Effects of Inorganic Salts on the Phase Separation of Partially Miscible Solutes.

Partially miscible solutions with a lower critical solution temperature have promising applications in the field of physical chemistry. To better guide the utilization of these solutions in practice, we conduct an in-depth study about the phase separation behavior of the solution added with inorganic salts. The addition of the inorganic salts into the solution is found to consequently reduce the phase separation temperature.

Atomistic Insights into the Effect of Functional Groups on the Adsorption of Water by Activated Carbon for Heat Energy Storage.

Adsorption heat storage holds great promise for solar energy applications. The development of new adsorbent materials is currently the research focus in this area. The present work designs several activated carbon models with different functional groups, including -OH, -NH, -COOH, and -SOH, and explores the influence of functional groups' categories and numbers on the water adsorption capacity of the activated carbon using the GCMC method.

Phosphorylation of Oligopeptides: Design of Ultra-Hydrophilic Zwitterionic Peptides for Anti-Fouling Detection of Nucleic Acids in Saliva.

The construction of low-fouling biosensors for assaying biomarkers in complex biological samples remains a challenge, and the key limitation is the lack of effective anti-fouling materials. Inspired by the biomimetic process of protein phosphorylation, we herein designed a new phosphorylated peptide modified with the dihydrogen phosphate (-POH) group, which significantly increased the hydrophilicity and anti-fouling capability of the peptide when compared with natural and normal peptides. Molecular simulation (MS) illustrated that, compared with the -COOH and -NH groups, the -POH group formed the most numbers of hydrogen bonds and stronger hydrogen bonds with water molecules.

Phase Equilibrium Studies in the Geothermal Energy Development: The Effect of Hydrogen Bond on the Multi-Component Fluid.

Geothermal energy has become an emerging resource with both large reserves and environmental friendliness and is playing an increasingly important role in the current energy transition progress. In this paper, a thermodynamically consistent flash model is developed to consider the effect of hydrogen bond on the phase equilibrium states of multi-component fluid to resolve the challenges of the special thermodynamic characteristic of water as the main working fluid. In order to provide practical suggestions to the industry, a number of possible effects have been investigated on the phase equilibrium states, including the hydrogen bond, environmental temperature, and fluid compositions.

Predicting the effective thermal conductivity of unfrozen soils with various water contents based on artificial neural network.

The effective thermal conductivity of soils is a crucial parameter for many applications such as geothermal engineering, environmental science, and agriculture and engineering. However, it is pretty challenging to accurately determine it due to soils' complex structure and components. In the present study, the influences of different parameters, including silt content (), sand content (), clay content (), quartz content (), porosity, and water content on the effective thermal conductivity of soils, were firstly analyzed by the Pearson correlation coefficient.

Nonlocal Effects and Slip Heat Flow in Nanolayers.

Guyer-Krumhansl (G-K) equation is a promising macroscopic model to explore heat transport in nanoscale. In the present work, a new nonlocal characteristic length is proposed by considering the effects of heat carriers-boundaries interactions to modify the nonlocal term in G-K equation, and a slip heat flux boundary condition is developed based on the local mean free path of heat carriers. Then an analytical solution for heat flux across 2-D nanolayers and an in-plane thermal conductivity model are obtained based on the modified G-K equation and the slip heat flux boundary.