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Research Subject: The conversion of anthropogenous CO₂ gas into value-add chemicals known as solar fuel technology attracted much consideration from the beginning of the 21st century owing to the potential of this technology in solving the climate change and energy shortage issues.
Research Approach: In the current study, Bismuth and copper modified TiO₂ were prepared using sol-gel and wet impregnation method in order to investigate as a catalyst for photocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide into renewable methane.  
Main Results: The results of X-ray diffraction analysis, Field emission scanning microscope images and Transmission electron microscope images demonstrated that titanium dioxide nanoparticles with 20 nm in size were synthesized that after the addition of bismuth, the size of particles became smaller. Also, using energy dispersive x-ray analysis and elemental mapping technique, it was determined that the bismuth and copper were uniformly inserted in the prepared nanoparticles. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy showed that the bandgap became smaller in bismuth and copper-containing samples, which resulted in visible light absorption. In addition, photoluminescence spectroscopy showed an impressive decrease in the rate of electron-hole separation in the prepared nanocomposite. The result of CO₂ photoreduction experiments revealed that the incorporation of 3 wt% Bismuth and 1.5 wt% copper into the structure of TiO₂ would increase the amount of methane production to 7.6 times greater than bare TiO₂. This superior activity for methane generation could be related to the ability of bismuth compounds in adsorption and activation of carbon dioxide molecules and also the efficient separation of charge carriers given by copper. Additionally, the smaller particle size and increase in the surface area had also a positive effect on the CO₂ reduction enhancement.

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Research subject: In this study, EDTA-functionalized Fe₃O₄@SiO₂ magnetic nanocomposites with core-shell structure were synthesized to remove divalent cadmium ions from aqueous solutions.
Research approach: During the first step, Fe₃O₄@SiO₂ nanosphere core-shell is synthesized using nano Fe₃O₄ as the core, TEOS as the silica source and PVA as the surfactant. This strategy relies on the covalently bonding of ethylendiaminetetraacetic acid to bis(3-aminopropyl)amine and cyanuric chloride functionalized magnetic nanoparticles. In the next step, characteristics of surface functional groups, crystal structure, magnetic properties, size and surface morphology of these nanoparticles were investigated, identified and analyzed using physico-chemical characterization techniques including fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), vibration sample magnetometry (VSM) and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area analyzer.  The adsorbent, due to its magnetic property, could be simply separated from the reaction mixture by a permanent magnet and reused in five consecutive cycles without considerable loss in its activity.
Main results: To probe the nature of the adsorbent, various experiments were investigated like adsorbent dose and contact time were optimized. Kinetic studies and the effect of different amounts of adsorbent to remove divalent cadmium ions from aqueous solutions show a maximum adsorption of 94% at ambient temperature. Moreover, the recyclability of Fe₃O₄@SiO₂-EDTA was investigated in order to remove the divalent cation for successive adsorption-desorption cycles. All the results of studies show that the synthetic nanocomposite Fe₃O₄@SiO₂-EDTA is an effective, recyclable adsorbent with excellent performance for the removal of divalent cadmium.

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Research subject: This study demonstrates a synthetic strategy for the preparation of porous SiO₂ for adsorption applications using natural and waste materials from rice husks which are functionalized with polymer dendrimer molecules and surface amino groups as the source of biosilica and were investigated to remove divalent cadmium ions from aqueous solutions.
Research approach: Porous silica nanoparticles with a mean diameter of 45 nm were successfully fabricated from rice husk (RH) biomass via a multistep method. During the first step, sodium silicate is extracted from rice husks. Then, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide, HCl, and acetic acid were added to the sodium silicate solution, and the resulting mixture was sonicated. After the hydrothermal reaction, the collected samples were calcinated to obtain silica nanoparticles. These synthetic nanoparticles were identified using various techniques such as Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, transmission electron microscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy, nitrogen adsorption-desorption analysis and dynamic light scattering analysis. Then, the adsorption kinetics and the effects of synthetic nanoadsorbents dosage on the removal of divalent cadmium ions were investigated. The effect of contact time on cadmium adsorption and recyclability of adsorbent was also investigated.
Main results: The results show that there is no significant reduction in the performance and activity of this nanosorbent in the adsorption of metal ions after 6 times of recycling and reuse. The excellent performance of this nanosorbent in the removal of metal ions is due to its high porosity, active surface amine groups and high surface-to-volume ratio.

