Physico-chemical water quality parameters and nutrient levels such as water temperature, turbidity, saturated oxygen, dissolved oxygen, pH, chlorophyll-a, salinity, conductivity, total nitrogen and total phosphorus, were measured from April to September 2011 in the Karaj dam area, Iran. Total nitrogen in water was modelled using an artificial neural network system. In the proposed system, water temperature, depth, saturated oxygen, dissolved oxygen, pH, chlorophyll-a, salinity, turbidity and conductivity were considered as input data, and the total nitrogen in water was considered as output. The weights and biases for various systems were obtained by the quick propagation, batch back propagation, incremental back propagation, genetic and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms. The proposed system uses 144 experimental data points; 70% of the experimental data are randomly selected for training the network and 30% of the data are used for testing. The best network topology was obtained as (9-5-1) using the quick propagation method with tangent transform function. The average absolute deviation percentages (AAD%) are 2.329 and 2.301 for training and testing processes, respectively. It is emphasized that the results of the artificial neural network (ANN) model are compatible with the experimental data.

Colored wastewater is the most important problem of textile manufacturing factories, because it contains pollutants with complex structure and toxic, carcinogenic, and mutagenic properties which are non-biodegradable and sustainable in the environment. Reactive Red 198 (RR198) is one of the types of azo dyes which are widely used in the textile industries. Therefore, in this study, the rate of degradation and mineralization of RR198 by UV/US/H2O2/O3 hybrid process was investigated. Influencing factors including: initial dye concentration (100, 200, 300, 400, 500 mg/L), contact time (12.5, 30, 47.5, 65, 82.5 min), pH (3, 5, 7, 9, 11), UV (125-W), H2O2 (10, 20, 30, 40, 50 mg/L), US (160 KHz) and O3 (33 mg/(L·min)) on the removal and mineralization efficiency of RR198 were investigated. Optimization and modeling of the process was done by CCD method. Based on the results of ANOVA analysis, most effective parameters on the RR198 removal efficiency were ozone, US, UV, time, initial dye concentration, pH, and H2O2, respectively, with an impact percentage of 96.86 and less than 1% for ozone and the rest parameters, respectively. Highest removal efficiency of RR198 was obtained by UV/US/H2O2/O3 hybrid process. Optimal conditions for dye removal including: initial dye concentration of 200 mg/L, reaction time of 34 min, H2O2 concentration of 27 mg/L and pH of seven were determined in the presence of ozone gas, UV, and US waves. In these conditions, the removal efficiency of RR198 and TOC were estimated to be 100 and 40.5, respectively. UV/US/H2O2/O3 hybrid process as an advanced oxidation process (AOP) with advantages such as high performance and speed, no sludge production and toxic residues in the treated effluent containing hard biodegradable compounds such as RR198 from aqueous solutions, so can be recommended and used.

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Air pollution is of factors leading to disturbance in nervous system while its acute neurological effects have not been completely studied. In metropolis, communities experience various social problems caused by air pollution such as retardate, academic disability, and increasing crime rate due to disturbed cognitive functions of children and vulnerable generation without being aware of the effect of air pollution on perception power of human. In this research, the published researches in 2017 available in database and publishers of valid scientific publications such as PubMed and Elsevier were reviewed then 11 related papers were selected to check and criticize their methodology, research instruments and results. Results indicated that the review researches employed various tests and instruments to assess cognitive functions, but most of them obtained similar results introducing disturbing and preventive effect of air pollution on mental functions; however, these studies did not determine the prominent effect of each air pollutant factor on specific area of brain and effect of genetic and environmental background of individuals. Moreover, valid and authentic tests were not employed in many of these papers to assess cognitive function and perception power, while validity and reliability of each of cognitive function tests have been determined and proved to assess the function of specific part of brain.