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The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has fundamentally changed the way we live and work forever. The business sector is forecasting and formulating different scenarios associated with the impact of the pandemic on its employees, customers, and suppliers. Various business retrieval models are under construction to cope with life after the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis. However, the proposed plans and scenarios are static and cannot address the dynamic pandemic changes worldwide. They also have not considered the peripheral in-between scenarios to propel the shifting paradigm of businesses from the existing condition to the new one. Furthermore, the scenario drivers in the current studies are generally centered on the economic aspects of the pandemic with little attention to the social facets. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing scenario planning and analytics to study the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on large-scale information technology-led Companies. The primary and peripheral scenarios are constructed based on a balanced set of business continuity and employee health drivers. Practical action plans are formulated for each scenario to devise plausible responses. Finally, a damage management framework is developed to cope with the mental disorders of the employees amid the disease.
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Reverse Osmosis (RO) is a rapid-developing desalination technology; however, it suffers from inefficient energy consumption. To reduce energy consumption, in this study, reverse osmosis thin-film composite membrane (TFC) module was prepared and composed of m-phenylenediamine (MPD), graphene oxide, and 1,3,5-benzenetricarbonyl chloride (TMC) by interfacial polymerization on the surface of a polysulfone substrate. The graphene oxide was embedded in the mentioned thin-film composite by adding it to MPD aqueous solution to enhance permeation flux and, thus, reduce energy consumption. This study assessed the performance of the membrane using a lab-scale RO setup and evaluated permeability and salt rejection. The chemical properties of TFC were also analyzed using ATR-FTIR. Incorporating various concentrations (0, 20, 40, 60, and 80 ppm) of graphene oxide into the TFC was shown to improve water flux. Flux improvement of 50% was achieved by using graphene (80 ppm), while 10% of salt rejection was lost. These flux increases resulted from the changes in surface charge, surface roughness, and hydrophilicity due to the embedment of GO nanosheets. The simplicity of the method, compatibility of GO with polyamide membrane, and quite short-time reaction are the highlights of this technique for developing novel TFC membranes for water treatment.
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BACKGROUND: The aim of this study is to accelerate and improve aerobic granulation within a Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) by cationic polymer addition. METHODS: To identify whether the polymer additive is capable of enhancing granule formation, two SBRs (R1 and R2, each 0.15 m in diameter and 2 m in height) are used by feeding synthetic wastewater. The cationic polymer with concentration of 30 to 2 ppm is added to R2, while no cationic polymer is added to R1. RESULTS: Results show that the cationic polymer addition causes faster granule formation and consequently shorter reactor start-up period. The polymer-amended reactor contains higher concentration of biomass with better settling ability (23% reduction in SVI15) and larger and denser granules (112% increase of granular diameter). In addition, the results demonstrate that the cationic polymer improve the sludge granulation process by 31% increase in Extracellular Polymer Substance(EPS) concentration, 7% increase in Specific Oxygen Uptake Rate(SOUR), 18% increase in hydrophobicity, and 17% reduction in effluent Mixed Liquor Suspended Solid(MLSS) concentration. CONCLUSIONS: Concludingly, it is found that using the cationic polymer to an aerobic granular system has the potential to enhance the sludge granulation process.
