Biosorption of textile dye reactive blue 221 by capia pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) seeds.

Peppers are very important foodstuffs in the world for direct and indirect consumption, so they are extensively used. The seeds of these peppers are waste materials that are disposed of from houses and factories. To evaluate the performance of this biomass in the treatment of wastewaters, a study was conducted to remove a textile dye, reactive blue 221, which is commercially used in textile mills. Raw seed materials were used without any pre-treatment. The effects of contact time, initial concentration of dye, pH and dose of biosorbent were studied to determine the optimum conditions for this biomass on color removal from wastewaters. The optimum pH value for dye biosorption was found to be 2.0. At an initial dye concentration of 217 mg L-1, treatment efficiency and biosorption capacity were 96.7% and 95.35 mg g-1, respectively. A maximum biosorption capacity of 142.86 mg g-1 was also obtained. Equilibrium biosorption of dye by capia seeds was well described by the Langmuir isotherm with a correlation coefficient above 99%. The biosorption process was also successfully explained with the pseudo-second order kinetic model. This biomass was found to be effective in terms of textile dye removal from aqueous solutions.

Fast and accurate analysis of large-scale composite structures with the parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm.

Accurate electromagnetic modeling of complicated optical structures poses several challenges. Optical metamaterial and plasmonic structures are composed of multiple coexisting dielectric and/or conducting parts. Such composite structures may possess diverse values of conductivities and dielectric constants, including negative permittivity and permeability. Further challenges are the large sizes of the structures with respect to wavelength and the complexities of the geometries. In order to overcome these challenges and to achieve rigorous and efficient electromagnetic modeling of three-dimensional optical composite structures, we have developed a parallel implementation of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA). Precise formulation of composite structures is achieved with the so-called "electric and magnetic current combined-field integral equation." Surface integral equations are carefully discretized with piecewise linear basis functions, and the ensuing dense matrix equations are solved iteratively with parallel MLFMA. The hierarchical strategy is used for the efficient parallelization of MLFMA on distributed-memory architectures. In this paper, fast and accurate solutions of large-scale canonical and complicated real-life problems, such as optical metamaterials, discretized with tens of millions of unknowns are presented in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed electromagnetic solver.

Treatment of slaughterhouse plant wastewater by using a membrane bioreactor.

The use of a membrane bioreactor (MBR) for removal of organic substances and nutrients from slaughterhouse plant wastewater was investigated. The chemical oxygen demand (COD), total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) concentrations of slaughterhouse wastewater were found to be approximately 571 mg O2/L, 102.5 mg/L, and 16.25 mg PO4-P/L, respectively. A submerged type membrane was used in the bioreactor. The removal efficiencies for COD, total organic carbon (TOC), TP and TN were found to be 97, 96, 65, 44% respectively. The COD value of wastewater was decreased to 16 mg/L (COD discharge standard for slaughterhouse plant wastewaters is 160 mg/L). TOC was decreased to 9 mg/L (TOC discharge standard for slaughterhouse plant wastewaters is 20 mg/L). Ammonium, and nitrate nitrogen concentrations of treated effluent were 0.100 mg NH4-N/L, and 80.521 mg NO3-N/L, respectively. Slaughterhouse wastewater was successfully treated with the MBR process.

Computational study of scattering from healthy and diseased red blood cells.

We present a comparative study of scattering from healthy red blood cells (RBCs) and diseased RBCs with deformed shapes. Scattering problems involving three-dimensional RBCs are formulated accurately with the electric and magnetic current combined-field integral equation and solved efficiently by the multilevel fast multipole algorithm. We compare scattering cross section values obtained for different RBC shapes and different orientations. In this way, we determine strict guidelines to distinguish deformed RBCs from healthy RBCs and to diagnose various diseases using scattering cross section values. The results may be useful for designing new and improved flow cytometry procedures.