Synergy of the flow behaviour and disperse phase of polysaccharide nanoparticles derived from Corchorus olitorius in enhancing oil recovery at an offshore operation.

The escalating global energy demand necessitates enhanced oil recovery methods, particularly offshore. Biological nanotechnology offers sustainable, environment-friendly, and cost-effective alternatives to synthetic chemicals. This study explored the synthesis of polysaccharide-based nanoparticles (PNPs) from Corchorus olitorius leaves using a weak acid-assisted ultrasonic method and their application as nanocomposites for oil recovery.

Water-Gas Shift over Pt Nanoparticles Dispersed on CeO and Gadolinium-Doped Ceria (GDC) Supports with Specific Nano-Configurations.

The water-gas shift (WGS) reaction is one of the most significant reactions in hydrogen technology since it can be used directly to produce hydrogen from the reaction of CO and water; it is also a side reaction taking place in the hydrocarbon reforming processes, determining their selectivity towards H production. The development of highly active WGS catalysts, especially at temperatures below ~450 °C, where the reaction is thermodynamically favored but kinetically limited, remains a challenge. From a fundamental point of view, the reaction mechanism is still unclear.

Aqueous Dispersion of Xenes by Liquid Phase Exfoliation of Monoelemental Crystals in Melamine Solution.

Αfter the impressive evolution of graphene and its derivatives, a large number of two dimensional (2D) materials with important optical and electrical properties have been successfully fabricated. Liquid phase exfoliation (LPE) of layered and non-layered materials has become a widely applied method for the preparation of 2D nanostructures with an extensive variety of applications. However, in most cases organic solvents are used as liquid phase which are often toxic and environmentally unfriendly and lead to low yields.

Paclitaxel-Loaded, Pegylated Carboxylic Graphene Oxide with High Colloidal Stability, Sustained, pH-Responsive Release and Strong Anticancer Effects on Lung Cancer A549 Cell Line.

: Graphene Oxide (GO) has shown great potential in biomedical applications for cancer therapeutics. The biosafety and stability issues of GO in biological media have been addressed by functionalization with polyethylene glycol (PEG). : In this work, carboxylated, nanosized GO (nCGO) was evaluated as a potential carrier of paclitaxel (PCT).

Is in-situ burning an acceptable mitigation option after a major oil spill? Impact on marine plankton.

Major oil spills can impose a significant environmental hazard on the marine ecosystem, and a promising mitigation measure is in-situ oil burning (ISB). However, our knowledge of the impact of the burned residues and soot deposition on the marine ecosystem is still limited. We investigated the effects of burned oil residue and soot deposition on the marine plankton communities of the oligotrophic Eastern Mediterranean Sea with a mesocosm experiment.

Distinct Communities of Bacteria and Unicellular Eukaryotes in the Different Water Masses of Cretan Passage Water Column (Eastern Mediterranean Sea).

Elucidating marine microbiota diversity and dynamics holds significant importance due to their role in maintaining vital ecosystem functions and services including climate regulation. This work aims to contribute in the understanding of microbial ecology and networking in one of the world's most understudied marine regions, the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. High-throughput 16S and 18S rRNA gene sequencing analysis was applied to study the diversity of bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes in the different water masses of the Cretan Passage during two seasonally-different sampling expeditions.

Vessel recovery using ultrasound localisation microscopy: An in silico comparative study between minimum variance and delay-and-sum beamformers.

The use of particle localisation and tracking algorithms on Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) or other ultrasound mode image data containing sparse microbubble (MB) populations, can produce super-resolved vascularization maps. Typically such data stem from conventional delay and sum (DAS) beamforming that is used widely in ultrasound imaging modes. Recently, adaptive beamforming has shown significant improvement in spatial resolution, but its value to super-resolution image analysis approaches is not fully understood.

A Strategic Synthesis of Orange Waste-Derived Porous Carbon via a Freeze-Drying Method: Morphological Characterization and Cytocompatibility Evaluation.

