Investigation on Applying Biodegradable Material for Removal of Various Substances (Fluorides, Nitrates and Lead) from Water.

Sapropel was used as a biodegradable material for water treatment. Sapropel is a sedimentary layer of a mix of organic and inorganic substances accumulated in the bottoms of lakes for thousands of years. It is a jelly-like homogeneous mass and has properties of sorption.

Tensile Stresses in the Coating with Interlayer under Normal and Tangential Loading.

In this paper, we obtained the analytic solution of the three-dimensional problem of elasticity concerning non-homogeneous half-space, in which the surface is under normal and tangential loading applied in a circular area. Half-space is composed of the homogeneous body, as well as coatings containing two homogeneous layers: interlayer and top layer. The analysis was carried out in cases where the Young's modulus of the intermediate layer differed from the Young's modulus of the substrate and the top layer.

Modification of the AFM Sensor by a Precisely Regulated Air Stream to Increase Imaging Speed and Accuracy in the Contact Mode.

Increasing the imaging rate of atomic force microscopy (AFM) without impairing of the imaging quality is a challenging task, since the increase in the scanning speed leads to a number of artifacts related to the limited mechanical bandwidth of the AFM components. One of these artifacts is the loss of contact between the probe tip and the sample. We propose to apply an additional nonlinear force on the upper surface of a cantilever, which will help to keep the tip and surface in contact.