Conversion of Soybean oil to Biodiesel Fuel with Immobilized Candida Lipase on Textile Cloth

The characteristic of biodiesel fuel production from transesterification of soybean oil is studied. The reactant solution is the mixture of soybean oil, methanol, and solvent. A new lipase immobilization method, textile cloth immobilization, was developed in this study. Immobilized Candida lipase sp. 99-125 was applied as the enzyme catalyst. The effect of flow rate of reaction liquid, solvents, reaction time, and water content on the biodiesel yield is investigated. Products analysis shows that the main components in biodiesel are methyl sterate, methyl hexadecanoate, methyl oleate, methyl linoleate, and methyl linolenate. The test results indicate that the maximum yield of biodiesel of 92% was obtained at the conditions of hexane being the solvent, water content being 20 wt%, and reaction time being 24 h.

Upgrading bio-oil over different solid catalysts

Solid acid 40SiO(2)/TiO2-SO42- and solid base 30K(2)CO(3)/Al2O3-NaOH were prepared and compared with catalytic esterification activity according to the model reaction. Upgrading bio-oil by solid acid and solid base catalysts in the conditioned experiment was investigated, in which dynamic viscosities of bio-oil was lowered markedly, although 8 months of aging did not show much viscosity to improve its fluidity and enhance its stability positively. Even the dehydration by 3A molecular sieve still kept the fluidity well. The density of upgraded bio-oil was reduced from 1.24 to 0.96 kg/m(3), and the gross calorific value increased by 50.7 and 51.8%, respectively. The acidity of upgraded bio-oil was alleviated by the solid base catalyst but intensified by the solid acid catalyst for its strong acidification. The results of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis showed that the ester reaction in the bio-oil was promoted by both solid acid and solid base catalysts and that the solid acid catalyst converted volatile and nonvolatile organic acids into esters and raised their amount by 20-fold. Besides the catalytic esterification, the solid acid catalyst carried out the carbonyl addition of alcohol to acetals. Some components of bio-oil undertook the isomerization over the solid base catalyst.

Controllable negative and positive group delay in transmission through a single quantum well at finite magnetic fields

We investigate the controllable negative and positive group delay in transmission through a single quantum well at the finite longitudinal magnetic fields. It is shown that the magneto-coupling effect between the longitudinal motion component and the transverse Landau orbits plays an important role in the group delay. The group delay depends not only on the width of potential well and the incident energy, but also on the magnetic-field strengthen and the Landau quantum number. The results show that the group delay can be changed from positive to negative by the modulation of the magnetic field. These interesting phenomena may lead to the tunable quantum mechanical delay line. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Coherent laser control in attosecond sum-frequency polarization beats using twin noisy driving fields

Based on the phase-conjugate polarization interference between two-pathway excitations, we obtained an analytic closed form for the second-order or fourth-order Markovian stochastic correlation of the V three-level sum-frequency polarization beat (SFPB) in attosecond scale. Novel interferometric oscillatory behavior is exposed in terms of radiation-radiation, radiation-matter, and matter-matter polarization beats. The phase-coherent control of the light beams in the SFPB is subtle. When the laser has broadband linewidth, the homodyne detected SFPB signal shows resonant-nonresonant cross correlation, a drastic difference for three Markovian stochastic fields, and the autocorrelation of the SFPB exhibits hybrid radiation-matter detuning terahertz damping oscillation. As an attosecond ultrafast modulation process, it can be extended intrinsically to any sum frequency of energy levels. It has been also found that the asymmetric behaviors of the polarization beat signals due to the unbalanced controllable dispersion effects between the two arms of interferometer do not affect the overall accuracy in case using the SFPB to measure the Doppler-free energy-level sum of two excited states.

Magnetoexcitonic optical absorption in semiconductors under strong magnetic fields and intense terahertz radiation in the Voigt configuration

The magnetoexcitonic optical absorption of a GaAs bulk semiconductor driven by a terahertz (THz) field is investigated numerically. The method of the solution of the initial-value problem, in combination with the perfect matched layer technique, is used to calculate the optical susceptibility, with Coulomb interaction, Landau quantization, and THz fields involved nonperturbatively. It shows that there appear replicas and sidebands of magnetoexciton of different Landau levels, which greatly enrich the magneto-optical spectrum in the presence of a driving THz field. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2008.

COHERENT MODEL FOR RESONANT-TUNNELING OF ELECTRONS IN DOUBLE-QUANTUM WELLS UNDER ELECTRIC-FIELDS

Taking the inhomogenous broadening of the electron energy levels into account, a coherent model of the resonant tunneling (RT) of electrons in double quantum wells is presented. The validity of the model is confirmed with the experiments [M. Nido et al., Proc. SPIE 1268, 177 (1990)], and shows that the tunneling process can be explained by the simple coherent theory even in the presence of the carrier scattering. We have discussed the dependence of resonant tunneling on the barrier thickness L(B) by introducing the contrast ratio LAMBDA and the full width at half depth of the RT valley, and found that LAMBDA first increases with increasing barrier thickness, reaches a maximum, and then decreases with a further increase of L(B), in striking contrast to the Fabry-Perot model where a monotonic increase of the peak-to-valley ratio is predicted. We attribute the reduction of LAMBDA with large L(B) to the energy broadening resulting from the carrier scattering. A monotonic decrease of the full width at half depth of the RT valley with an increase of L(R) is also found.

A NEW METHOD FOR MEASURING THE EFFECTIVE DIFFUSION CONSTANT OF 2-DIMENSIONAL ELECTRONS IN THE PRESENCE OF MAGNETIC-FIELDS

The transient charge response Q(t) of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs heterostructures to a small pulse of the gate voltage, applied between the top gate and source electrodes in a Corbino structure, was employed to directly measure the effective diffusion constant of a 2DEG in the quantum Hall regime. The measured diffusion constant D showed a drastic change as the magnetic field was swept through the integer fillings of the Landau levels.