Publications related to Benchmark thermochemistry of chloramines, bromamines, and bromochloramines: Halogen oxidants stabilized by electron correlation

Acids from fruits generate photoactive Fe-complexes, enhancing solar disinfection of water (SODIS): A systematic study of the novel " fruto-Fenton " process, effective over a wide pH range (4-9)

César Pulgarin, Aline Laetitia Schaub, Stefanos Giannakis, Giulio Farinelli, Mona Kohantorabi

This study aimed to enhance solar disinfection (SODIS) by the photo-Fenton process, operated at natural pH, through the re-utilization of fruit wastes. For this purpose, pure organic acids present in fruits and alimentary wastes were tested and compared wi ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Ion Spectroscopy Reveals Structural Difference for Proteins Microhydrated by Retention and Condensation of Water

Oleg Boyarkine, Andrei Zviagin

Protein ubiquitin in its +7 charge state microhydrated by 5 and 10 water molecules has been interrogated in the gas phase by cold ion UV/IR spectroscopy. The complexes were formed either by condensing water onto the unfolded bare proteins in a temperature- ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

Oxidation processes and me

Urs von Gunten

This publication summarizes my journey in the field of chemical oxidation processes for water treatment over the last 30+ years. Initially, the efficiency of the application of chemical oxidants for micropollutant abatement was assessed by the abatement of ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Collective motion in a sheet of microswimmers

Viktor Skultéty

Self-propelled particles such as bacteria or algae swimming through a fluid are non-equilibrium systems where particle motility breaks microscopic detailed balance, often resulting in large-scale collective motion. Previous theoretical work has identified ...

Nature Portfolio2024

A novel fatigue life prediction methodology based on energy dissipation in viscoelastic materials, synergistic effects of stress level, stress ratio, and temperature

Thomas Keller, Abdolvahid Movahedirad, Lulu Liu

This work introduces a new methodology to predict the fatigue life of viscoelastic materials by considering the creep effect on fatigue behavior under the concurrent effects of stress level, stress ratio, and temperature. The model established based on the ...

2024

Encoding quantum-chemical knowledge into machine-learning models of complex molecular properties

Ksenia Briling

Statistical (machine-learning, ML) models are more and more often used in computational chemistry as a substitute to more expensive ab initio and parametrizable methods. While the ML algorithms are capable of learning physical laws implicitly from data, ad ...

EPFL2024

Efficient and insightful descriptors for representing molecular and material space

Alexander Jan Goscinski

Data-driven approaches have been applied to reduce the cost of accurate computational studies on materials, by using only a small number of expensive reference electronic structure calculations for a representative subset of the materials space, and using ...

EPFL2024

Magnetism of Single Surface Adsorbed Atoms Studied with Radio-Frequency STM

Clément Marie Soulard

This thesis investigates the magnetic properties of single atoms and molecules adsorbed on thin magnesium oxide decoupling layers, grown on a silver single crystal. To address these systems experimentally, we use a low temperature scanning tunneling micros ...

EPFL2024

Plasmonically enhanced molecular junctions for investigation of atomic-scale fluctuations in self-assembled monolayers

Sakthi Priya Amirtharaj

Molecular junctions represent a fascinating frontier in the realm of nanotechnology and are one of the smallest optoelectronic devices possible, consisting of individual molecules or a group of molecules that serve as the active element sandwiched between ...

EPFL2024

Mixed ionic-electronic conduction in Ruddlesden-Popper and Dion-Jacobson layered hybrid perovskites with aromatic organic spacers

Michael Graetzel, Davide Moia, Joachim Maier, Jovana Milic, Algirdas Ducinskas, Mina Jung

The understanding of mixed ionic-electronic conductivity in hybrid perovskites has enabled major advances in the development of optoelectronic devices based on this class of materials. While recent investigations revealed the potential of using dimensional ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2024

Localized Ionic Reinforcement of Double Network Granular Hydrogels

Esther Amstad, Alexandra Thoma

Nature produces soft materials with fascinating combinations of mechanical properties. For example, the mussel byssus embodies a combination of stiffness and toughness, a feature that is unmatched by synthetic hydrogels. Key to enabling these excellent mec ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2024

Reactivity of Cyanobacteria Metabolites with Ozone: Multicompound Competition Kinetics

Urs von Gunten

Cyanobacterial blooms occur at increasing frequency and intensity, notably in freshwater. This leads to the introduction of complex mixtures of their products, i.e., cyano-metabolites, to drinking water treatment plants. To assess the fate of cyano-metabol ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

The Mn(VII)-H2O2 oxidation process: Abatement of electron-deficient N-containing organic compounds

Urs von Gunten, Ke Xu

Chemical oxidants applied in water treatment are electrophiles, which preferentially attack sites with higher electron density. This typically results in less efficient oxidative abatement of organic compounds with electronwithdrawing substituents. In this ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Computational Homogenization for Inverse Design of Surface-based Inflatables

Mark Pauly, Francis Julian Panetta, Uday Kusupati, Yingying Ren, Florin Isvoranu, Seiichi Eduardo Suzuki Erazo

Surface-based inflatables are composed of two thin layers of nearly inextensible sheet material joined together along carefully selected fusing curves. During inflation, pressure forces separate the two sheets to maximize the enclosed volume. The fusing c ...

2024

Oxidative Water Treatment: The Track Ahead

Urs von Gunten, Yun Ho Lee

Chemical oxidation has been applied in municipal water treatment for more than a century, initially for disinfection. In the early decades, chlorine disinfection was adopted in the fight against waterborne disease. However, the oxidative properties of chlo ...

2023

Growth and investigation of Argon thin films adsorbed on graphite by means of Ultrafast Electron Diffraction

Paolo Usai

Starting from our big universe to the microscopic world, phase transitions play an important role in nature. Just after the Big Bang our universe experienced multiple phase transitions, from high-temperature plasma to the matter we know today. Phase transi ...

EPFL2023

Inactivation of coxsackievirus B5 by free chlorine under conditions relevant to drinking water treatment

Shotaro Torii

Chlorine disinfection is commonly applied to inactivate pathogenic viruses in drinking water treatment plants. However, the role of water quality in chlorine disinfection of viruses has not been investigated thoughtfully. In this study, we investigated the ...

IWA PUBLISHING2023

Mechanistic insights on interactions of dissolved organic matter with chemical oxidants: quantification of reactive sites and identification of oxidation byproducts

Joanna Maria Houska

Chemical oxidants including ozone (O3), chlorine (HOCl/OCl-) and chlorine dioxide (ClO2) are applied for disinfection of drinking water. To cope with water scarcity and the increased risks associated with the presence of micropollutants, water treatment sy ...

EPFL2023

The influence of the gas on the dynamics of cavitation bubbles

Davide Bernardo Preso

Cavitation bubbles, extensively investigated in fluid mechanics, present enduring challenges in hydraulic machinery, while holding considerable potential for practical applications in biomedicine and sonochemistry. Despite more than a century of research, ...

EPFL2023

Why five decades of massive research on heterogeneous photocatalysis, especially on TiO2, has not yet driven to water disinfection and detoxification applications? Critical review of drawbacks and challenges

César Pulgarin, Julian Andrés Rengifo Herrera

For fifty years, heterogeneous photocatalysis has been considered as having potential to remove organic and microbiological pollutants from water under either artificial UV light or sunlight irradiation. However, after tens of thousands of published resear ...

Elsevier Science Sa2023