Nanopesticides: Current status and scope for their application in agriculture

Nanotechnology is a rapidly evolving field that has the potential to revolutionise food systems and counter the present-day challenge of food security. It envisages taking agriculture from the era of indiscriminate natural resource use and environmental degradation to the brave new world of advanced systems with enhanced material use efficiency and targeted applications to reduce crop losses caused due to abiotic-biotic stresses as well as to give due considerations to the environment. To manage plant diseases and insect pests, pesticides are inevitably used in agriculture. However, the higher dosage of these chemicals on a per hectare basis has resulted in many environmental and health hazards. To tackle the conventional pesticide related issues, a new field of science called nanotechnology has led to the development of nanopesticides that have less active ingredients, but better efficiency. The nanopesticides contain the carrier molecule or the active nanosized ingredient with a very high surface area to the volume property that provides them unique exploitable-advantages. Several formulations, viz., nanoemulsions, nanosuspensions, nanogels, metal compound-based nanopesticides, have been developed for different modes of action and vivid applications. The biggest advantage comes due to the small size of the particles that help in properly spreading the ingredients on the pest surface and, thus, producing a better action than conventional pesticides. The use of nanoparticles in the form of nanopesticides, nanofertilisers, and nano delivery systems is on the increase day by day due to their higher efficiency and reduced dosage requirements. However, human beings and other organisms are also getting exposed to the nano-entities during the application or afterwards. The interactions of these engineered nano-entities with biological systems are relatively unknown thus far. Therefore, before their wider usage in crop production and protection, a better understanding of their interactions, and adverse effects, if any, is also crucial for a sustainable transition.

Embeddings between Triebel-Lizorkin Spaces on Metric Spaces Associated with Operators

We consider the general framework of a metric measure space satisfying the doubling volume property, associated with a non-negative self-adjoint operator, whose heat kernel enjoys standard Gaussian localization. We prove embedding theorems between Triebel-Lizorkin spaces associated with operators. Embeddings for non-classical Triebel-Lizorkin and (both classical and non-classical) Besov spaces are proved as well. Our result generalize the Euclidean case and are new for many settings of independent interest such as the ball, the interval and Riemannian manifolds.

Correlation between the ion permeation and free volume property in ethyl cellulose film during the acid treatment

A correlation between the ion permeation and free-volume hole size was found by theoretical deduction and confirmed by the corresponding experiment.

Risk Assessment and Emergency Response of Oil Spill for Offshore Oil Activity

With the greatly development in offshore gas and oil activity in China, the potential risk of oil spill attract more public attentions. In order to effectively limit the spilling incidence and bring it under control, it is necessary to establish a risk assessment model for offshore petroleum activity and prepare the oil spill response resource in an effective way. In this paper, a quantified risk assessment model, including the spill probability and consequence assessment, was developed using fuzzy comprehensive method. The spill probability assessment was established with view of the operative manual and statistic leakage/damage data of different kinds of offshore petroleum facilities and operation; the consequence assessment was proposed to several factors including the spilling volume, property of spilled oil, spilling location and the elements of spilling detection and controlling capability of operator. Based on the result from risk assessment, we can identify the comprehensive spill risk level (low, ALARP, high) and make a decision whether the response resource allocated to the site could be enough. The multiply oil spill response devices and facilities, especially the oil recovery vessel, were largely used in China and will be expand in future.

Mechatronic Design of a Planar Parallel Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

The pneumatic actuation is widely used in robotics. The actuators based on pneumatic artificial muscles are unconventional actuation systems which use the shortening by increase of the volume property which generate an axial force. They have a very good force/volume ratio and some advantages compared with conventional pneumatic actuation. This paper presents the mechatronic design of a PRRRP Biglide planar parallel robot actuated by four artificial muscles in antagonist configuration. The control system is based on an 8-bit microcontroller based development board and the position and force control is made by means of pressure regulation using proportional pressure regulators. It was determined the workspace of PRRRP Biglide parallel robot for different strokes of actuators using discretisation method in Matlab environment.