Porous carbon materials from food waste have gained growing interest worldwide for multiple applications due to their natural abundance and the sustainability of the raw materials and the cost-effective synthetic processing. Herein, orange waste-derived porous carbon (OWPC) was developed through a freeze-drying method to prevent the demolition of the original biomass structure and then was pyrolyzed to create a large number of micro, meso and macro pores. The novelty of this work lies in the fact of using the macro-channels of the orange waste in order to create a macroporous network via the freeze-drying method which remains after the pyrolysis steps and creates space for the development of different types of porous in the micro and meso scale in a controlled way.

An investigation into the morphological variation and ecological-environmental range of Cyphoderia compressa: A case study of Scottish material.

Cyphoderia compressa has only been described from supralittoral environments, as a psammobiont, with salinities from 1.33 to 36.00 ‰.

Improved industrial induction time-based technique for evaluating kinetic hydrate inhibitors.

Kinetic hydrate inhibitor laboratory testing before field application is one of the key priorities in the oil and gas industry. The common induction-time-based technique is often used to evaluate and screen for kinetic hydrate inhibitors (KHIs). However, the main challenge relates to the stochastic nature of hydrate nucleation observed in fresh systems, which often results in scattered data on hydrate formation with unacceptable uncertainties.

Diversity links to functionality: Unraveling the impact of pressure disruption and culture medium on crude oil-enriched microbial communities from the deep Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Mesopelagic water from the deep Eastern Mediterranean Sea (EMS) was collected under disrupted (REPRESS) or undisturbed (HP) pressure conditions and was acclimated to oil (OIL) or dispersed-oil (DISPOIL) under in situ pressure and temperature (10 MPa, 14 °C). Decompression resulted in oil-acclimatised microbial communities of lower diversity despite the restoration of in situ pressure conditions during the 1-week incubation. Further biodiversity loss was observed when oil-acclimatised communities were transferred to ONR7 medium to facilitate the isolation of oil-degrading bacteria.

Effect of endophytic bacteria on the phytoremediation potential of halophyte for Sb-contaminated soils.

Phytoremediation, including bacteria-assisted phytoremediation, presents a promising technology for treating shooting range soils contaminated with toxic metalloids. In this study, a pot experiment was performed using the halophyte and soil collected from a shooting range and artificially spiked at two different antimonite (Sb(III)) concentrations (50 mg/kg and 250 mg/kg) with the aim to explore the Sb phytoremediation of the halophyte. The effect of salt (0.

Nanocatalysis for Environmental Protection, Energy, and Green Chemistry.

Nowadays, nanoscience and nanotechnology depict cutting-edge areas of modern science and technology across an array of applications, including heterogeneous catalysis [...

Extreme weather events as an important factor for the evolution of plastisphere but not for the degradation process.

Marine plastics, with their negative effects on marine life and the human health, have been recently recognized as a new niche for the colonization and development of marine biofilms. Members of the colonizing communities could possess the potential for plastic biodegradation. Thus, there is an urgent need to characterize these complex and geographically variable communities and elucidate the functionalities.

Methane Catalytic Combustion under Lean Conditions over Pristine and Ir-Loaded LaSrMnO Perovskites: Efficiency, Hysteresis, and Time-on-Stream and Thermal Aging Stabilities.

The increasing use of natural gas as an efficient, reliable, affordable, and cleaner energy source, compared with other fossil fuels, has brought the catalytic CH complete oxidation reaction into the spotlight as a simple and economic way to control the amount of unconverted methane escaping into the atmosphere. CH emissions are a major contributor to the 'greenhouse effect', and therefore, they need to be effectively reduced. Catalytic CH oxidation is a promising method that can be used for this purpose.

Geo Fossils-I: A synthetic dataset of 2D fossil images for computer vision applications on geology.

Geo Fossils-I is a synthetic image dataset used as a solution for resolving the limited availability of geological datasets intended for image classification and object detection on 2D images of geological outcrops. The Geo Fossils-I dataset was created to train a custom image classification model for geological fossil identification and inspire additional work in generating synthetic geological data with Stable Diffusion models. The Geo Fossils-I dataset was generated through a custom training process and the fine-tuning of a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model.

Intertwined synergistic abiotic and biotic degradation of polypropylene pellets in marine mesocosms.

