Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Green Belt Recipe for Reduced Pollution

Plantation or green belt (GB) grown around the factories and industrial premises improves the condition of land, mitigates air pollution (as the plants serve as a sink for pollutants and check the flow of dust, etc.), and reduces the level of noise pollution, claims a joint research team from Kolkata and Nagpur. The researchers have done the assessment of green belts of 500-m width in and around a petroleum refinery in the west coast of India.

For the study, they developed software and ran computer-based models using species of deciduous trees existing in the region. The researchers have found that the green belt has been good at reducing pollution and its overall efficiency was more than 60 per cent. The findings of the study have been published in a recent issue of Environment Monitoring Assessment.

Friday, September 04, 2009

Ultrafast Optical Switch

Indian researchers have made ultrafast optical switches using double-walled carbon nanotubes. They used pristine and molybdenum filled double walled carbon nanotubes (DWNTs) suspended in heavy water. Such designed DWNTs show excellent ultrafast optical switching properties using extremely short pulses of energy that lasts for 50 femtoseconds.

One femtosecond is a millionth of a nanosecond, which is one billionth of a second. DWNTs, two carbon atoms thick, yet conduct electricity. This quality makes them well-suited for advanced solar panels, sensors and a host of other applications. The findings of the study have been published in the 26th August 2009 issue Applied Physics Letters.
Optical Fibre on New Turf

Optical fibre has already been hailed for its role in revolutionizing communication. Now, researchers take optical fibre to new domain of application. An Indian research team has designed an analytical method using optical fibre. The fibre-optic part accommodates sample volume of 1 microlitre placed between the two ends of optical fibres.

LPME (Liquid-phase microextraction) using 25–30 microlitre of organic solvent was found to produce more sensitive results than SDME (single drop microextraction). The new technique as used in combination with sample handling techniques produced limits of detection of analytes which were better than obtained by previously reported spectrophotometry. The findings of the study have been published in the 26th August 2009 issue of Analytica Chimica Acta.