujan Type Identities.

ABSTRACT:

A novel hybrid of quasi-random nanostructures and Archimedean spiral arrangement light trapping coating, and its low-cost, fast-production technique are presented here. Both numerical simulations and experiments confirmed the superiority of efficiency enhancement and omnidirectional light-trapping capacity when coating the created nanostructures on thin-film solar cells.