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    Deviations from Arrhenius dynamics in high temperature liquids, a possible collapse, and a viscosity bound
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Xue, Jing; Nogueira, Flavio S.; Kelton, K.F.; Nussinov, Zohar
    Liquids realize a highly complex state of matter in which strong competing kinetic and interaction effects come to life. As such, liquids are, generally, more challenging to understand than either gases or solids. In weakly interacting gases, the kinetic effects dominate. By contrast, low temperature solids typically feature far smaller fluctuations about their ground state. Notwithstanding their complexity, with the exception of quantum fluids (e.g., superfluid helium) and supercooled liquids (including glasses), various aspects of common liquid dynamics such as their dynamic viscosity are often assumed to be given by rather simple, Arrhenius-type, activated forms with nearly constant (i.e., temperature independent) energy barriers. In this paper, we analyze experimentally measured viscosities of numerous liquids far above their equilibrium melting temperature to see how well this assumption fares. We find, for the investigated liquids, marked deviations from simple activated dynamics. Even far above their equilibrium melting temperatures, as the temperature drops, the viscosity of these liquids increases more strongly than predicted by activated dynamics dominated by a single uniform energy barrier. For metallic fluids, the scale of the prefactors of the best Arrhenius fits for the viscosity is typically consistent with that given by the product (nh) with n the number density and h Planck's constant. More generally, in various fluids (whether metallic or nonmetallic) that we examined, (nh) constitutes a lower bound scale on the viscosity. We find that a scaling of the temperature axis (complementing that of the viscosity) leads to a partial collapse of the temperature dependent viscosities of different fluids; such a scaling allows for a functional dependence of the viscosity on temperature that includes yet is far more general than activated Arrhenius form alone. We speculate on relations between non-Arrhenius dynamics and thermodynamic observables.
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    Chemical insights into the base-tuned hydrothermal treatment of side stream biomasses
    (Cambridge : Royal Society of Chemistry, 2022) Tkachenko, Vitalii; Marzban, Nader; Vogl, Sarah; Filonenko, Svitlana; Antonietti, Markus
    Herein, we analyzed the hydrothermal processes applied to four very different side stream biomasses (chestnut foliage, sugar beet pressing chips, pine bark and branches from park cleaning, bamboo cuts) and identified diverse soluble products depending on the starting pH of the reaction, covering mild to strong basic pH conditions. Despite the biological diversity of the starting products, hydrothermal disintegration of biomass results in a remarkable reduction of chemical diversity towards a controllable number of molecular products, and the well-resolved and rather simple NMR-spectra allow the assignment of the products to only a few families of compounds. It has been revealed that in comparison with the classical hydrothermal treatment, where mostly hydrochar is produced, molar excess of base shifts the hydrothermal treatment towards a humification process. A further increase of the base content causes destruction of the biomass into the more oxygenated homogeneous colloid and thus, for the first time, it can be assigned to the hydrothermal fulvication process. We discuss diverse valorization schemes depending on the biomass and conditions applied.