van der Waals solids Guanhui Gao1,2,II, Wei Gao, E. Cannuccia4,II, Jaime Taha-Tijerina, Luis Balicas, Akshay Mathkar, T.N. Narayanan, Zhen Liu, Bipin K. Gupta, Juan Peng, Yansheng Yin*, Angel Rubio *, Pulickel M. Ajayan * Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, United States Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, Ocean University...

The sago palm grows without the need for any form of fertilization, apart from some ground clearing during its first year of growth. It thrives mainly on peat soil which is unsuitable for most other crops. These make sago palm the best option as the starch source for tropical countries. Although the initial waiting period is long (up to 10 years for the plant to be harvestable), sago is the wor...

We discuss spontaneously bent configurations of pre-stretched bilayer sheets that can be obtained by tuning the pre-stretches in the two layers. The two-dimensional nonlinear plate model we use for this purpose is an adaptation of the one recently obtained for thin sheets of nematic elastomers, by means of a rigorous dimensional reduction argument based on the theory of Gamma-convergence (Agost...

Banana cultivars--Luvhele (MusaABB), Mabonde (MusaAAA), and Muomva-red (Musa balbisiana) --were characterized for morphological, physicochemical, and antioxidant properties. All three cultivars varied significantly (P < 0.05) in their morphology, pH, titratable acidity and total soluble solids with no significant difference in their ash content. Individual cultivars showed variations in flour s...

Commercial wheat straw soda lignin was used to develop an alkali-O2 oxidation method to produce a ready-to-use solution for concrete plasticizing (cement dispersing). Lignin characterization was done directly from the solution. Depending on conditions, oxidation primarily induced either condensation or degradation of lignin. Thus, both the negative charge and the molar mass of the lignin were c...

Mesoporous solids, which were prepared from inorganic-surfactant mesostructured materials, have been investigated due to their very large surface area and high porosity, pore size uniformity and variation, periodic pore arrangement and possible pore surface modification. Morphosyntheses from macroscopic morphologies such as bulk monolith and films, to nanoscopic ones, nanoparticles and their st...

Leather industry, one of the polluting industries because of generation of huge amount of liquid and solid wastes, also emits obnoxious smell because of degradation of proteinous material of skin and generation of gases such as NH3, H2S and CO2. Solid wastes are raw trimmings, fleshings, chrome shavings, buffing dusts and keratin wastes. Accumulation of these wastes lead to sludge problem and c...

We report the synthesis of a new nanocrystal (NC) mesophase through self-assembly of water-soluble NCmicelles with soluble silica. The mesophase comprises gold nanocrystals arranged within a silica matrix in a facecentered-cubic lattice with cell dimensions that are adjustable through control of the nanocrystal diameter and/or the alkane chain lengths of the primary alkanethiol stabilizing liga...

Total suspended solids (TSS) are a major pollutant that affects waterways all over the world. Predicting the values of TSS is of interest to quality control of wastewater processing. Due to infrequent measurements, time series data for TSS are constructed using influent flow rate and influent carbonaceous bio-chemical oxygen demand (CBOD). We investigated different scenarios of daily average in...