Glasses with the mol% composition 17Y 2 O 3 ?33Al 2 O 3 ?40SiO 2 ?2AlF 3 ?3Na 2 O?2CeF 3 ?3B 2 O 3 were thermally annealed at 1000 uC for different periods of time. This resulted in the surface nucleation and subsequent growth of Ce 3+ -doped yttrium aluminium garnet (YAG) which shows an intense broadband fluorescence.In the bulk, the nucleation and subsequent growth of an X-ray amorphous star-shaped and alumina enriched phase leads to a depletion of alumina from the glass. The nucleation of monoclinic and orthorhombic Y 2 Si 2 O 7 adjacent to the YAG layer is observed in addition to pore formation. These pores serve as centres for enhanced nucleation near the surface. The nucleation and growth of the orthorhombic phase and a different monoclinic Y 2 Si 2 O 7 are additionally observed in the bulk. The phase identification and localization was performed by X-ray diffraction and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD).

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Saponification of oils which is a commercially important heterogeneous reaction, can be speeded up by the application of ultrasound in the presence of phase-transfer catalyst (PTC). This paper focuses on the ability of ultrasound to cause efficient mixing of this liquid-liquid heterogeneous reaction. Castor oil was taken as a model oil and the kinetic of the reaction was followed by the extent of saponification. The hydrolysis of castor oil was carried out with different PTC such as cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB), benzyl triethyl ammonium chloride (BTAC) and tetrabutyl ammonium bromide (TBAB) in aqueous alkaline solution. As hydroxyl anion moves very slowly from aqueous to oil phase, the presence of a PTC is of prime importance. For this purpose, cationic surfactants are selected. The sonication of biphasic system were performed by 20 kHz (simple horn and cup horn) and 900 kHz. It was found that CTAB was better than the two others and this could be related to the molecular structure of the PTCs. The effect of temperature was also studied on the saponification process. By increasing the temperature, the yield was also increased and this could be explained by intermolecular forces, interfacial tension and mass transfer. Saponification of three different vegetable oils shows that the almond oil is saponified easier than the two others and this could be related to their properties such as surface tension, viscosity and density.

BackgroundThe complexity of reactions and kinetic is the current problem of photodegradation processes. Recently, artificial neural networks have been widely used to solve the problems because of their reliable, robust, and salient characteristics in capturing the non-linear relationships between variables in complex systems. In this study, an artificial neural network was applied for modeling p-cresol photodegradation. To optimize the network, the independent variables including irradiation time, pH, photocatalyst amount and concentration of p-cresol were used as the input parameters, while the photodegradation% was selected as output. The photodegradation% was obtained from the performance of the experimental design of the variables under UV irradiation. The network was trained by Quick propagation (QP) and the other three algorithms as a model. To determine the number of hidden layer nodes in the model, the root mean squared error of testing set was minimized. After minimizing the error, the topologies of the algorithms were compared by coefficient of determination and absolute average deviation.ResultsThe comparison indicated that the Quick propagation algorithm had minimum root mean squared error, 1.3995, absolute average deviation, 3.0478, and maximum coefficient of determination, 0.9752, for the testing data set. The validation test results of the artificial neural network based on QP indicated that the root mean squared error was 4.11, absolute average deviation was 8.071 and the maximum coefficient of determination was 0.97.ConclusionArtificial neural network based on Quick propagation algorithm with topology 4-10-1 gave the best performance in this study.

A glass with the mol % composition 23.82 Y2O3·39.82 Al2O3·28.50 SiO2·2.91AlF3·4.95 ZrO2 doped with 2 mol % CeF3 is crystallized at 1250 °C for 20 h. The crystallized samples are studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD), the SEM-based methods EBSD and EDX, as well as fluorescence microscopy. Six crystalline phases are detected in the residual glass including alumina, YAG, Y-stabilized zirconia (YSZ), and three different yttrium silicates of the composition Y2Si2O7. Chemistry-assisted indexing (ChI) is successfully applied to separate YAG and YSZ in EBSD-scans. YAG displays polygon as well as dendritic growth. Some crystals show both mechanisms at opposite ends, indicating that the growth mechanism is influenced by the chemistry of the surrounding glass matrix.