Little is known about the effects of applying amendments on soil for immobilizing metal(loid)s on the soil microbial community. Alterations in the microbial community were examined after incubation of treated contaminated soils. One soil was contaminated with Pb and As, a second soil with Cd and Zn. Red pepper stalk (RPS) and biochars produced from RPS in either N2 atmosphere (RPSN) or CO2 atmosphere (RPSC) were applied at a rate of 2.5% to the two soils and incubated for 30 days. Bacterial communities of control and treated soils were characterized by sequencing 16S rRNA genes using the Illumina MiSeq sequencing. In both soils, bacterial richness increased in the amended soils, though somewhat differently between the treatments. Evenness values decreased significantly, and the final overall diversities were reduced. The neutralization of pH, reduced available concentrations of Pb or Cd, and supplementation of available carbon and surface area could be possible factors affecting the community changes. Biochar amendments caused the soil bacterial communities to become more similar than those in the not amended soils. The bacterial community structures at the phylum and genus levels showed that amendment addition might restore the normal bacterial community of soils, and cause soil bacterial communities in contaminated soils to normalize and stabilize.

In order to investigate the electro-optical characteristics of the current polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) film, zinc acrylate nanoparticles (N_Ps) were doped into the PDLC prepared samples. Generally for the fabrication of N_Ps–based PDLC film, two conventional methods such as the sandwich method and capillary methods are considered. In the conventional fabrication method of N_p-doped PDLCs, the homogenous distribution of nanoparticles remained an unresolved issue. Particularly, upon the fabrication of N_p-doped PDLC films, it is important to emphasis that nanoparticles are uniformly distributed inside the indium tin oxide (ITO) coated glass. For the purpose, here in this work, a new PDLC manufacturing method has been proposed to improve such shortcoming. Unlike the conventional method, the N_Ps acrylate layer was first coated on the ITO glass, which maintained evenly distributed N_Ps and then was placed onto the polymer/LC crystal mixture. By adopting the current PDLC fabricated method (with 1.0 wt% ZnA layer coating into PDLC film) the transmittance remained 93.9% and a good contrast ratio (CR) ∼ 7.0 was observed at a low driving voltage (∼ 20 V). Moreover the morphology study of current PDLCs showed a uniform size distribution of droplet morphology as well as a homogeneous distribution of N_Ps. Thus our investigations indicated that PDLC films prepared by this new technique achieved the goal of uniform distribution of N_Ps particles, homogeneous distribution of droplet morphology with the improved electro-optical characteristics. Graphical Abstract

In this paper, multidirectional light-control reflective (LCR) films are developed in order to create an active reflective structure that will enhance the image brightness and contrast ratio of reflective dye-doped polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (D-PDLC) displays at lower viewing angles. Advantages of LCR films are that their production is low cost and they require a simple photolithographic fabrication method. The optimum design prism-type light-control reflective film succeeded in minimising the surface scattering effect; thus, the contrast ratio is much enhanced. The symmetric and asymmetric LCR films produced multidirectional scattering that enhances the reflectance at lower viewing angles, which has importance in future display applications. In particular, the prism LCR film has been found to be more influential on the reflectance of D-PDLC films due to multidirectional scattering of light by non-symmetric arrays. The improvement in contrast ratio has been confirmed by the enhancement of optical properties for reflective D-PDLC displays at lower viewing angles below 30°.