Eng

This study evaluates the life cycle assessment (LCA) of Lufenuron 50-EC pesticide adsorption from aqueous solution using oil palm shell (OPS)-derived activated carbon produced through two activation routes: physical and chemical. The assessment covers environmental impacts associated with feedstock collection, transportation, pre-processing, and post-processing stages involved in producing activated carbon for pesticide removal. The cradle-to-grave LCA technique was applied using the ELCD 3.2 Greendelta v2.18 database and processed with OpenLCA v2.4 using CML-IA baseline method to perform the quantitative life cycle impact assessment. The results for treating 1 m³ of contaminated water show that physical activation route (Route 1) generates a higher environmental burden across all evaluated impact categories compared to chemical route (Route 2). Notably, global warming potential (GWP) reached 117.62 kg CO₂ eq for Route 1 compared to 75.86 kg CO₂ eq for Route 2. This represents a 35.5% reduction with the chemical route, suggesting that the high energy demand associated with thermal process in physical activation generates more significant greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, this study helped identify critical performance points and opportunities for improvement in converting the OPS to an activated carbon transformation process and its application in pesticide contamination control.

This study develops a Pore-Prior and Progressive-Sampling Transformer architecture, termed PPFormer, for the laboratory-scale analysis of microscopic remaining-oil images acquired from photolithographic glass-micromodel displacement experiments. The architecture integrates pore-prior embedding, progressive sampling of morphology-sensitive tokens, multi-scale self-attention encoding, relative position encoding, and boundary-enhanced decoding. PPFormer identifies five microscopic remaining-oil morphologies: cluster-like remaining oil, columnar remaining oil, droplet-like remaining oil, film-like remaining oil, and blind-end remaining oil. Under the investigated experimental conditions, the model achieved an overall pixel accuracy of 93.6%. The resulting morphology identification maps were used for pore-space-normalized area characterization and displacement-efficiency analysis under three permeability conditions and four displacement strategies. Relative to conventional waterflooding, the area-reduction ranges of cluster-like remaining oil, columnar remaining oil, and droplet-like remaining oil were from 2.29% to 12.66%, from −0.46% to 21.86%, and from 0.09% to 10.75%, respectively. Film-like remaining oil and blind-end remaining oil exhibited smaller changes, ranging from −0.50% to 8.19% and from −0.59% to 5.39%, respectively. Uncertainty was evaluated across independent replicate runs and by comparing predicted masks with consensus ground-truth masks.

Water damage under the coupled effects of traffic load and pore water pressure (PWP) is a primary cause of early failure in asphalt pavements. Although dense-graded pavements generally have low void ratios, excess PWP poses a severe threat to durability under extreme conditions. These conditions include heavy rainfall, water accumulation in wheel tracks, and upward capillary water rise. In this study, a mesoscopic model considering fluid–solid coupling effects was established using the Particle Flow Code in the 2 Dimensions (PFC2D) platform, which is based on the discrete element method (DEM). A parallel-bonded stress corrosion model was introduced to describe damage evolution. The results show that the maximum positive PWP increased monotonically with load, reaching a distinct peak value at a critical loading frequency under specific load amplitudes. At this critical frequency, the fatigue life was significantly shortened compared to lower-frequency conditions. The PWP response exhibited a clear phase lag relative to the applied load, with the lag angle increasing alongside frequency. Furthermore, the absolute value of the minimum PWP continued to increase with fatigue damage accumulation. This indicates that regions with a vacuum suction effect were continuously expanding, which is a key reason for asphalt film stripping from the aggregate surface. These findings provide a theoretical basis for understanding mesoscopic water damage mechanisms in asphalt pavements and offer a reference for durability design.