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India, the second largest agro-based economy with year-round crop cultivation, generates a large amount of agricultural waste, including crop residues. In the absence of adequate sustainable management practices, approximately 92 seems a very small number of metric tons of crop waste is burned every year in India, causing excessive particulate matter emissions and air pollution. Crop residue burning has become a major environmental problem causing health issues as well as contributing to global warming. Composting, biochar production and mechanization are a few effective sustainable techniques that can help to curtail the issue while retaining the nutrients present in the crop residue in the soil. The government of India has attempted to curtail this problem, through numerous measures and campaigns designed to promote sustainable management methods such as converting crop residue into energy. However, the alarming rise of air pollution levels caused by crop residue burning in the city of Delhi and other northern areas in India observed in recent years, especially in and after the year of 2015, suggest that the issues is not yet under control. The solution to crop residue burning lies in the effective implementation of sustainable management practices with Government interventions and policies. This manuscript addresses the underlying technical as well as policy issues that has prevented India from achieving a long-lasting solution and also potential solutions that have been overlooked. However, effective implementation of these techniques also requires us to look at other socioeconomic aspects that had not been considered. This manuscript also discusses some of the policy considerations and functionality based on the analyses and current practices. The agricultural waste sector can benefit immensely from some of the examples from other waste sectors such as the municipal solid waste (MSW) and wastewater management where collection, segregation, recycling and disposal are institutionalized to secure an operational system. Active stakeholder involvement including education and empowerment of farmers along with technical solutions and product manufacturing can also assist tremendously. Even though the issue of crop residue burning touches many sectors, such as environment, agriculture, economy, social aspects, education, and energy, the past governmental efforts mainly revolved around agriculture and energy. This sectorial thinking is another barrier that needs to be broken. The government of India as well as governments of other developing countries can benefit from the emerging concept of nexus thinking in managing environmental resources. Nexus thinking promotes a higher-level integration and higher level of stakeholder involvement that goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries, providing a supporting platform to solve issues such as crop residue burning.

The aim of this study is to synthesise SPEEK composite proton exchange membrane with the addition of TiO2 nanofillers for microbial fuel cell application. SPEEK composite membrane with varying weight percentage of TiO2 (2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10%) was prepared to study the effect of TiO2 concentration on membrane performance. Synthesized composite membranes were subjected to various characterization studies such as FT-IR, XRD, Raman spectroscopy, TGA, UTM and SEM. Physico-chemical properties of membrane such as water uptake capacity, ion exchange capacity and thickness were also analyzed. 5% TiO2 – SPEEK composite membrane exhibited the higher water uptake capacity value and Ion exchange capacity value of 31% and 1.71 meq/g respectively. Performance of the MFC system with TiO2 – SPEEK membranes were evaluated and compared with the pristine SPEEK and Nafion membrane. 5% TiO2 – SPEEK membrane produced the higher power density (1.22 W/m2) and voltage (0.635 V) than the other membranes investigated. Efficacy of MFC in wastewater treatment was evaluated based on the chemical oxygen demand (COD), total organic carbon content and turbidity. Biofilm growth over the surface of the electrodes was also analyzed using scanning electron microscopy.

In the present study, the extraction of divalent heavy metals like copper [Cu (II)] and cadmium [Cd (II)] using a Pickering Emulsion Liquid Membrane (PELM) has been investigated by using three different surfactants such as Amphiphilic silica nanowires (ASNWs), Aluminum oxide nanoparticles (Alumina) and Sorbitan monooleate (SPAN 80). The influence of the process parameters such as pH, the stripping phase concentration, the agitation speed, and the carrier concentration on the extraction efficiency have been examined to find the optimum conditions at which the maximum recovery of Cu (II) and Cd (II) could take place. At optimum conditions, the extraction efficiency of 89.77% and 91.19% for Cu (II) and Cd (II) ions were achieved. Non-edible oils were used as diluent in this present study to reduce the need for toxic organic solvents in preparing PELM. The impact of each process factor on the extraction efficiency of Cu (II) and Cd (II) ions has been verified using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The higher values of F and lower values of P (less than 0.05) indicate pH is the most significant parameter on the percentage extraction of Cu (II) and Cd (II) using the Taguchi design approach.

