Investigation of the heterogeneity of bromine in plastic components as an indicator for brominated flame retardants in waste electrical and electronic equipment with regard to recyclability.

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) can contain brominated flame retardants (BFRs) that pose a threat to human health and the environment. In addition, Br-containing plastics reduce the recycling potential of WEEE. In order to gain a better insight into the distribution of Br in plastics from WEEE, the total concentration of Br was measured on the level of device types and plastic components using handheld X-ray fluorescence (hXRF). In 35 % of the sample size (882 components from 369 different devices, which originate from 6 device types) Br was detected, 5 % exceeded the RoHS limit. Only few and older devices contained high Br concentrations, while the majority were below the RoHS limit and could be recycled. In addition, 18 different plastic types were identified by infrared spectroscopy, with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene being the most abundant (44 % of all samples). Manual dismantling of devices into individual plastic components enabled us to examine Br hotspots and the variety of plastic types in WEEE. Based on this analytical procedure, WEEE recyclers could exclude certain equipment or plastic components (e.g. power supplies or PC housings) directly on-site prior to WEEE recycling and shredding in order to produce high-quality recycled products and avoid cross-contamination.

Liquid crystals as optical amplifiers for bacterial detection.

Interactions of bacteria with target molecules (e.g. antibiotics) or other microorganisms are of growing interest. The first barrier for targeting gram-negative bacteria is layer of a Lipopolysaccharides (LPS). Liquid crystal (LC) based sensors covered with LPS monolayers, as presented in this study, offer a simple model to study and make use of this type of interface for detection and screening. This work describes in detail the production and application of such sensors based on three different LPS that have been investigated regarding their potential to serve as sensing layer to detect bacteria. The LPS O127:B8 in combination with a LC based sensor was identified to be most useful as biomimetic sensing surface. This LPS/LC combination interacts with three different bacteria species, one gram-positive and two gram-negative species, allowing the detection of bacterial presence regardless from their viability. It could be shown that even very low bacterial cell numbers (minimum 500 cell ml(-1)) could be detected within minutes (maximum 15 min). The readout mechanism is the adsorption of bacterial entities on surface bond LPS molecules with the LC serving as an optical amplifier.

Nonlinear resonances of particles in a dusty plasma sheath.

Vertical oscillations of microparticles trapped in the sheath of a capacitive rf discharge have been excited showing a strongly nonlinear resonance. The nonlinear oscillations are analyzed in terms of an anharmonic fourth-order potential energy curve. It is demonstrated that the observed nonlinearities can be related to a position dependent charge of the microspheres, whereas the electric field is found to be as nearly linearly increasing. The experimental results on the position dependent charging and electric field structure are compared to a numerical model.