The accumulation of plastic waste in the oceans has caused growing concern for its effects on marine life. The interactions of plastics with environmental factors have been linked to fragmentation to micro- and nanoparticles with different properties and consequences, but the mechanism of fragmentation has not been fully understood yet. In this work, we investigate the combined effect of marine communities and ultraviolet (UV) radiation towards the degradation of virgin and artificially weathered polypropylene (PP) pellets after a long-term incubation period in marine mesocosms.

Capacity of to Phytoremediate Sb-Contaminated Soils Assisted by Organic Acids and Oxygen Nanobubbles.

Antimony (Sb) is considered to be a toxic metalloid of increasing prevalence in the environment. Although several phytoremediation studies have been conducted, research regarding the mechanisms of Sb accumulation and translocation within plants remains limited. In this study, soil from a shooting range was collected and spiked with an initial Sb(III) concentration of 50 mg/kg.

GAN River-I: A process-based low NTG meandering reservoir model dataset for machine learning studies.

The GAN River-I data set is designed to provide a stern test for machine learning and geostatistical tools that wish to recreate the complex geometries of realistic facies distributions in subsurface reservoirs. It provides more complex, non-stationary facies distributions than previous open data sets, some of which have modelled channels but do not include the number and complex association of facies types of this data set. GAN River-I is a dataset of 2D layers of 3D facies models produced from a process-based simulator of a meandering fluvial system.

Immiscible Viscous Fingering: The Simulation of Tertiary Polymer Displacements of Viscous Oils in 2D Slab Floods.

Immiscible viscous fingering in porous media occurs when a high viscosity fluid is displaced by an immiscible low viscosity fluid. This paper extends a recent development in the modelling of immiscible viscous fingering to directly simulate experimental floods where the viscosity of the aqueous displacing fluid was increased (by the addition of aqueous polymer) after a period of low viscosity water injection. This is referred to as tertiary polymer flooding, and the objective of this process is to increase the displacement of oil from the system.

Pore-scale visualization of hydrogen storage in a sandstone at subsurface pressure and temperature conditions: Trapping, dissolution and wettability.

Hypothesis: Underground hydrogen (H) storage is a potentially viable solution for large-scale cyclic H storage; however, the behavior of H at subsurface pressure and temperature conditions is poorly known. This work investigates if the pore-scale displacement processes in H-brine systems in a porous sandstone can be sufficiently well defined to enable effective and economic storage operations. In particular, this study investigates trapping, dissolution, and wettability of H-brine systems at the pore-scale, at conditions that are realistic for subsurface H storage.

Evaluation of the Dynamic Interfacial Tension between Viscoelastic Surfactant Solutions and Oil Using Porous Micromodels.

Interfacial tension (IFT) is a crucial parameter in many natural and industrial processes, such as enhanced oil recovery and subsurface energy storage. IFT determines how easy the fluids can pass through pore throats and hence will decide how much residual fluids will be left behind. Here, we use a porous glass micromodel to investigate the dynamic IFT between oil and Armovis viscoelastic surfactant (VES) solution based on the concept of drop deformation while passing through a pore throat.

Insights into the climate-driven evolution of gas hydrate-bearing permafrost sediments: implications for prediction of environmental impacts and security of energy in cold regions.

The present study investigates the evolution of gas hydrate-bearing permafrost sediments against the environmental temperature change. The elastic wave velocities and effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of simulated gas hydrate-bearing sediment samples were measured at a typical range of temperature in permafrost and wide range of hydrate saturation. The experimental results reveal the influence of several complex and interdependent pore-scale factors on the elastic wave velocities and ETC.

Selective Catalytic Reduction of NO over Perovskite-Based Catalysts Using CH(O), H and CO as Reducing Agents-A Review of the Latest Developments.

Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) is probably the most widespread process for limiting NO emissions under lean conditions (O excess) and, in addition to the currently used NH or urea as a reducing agent, many other alternative reductants could be more promising, such as CH/CHO, H and CO. Different catalysts have been used thus far for NO abatement from mobile (automotive) and stationary (fossil fuel combustion plants) sources, however, perovskites demand considerable attention, partly due to their versatility to combine and incorporate various chemical elements in their lattice that favor deNO catalysis. In this work, the CH/CHO, H, and CO-SCR of NO on perovskite-based catalysts is reviewed, with particular emphasis on the role of the reducing agent nature and perovskite composition.