Subgrade soils play a major role in the proper functioning of pavements. They are subjected to repeated loads due to traffic and often subjected to moisture ingress during monsoon seasons. If the subgrade is expansive in nature, lime stabilization is commonly adopted to mitigate swelling and shrinkage. However, the behavior of lime treated expansive soil under the cyclic loading and effect of moisture ingress is not yet fully understood. The subgrade is generally characterized by the parameter Resilient Modulus ( M R ), which is determined under laboratory conditions. Considering these issues, an experimental study is attempted to compare the resilient modulus ( M R ) and permanent strain values of untreated and lime treated soil. The comparison is made based on different percentages of lime and curing period. The test results are finally used to analyze the behavior of lime treated soil in their in-situ stress states.

With the rapid growth of internet based services and the data generated on these services are attracted by the attackers to intrude the networking services and information. Based on the characteristics of these intruders, many researchers attempted to aim to detect the intrusion with the help of automating process. Since, the large volume of data is generated and transferred through network, the security and performance are remained an issue. IDS (Intrusion Detection System) was developed to detect and prevent the intruders and secure the network systems. The performance and loss are still an issue because of the features space grows while detecting the intruders. In this paper, deep clustering based CNN have been used to detect the intruders with the help of Meta heuristic algorithms for feature selection and preprocessing. The proposed system includes three phases such as preprocessing, feature selection and classification. In the first phase, KDD dataset is preprocessed by using Binning normalization and Eigen-PCA based discretization method. In second phase, feature selection is performed by using Information Gain based Dragonfly Optimizer (IGDFO). Finally, Deep clustering based Convolutional Neural Network (CCNN) classifier optimized with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) identifies intrusion attacks efficiently. The clustering loss and network loss can be reduced with the optimization algorithm. We evaluate the proposed IDS model with the NSL-KDD dataset in terms of evaluation metrics. The experimental results show that proposed system achieves better performance compared with the existing system in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, f-measure and false detection rate.

Cadmium contamination in industrial wastewater is an environmental issue posing a great threat to human and animal life. However, the available methods for the removal of cadmium at lower concentrations are limited. Such processes are often accompanied by sludge formation and lead to heavy metal wastage. This paper focuses on the application of an electrosorption process using modified activated carbon felt (MACF) electrodes for the removal and recovery of lower concentration of cadmium from a simulated wastewater sample without sludge formation. Activated carbon felt (ACF) electrodes were treated with 20% HNO3 for removing surface impurities and improving the surface area. The effect of the electrode modification was analyzed by performing various characterizations including scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and cyclic voltammetry. The adsorption isotherm and kinetic models have also been studied. The effect of operating parameters including pH, voltage, initial concentration and time were analyzed and optimized using Box-Behnken design and were obtained as 6.42, 1.44 V, 0.50 mg/L and 131.51 min respectively. During the regeneration of electrodes, a concentrated cadmium solution of 18.55 mg/L was obtained, which showed the possibility of cadmium recovery. The maximum cadmium removal was 60.60% at the optimized conditions, revealing the significance of electrosorption for heavy metal treatment.

A virus is a sub-microscopic infectious organism that causes diseases in humans, animals, and plants resulting in morbidity and may cause mortality. Proper diagnosis is necessary to initiate the treatment and pave the way to eradicate the viral infection. The current diagnostic kits for nucleic acid amplification assay, blood filtration, single-cell analysis are highly accurate, even though the procedure necessitates large sample volumes, complicated fabrication steps, time-consuming processes, and high costs. The filtration of viral samples from the blood is a tedious process. In this research, we have presented a home-based fabricated paper microfluidic chip to effectively filtrate viral particles from the sample to facilitate the nucleic acid amplification assay. The filtration analysis was exhibited for lateral and vertical flow paper chips fabricated via laser printing and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) encapsulation that circumvents the necessity of a traditional wax printer and hot plate. The results convey that the vertical flow paper chip with grade 4 inlet and outlet filters 98.57% of unnecessary particles from the sample. The paper-based microfluidic chip developed in this research is simple, easy to fabricate, and inexpensive to access in underdeveloped countries. The paper chip can pave the way for applications like lab-on-chip devices, POC assays, rapid nucleic acid amplification tests, cell cultures, and biomolecular research.

