The objective of this work is to experimentally study the consequence of blending lower order alcohol (methanol and ethanol) with jatropha oil methyl ester (JOME) in a single cylinder, four stroke and watercooled CI engine. 70% JOME blended with 30% methanol (J70M30) and 70% JOME blended with 30% ethanol (J70E30) are the two blends prepared to operate the engine. Experiments were conducted from 0 to 100% load at a fixed engine speed of 1500 rpm and the results were compared with base fuels. Due to the inferior physical properties of JOME, brake thermal efficiency (BTE) decreases compared to diesel at maximum load. Also, NO emissions increased by 4% and smoke opacity decreases by 10% while operating the engine with JOME compared to diesel. Simultaneous reduction of NO and smoke is achieved by blending lower order alcohol with JOME and a slight improvement in BTE is observed.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a bacteria which can live in freshwater, soil and plants. It is a commensal of the digestive tube, slightly abundant in human body. Its presence in wells water is a result of current anthropogenic activity and pollution loads. It is an important nosocomial pathogenic agent characterized by an intrinsic resistance to multiple antimicrobial agents which can develop high-level multidrug resistance. To assess the contamination of these well waters by this pathogenic germ, two hundred samples were collected for four seasonal campaigns between March 2017 and May 2018 with a rate of forty three (43) samples per season in an irrigated zone. The samples were analysed to identify P. aeruginosa, then the isolated serotypes were determined by slid agglutination test using four pools and 20 monovalent Antisera. The detected P. aeruginosa were tested for susceptibility to 18 antibiotics. A total of (n=85/139) isolated strains were identified as P. aeruginosa representing 61.15 % of prevalence among Pseudomonas spp. Antimicrobial resistance revealed that 68% of them are multidrug resistant, while15.09 % of strains resist at least to 7 antibiotics, 30.19% resist at least to 11 antibiotics, 13.21% resist at least to 12 antibiotics, 5.66% resist at least to 13 antibiotics, and 3.77% resist at least to 14 antibiotics. The high level resistance of P. aeruginosa is observed with piperacillin tazobactam (100/10μg) (84.91%), ciprofloxacin (5μg) (79.25%), imipenem (10μg) and ceftazidime (30μg) (37.58%). The resistance of phenotypes of P. aeruginosa strains allowed to identify (n=20/85) ESBL, (n=31/85) oxacillinase broad spectrum ES-OXA, (n=5/85) phenotype of impermeability to imipenem, (n=12/85) cephalosporinase AMPC, and (n=17/85) wild type. The results showed the high antibiotic resistance levels of P. aeruginosa strains from well water samples against antibiotics. Furthermore, based on the results, these well waters can be a source of P. aeruginosa and human and animal susceptibility to other opportunistic pathogens.

Plankton diversity acts as an ecological indicator of aquatic ecosystems due to their rapid response to environmental changes. Plankton samples were collected monthly for a period of 24 months. A total of 35 genera of phytoplankton belonging to three classes, Bacillariophyceae (21 genera), Chlorophyceae (9 genera) and Cyanophyceae (5 genera) were found. The abundance of phytoplankton was in the order, Bacillariophyceae (83%) followed by Chlorophyceae (9%) and Cyanophyceae (8%). Maximum phytoplankton density in winter season was attributed to the low water temperature, gentle water velocity, high transparency, availability of sufficient nutrients and most stable substratum. Eight genera of zooplankton belonging to three major groups, Protozoa (2 genera), Rotifera (5 genera) and Copepoda (1 genus) was recorded. Shannon-Wiener diversity index of phytoplankton and zooplankton was computed maximum to be 2.61 and 1.56 respectively in the winter season. PCA indicates Cymbella, Navicula, Synedra, Cocconeis, Achnanthidium, Amphora, Nitzschia, Tabellaria, Fragilaria, Ulothrix, Spirogyra and Phormidium to be most dominant genera in the Mandakini river. Total alkalinity, water temperature, transparency, velocity, dissolved oxygen, free carbon dioxide, turbidity, phosphate and nitrate were found to be the most important factors affecting plankton diversity in the Mandakini river.

In this paper, with different types of optimal surfactant monomers and potentiators mixed, the optimum formula of the new surfactant was obtained. The new surfactant with low toxicity, low cost and good dust removal effect was developed by the simulated flue gas experiment and verified the removal efficiency of the new surfactant on the particulate matter in the flue gas. It provided a reference for the industrial application in ultra-low emission of coal smoke. The results showed that the new surfactant could effectively reduce particulate matter in the simulated flue gas, and be the best to the dust particle size less than or equal to 1 micron. The optimum formula was worked out to be: anionic surfactant sodium dodecylbenzene-sulfonate (SDBS) 0.06%, anionic surfactant rapid penetrant T 0.06% and inorganic salt NaCl 1%.

Nowadays, water pollution is a part of the major environmental problems. Industrial sewage that does not meet the emission standards will pollute the surface water and groundwater when it is discharged into water bodies, causing serious adverse impacts on human beings and environment. In view of industrial sewage privately discharged without properly monitoring, we present a method for detection of sewage discharge using clustering and differential analysis on image sequences derived from satellite photos taken when focusing on a certain place. The proposed method helps to indicate key images containing sewage, make the sewage area and leave evidence for the retrospective incident. Clustering based on the search of fast density peaks is used for detecting images containing sewage. In addition, two sample’s t-test and Fisher linear discriminant analysis are combined to extract the key pixels representing the area of sewage discharge. Experiments were made on 200 images corresponding to a certain area at different times of the day and 25 key frames with areas labelled to be sewage discharge were extracted, which indicated the effectiveness of this method.