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Abstract-In this article, a new stabilizing mechanism for a two wheel robot is proposed. Such systems, due to inherent ‎instability, require dynamic stabilization. The conventional method for stabilizing these robots is moving the base back ‎and forth, to use its inertia effects. Therefore, such strategies drastically depend on the ground surface, besides the ‎robot is not able to reconfigure its manipulator to do any desired task. These limitations reduce the capability of the ‎robot to manipulate objects, and to perform accurate tasks. In order to omit these restrictions, in the developed ‎mechanism, a reaction wheel is used. The proposed mechanism exploits the inertia moment of reaction wheel to ‎stabilize motion of the robot. Therefore, since there is no interaction between the reaction wheel and the ground surface, ‎by using this mechanism there would be no concern about the surface that the robot moves on that. Also, manipulator ‎of the robot can track the given trajectories, without considering stability limitations. In order to show the performance ‎of proposed mechanism, a verified dynamics model of the robot is used and the control algorithm with various initial ‎conditions is simulated.‎

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Most of dyes used in production processes caused serious environmental pollution when discharged to the water resources. Azo dyes are the most used synthetic compounds in the industries such as textile, food, leather and cosmetic. Due to their toxicity and hard degradation, these kinds of compounds are classi fied as environmental hazardous materials that have to be treated before discharging to the environment. Direct blue 71 (DB 71) is one of azo dyes that is resistant to aerobic degradation and under anaerobic condition is reduced to potential carcinogenic aromatics. Different kinds of physical, chemical and biological methods such as adsorption, ultra filtration, reverse osmosis, coagulation and electro coagulation are widely used for efficient dye removal but they just transport contaminants from water to sludge and generate secondary wastes which need more treatment. Adsorption with many advantages is a proper method that is applied to treat dye compounds. In recent years, use of low cost materials as adsorbent for dye removal has been highlighted. Since natural absorbents are inexpensive and may be achieved without any cost and they are usually in abundance in nature, absorption of solute ions by these materials are a proper method to eliminate color from polluted waters and industrial wastewaters. In this study, removal of azo dye Direct Blue 71 was evaluated with two new natural adsorbents of walnut and peanuts shells. These adsorbents are produced from agricultural wastes. The effect of pH, contact time and adsorbent dosage on the removal efficiency has been studied. According to the results, maximum removal of dyes by the two natural absorbents (0.75 gr/L walnut shell in 50 mg/L initial dye concentration with pH of 9 in 45 minutes and 1 gr/L peanut shell in 50 mg/L initial dye concentration with pH of 9 in 60 minutes) was 55 and 60 percent, respectively. Comparison of prepared adsorbent in the laboratory and commercial ones in optimum condition have similar dye removal efficiency that means suitable and cheap adsorbent could be prepared in the laboratory. Removal efficiency of DB71 was also obtained 85 and 83 by the two walnut and peanut shells adsorbent powder, respectively. The results have also shown that amongst four isotherms of Langmuir, Freundlich, Temkin and Dubinin-radushkevich, Freundlich isotherm has the highest correlation coefficient which implying heterogeneous surface of adsorbent for both sorbents. It has also shown that the maximum surface adsorbent capacity for the monolayer of activated carbon of the walnut and peanut shells were 26 and 28 mg/gr, respectively. From the n values 3.58 and 3.72 of the Freundlich isotherm for both adsorbent of walnut and peanut shells, it could be concluded that physical adsorption process has been happened. The data could also indicate that pseudosecond- order was the best adsorption kinetics model for the two adsorbents