Long-term material dependency on natural resources has caused a heavy toll on the environment and biodiversity of natural systems. To explore the effectiveness of the usage of unconventional materials in geotechnical applications, an attempt is made towards the application of calcium lignosulphonate, a by-product of the paper industry in soil stabilization techniques in the place of conventional additives such as lime, cement and fly ash. These materials can harm the environment and also increase the carbon footprint due to emissions during their production. The present study focuses on stabilizing a potential expansive soil by using lignosulphonate (LS) in proportions ranging from 0.5% to 3% and 6%. The strength and swell parameters of treated and untreated soil are evaluated under curing periods ranging from 0 to 28 days. The strength aspects of the soil-lignosulphonate composites are evaluated under different moisture states and also after allowing a longer interaction period between LS and soil through the pre-compaction mellowing process. The interaction mechanism is also substantiated with microstructural studies. An average strength improvement of the order of 2 is depicted by the treated soil for an optimum LS content of 1.5%. The treated soil also showed a considerable decrease in swell potential and swell pressure, than untreated soil. The manuscript primarily focuses on the behaviour of LS-amended expansive soil in terms of strength and swelling characteristics and the technique to augment the interaction mechanism of the LS-soil composites.

Herein we report an efficient Fe doped CuO based room temperature sensor for ammonia. The sensors were fabricated by a simple solution casting route whereas, the sensing material was synthesized by a low cost hydrothermal method. Different concentration of Fe doping in CuO (0 at.%, 2 at.%, 4 at.% and 8 at.%) resulted in interesting structural and morphological changes. Higher concentration of doping (8 at.%) revealed the formation of rod-like α-Fe2O3 structures with flakes of CuO decorated over the surface. The presence of this α-Fe2O3, found to positively influence the gas sensing properties of CuO. The incorporation of 2 at.% Fe resulted in enhancement of sensor response by two times whereas, the formation of α-Fe2O3 enhanced the sensor response by 5%. The plausible sensor response is attributed to the formation of p–p isotype hetero junctions between CuO and α-Fe2O3 and resulted the change in hole accumulation layer.

Single crystals of (benzene-1,2-dicarboxylic acid-κO)(2-carboxybenzoato-κO) caesium(I), also known as caesium trihydrodiphthalate (CsADP), were successfully synthesized through a controlled hydrothermal reaction between caesium sulfate and phthalic acid in a 1:2 molar ratio. The resulting crystals, grown over 26–28 days, were analyzed using various techniques. FT-IR spectroscopy revealed characteristic vibrational bands, while powder XRD and single-crystal XRD confirmed phase purity and structural properties. CsADP crystallizes in the orthorhombic system with a centrosymmetric space group (P bcn ). The caesium ion is coordinated by ten oxygen atoms, with Cs···O bond lengths ranging from 3.085 to 3.610 Å, forming a distorted bicapped square antiprism geometry. Thermal analysis indicated stability up to 240 °C, while UV–Vis spectroscopy demonstrated transparency, with a bandgap of 4.17 eV. Nonlinear optical (NLO) properties were investigated using Z-scan techniques, revealing reverse saturation absorption and a strong third-order susceptibility, highlighting CsADP as a promising candidate for NLO applications. Hirshfeld surface analysis identified dominant O···H/H···O interactions, contributing to its NLO behaviour. Additionally, molecular electrostatic potential and Mulliken population analysis provided insights into the charge distribution within the structure.