Fe(III) hydroxide nanoparticles are an essential carrier for aqueous heavy metals. Particularly, iron hydroxide precipitation on mineral surfaces can immobilize aqueous heavy metals. Here, we used grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) to quantify nucleation and growth of iron hydroxide on quartz in 0.1 mM Fe(NO3)3 solution in the presence of Na+, Cu2+, Pb2+, or Cr3+ at pH = 3.7 ± 0.1. In 30 min, the average radii of gyration (Rg) of particles on quartz grew from around 2 to 6 nm in the presence of Na+ and Cu2+. Interestingly, the particle sizes remained 3.3 ± 0.3 nm in the presence of Pb2+, and few particles formed in the presence of Cr3+. Quartz crystal microbalance dissipation (QCM-D) measurements showed that only Cr3+ adsorbed onto quartz, while Cu2+ and Pb2+ did not. Cr3+ adsorption changed the surface charge of quartz from negative to positive, thus inhibiting the precipitation of positively charged iron hydroxide on quartz. Masses and compositions of the precipitates were also quantified. This study provided new insights on interactions among quartz, iron hydroxide, and metal ions. Such information is helpful not only for environmental remediation but also for the doping design of iron oxide catalysts.
There are two sides to every story of visual saliency modeling in the frequency domain. On the one hand, image saliency can be effectively estimated by applying simple operations to the frequency spectrum. On the other hand, it is still unclear which part of the frequency spectrum contributes the most to popping-out targets and suppressing distractors. Toward this end, this paper tentatively explores the secret of image saliency in the frequency domain. From the results obtained in several qualitative and quantitative experiments, we find that the secret of visual saliency may mainly hide in the phases of intermediate frequencies. To explain this finding, we reinterpret the concept of discrete Fourier transform from the perspective of template-based contrast computation and thus develop several principles for designing the saliency detector in the frequency domain. Following these principles, we propose a novel approach to design the saliency detector under the assistance of prior knowledge obtained through both unsupervised and supervised learning processes. Experimental results on a public image benchmark show that the learned saliency detector outperforms 18 state-of-the-art approaches in predicting human fixations.
Morphology control of solution coated solar cell materials presents a key challenge limiting their device performance and commercial viability. Here we present a new concept for controlling phase separation during solution printing using an all-polymer bulk heterojunction solar cell as a model system. The key aspect of our method lies in the design of fluid flow using a microstructured printing blade, on the basis of the hypothesis of flow-induced polymer crystallization. Our flow design resulted in a similar to 90% increase in the donor thin film crystallinity and reduced microphase separated donor and acceptor domain sizes. The improved morphology enhanced all metrics of solar cell device performance across various printing conditions, specifically leading to higher short-circuit current, fill factor, open circuit voltage and significantly reduced device-to-device variation. We expect our design concept to have broad applications beyond all-polymer solar cells because of its simplicity and versatility.