Dyes are important source of water pollution and their degradation products may be carcinogens and toxic to mammals. For evaluation of oxidative degradation of dye wastewater, the kaolinite supported zero valent iron were synthesized. The surface morphology of kaolinite and kaolinite supported zero valent iron were observed with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The degradation of dye C.I. Reactive Red 15 in aqueous solution by kaolinite supported zero valent iron was investigated in details. The effects of the dosage of kaolinite supported zero valent iron, pH in solution, reaction time and the initial dye concentration on the degradation were studied. The results showed that the pH value, the dosage of kaolinite supported zero valent iron and the initial dye concentration had an important impact on dye degradation. Under these conditions, such as 80 mg/L dye C.I. Reactive Red 15, 20 min of reaction time, 0.5 g kaolinite supported zero valent iron particles, pH value of 2.0, temperature of 308 K and 120 rpm respectively, the degradation rate of dye C.I. Reactive Red 15 reached 82.3%.

China’s transportation industry holds high energy consumption. The energy consumption of China’s transportation industry climbs up gradually with progress in urbanization and growing volume of passenger and freight traffic, which causes heavy environmental pollution. Improving energy efficiency is an important factor and management goal that influences the sustainable development of the transportation industry. In this study, an energy efficiency evaluation system of transportation industry was initially constructed, and the three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model was adopted to estimate the energy efficiency of China’s transportation industry during 2001-2016. Subsequently, environmental variables were introduced to further perfect the calculation results. Results demonstrate that the technical efficiency (TE) of China’s transportation industry is 1 in 6 years during the study period in the traditional DEA model, reaching the technological frontier level. TE still has a large potential for improvement. The input redundancy of energy efficiency in China’s transportation industry may increase as per capita gross domestic product increases. However, such input can be effectively decreased by increasing the total export-import volume and total retail sales of consumer goods. After eliminating environmental and random factors, the low energy efficiency of China’s transportation industry is mainly caused by scale inefficiency. Conclusions in this study can provide theoretical references to understand and improve the energy efficiency of the transportation industry and thus formulate effective transportation energy and environmental policies.

There are no recognized data about the relationships between soil organic carbon and soil texture in Northern Agriculture Region (NAR), Western Australia (WA). Such information is central in understanding the impact of silt and clay content of soil profile soil organic carbon. In order to describe mathematically this relation, twenty-one soil orders highly weathered soils (mostly sandy soils) in Northern Agricultural Region, Western Australia under similar climate, vegetation and topography were sampled at 120 cm depth and analyzed for texture and total SOC concentration. The SOC concentration was directly and linearly correlated with the combined clay + silt (but not to clay alone) content for all depths. The intercept and slope of these linear relations decreased with depth following exponential and logarithmic functions (P < 0.001, R2 = 0.81 and 0.76, respectively). These mathematical functions permitted the adjustment of the intercept and slope parameters of a SOC = a + b (clay + silt) function for any depth in the 0-120 cm interval. This profile pedotransfer function precisely estimated SOC concentration (P < 0.0001, R2 = 0.90) up to 120 cm of the studied soils. Using data from different soil orders, estimated vs. measured SOC relations with similarly high R2 values were obtained, despite slopes and intercepts were different than 1 and 0. This indicates that for the NAR, WA the textural control of SOC varies predictably with depth, and the proposed model can be calibrated to estimate SOC in subsurface layers of highly weathered soils.

Climate change ordinarily indicates a change in behaviour of the weather elements over an area during a time span. The change is attributable directly or indirectly to human activities or the natural causes that have the effect of altering the atmospheric composition. One aspect of this complexity is that climate change will impact unevenly across the ecosystems that prove vulnerable to climate changes. Biodiversity means variation of life forms within a given ecosystem. The present work attempts to trace down the nature of interrelationship between the climate change and faunal biodiversity especially with regard to rainfall variations in Nallamala forest (Kurnool district) of Andhra Pradesh. Rainfall is also one of the limiting factors of the species expansion that determines its distribution in boundaries of the area. The trend of rainfall time-series data indicates a decreasing trend in the rainfall pattern over forest and agricultural and grassland areas from 2014 along with northern, central and southern Western Ghats.

In this study, the structural characteristics of the attached microbial community during biofilm formation and the metabolic requirements under anaerobic conditions were evaluated. In particular, 16S rDNA sequencing technology was used to study the structural changes of the attached microbial community during biofilm formation (day 0, 10, 20, and 30) in an aquaculture system, and Biolog microplate technology was used to study metabolic characteristics under anaerobic conditions during biofilm formation. The AWCD (average well colour development), an indicator of carbon metabolism, of attached microorganisms during biofilm formation under anaerobic conditions differed significantly among time points (P < 0.05), and the carbon source utilization capacity was enhanced. Under anaerobic conditions during biofilm formation, the utilization of amines in six major carbon sources was the highest, followed by polymers, carbohydrates, amino acids, and carboxylic acids, and the utilization of phenols was the lowest. Under anaerobic conditions, the utilization rate by the attached microorganisms during biofilm formation was highest for Tween 40, followed by Tween 80, D-xylose, 4-hydroxybenzoic acid, α-D-glucose-1-phosphate, L-phenylalanine, and phenylethylamine. The 16s rDNA sequencing results showed that the dominant phyla of attached microorganisms during biofilm formation were mainly Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Cyanobacteria. On the 10th and 20th days of biofilm formation, attached microorganisms were enriched for Rhodobacter of α-Proteobacteria and Janthinobacterium of β-Proteobacteria, which play important roles in biofilm denitrification. However, on the 30th day, enriched bacteria included the Burkholderiales of β-Proteobacteria, the Xanthomonadaceae and Thermomonas of γ- Proteobacteria, which function in cyanide decomposition.