Worldwide, reservoirs are having serious challenges on crude oil removal due to various factors affecting its mobility; hence, the approach of oil production needs to be rectified. Recently, various nanoparticles (NPs) were discovered to have aided in oil displacement to improve oil production by modifying some reservoir conditions thereby reducing interfacial tension (IFT) and rock surface wettability. However, the injected NPs in the reservoir are trapped within the rock pores and become worthless due to high temperature and pressure. Hence, introducing energy to the nanofluids via electromagnetic (EM) waves can improve nanoparticle (NPs) mobility in the reservoir for the attainment of oil displacements. In this work, hybrid ZnO/SiO₂ NPs were selected by considering that the combination of two dielectric NPs may produce a single nanofluid that is expected to make the fluids more electrified under EM waves. The result showed that ZnO/SiO₂ NPs reduced the IFT (mN/m) from 17.39 to 2.91, and wettability (°) from 141 to 61. Moreover, by introducing the EM waves to the fluids, the IFT was further reduced to 0.02 mN/m from 16.70 mN/m, and solid surface wettability was also reduced from 132° to 58°. The advancement observed during exposure to EM waves was attributed to the energy propagated to the fluids that polarize the free charges of the NPs and consequently activate the fluids by creating disturbances at the fluid/oil interface, which resulted in reduced IFT and wettability.

The development of promising magnetic nanocatalysts is one of the key research topics in the field of catalysis. This is because of their versatile surface physicochemical, magnetic, and size-dependent catalytic properties. Herein, an optimization strategy for the synthesis of high-value fuel grade chemicals from hydro-deoxygenation of biomass-derived furfural and vanillin using a nanostructured magnetic Fe(NiFe)O₄-SiO₂ catalyst, synthesized by a facile one-pot procedure, was presented. Accordingly, effects of calcination temperature from 400, 500, 600 to 700 °C on the structure-activity properties of the magnetic Fe(NiFe)O₄-SiO₂ catalyst was systematically studied. The magnetic Fe(NiFe)O₄-SiO₂ catalyst calcined at 500 °C exhibited the best catalytic performance, giving full conversions of vanillin and furfural, with good selectivity of 63 and 59% to cyclohexane and n-pentane (fuel grade chemicals), respectively. The prowess of this catalyst was attributed to its abundant acid properties in addendum to high BET surface area.

Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) are efficient media for CO₂ capture, and an electroreduction process using the deterministic surface of single-atom electrocatalysts is a facile way to screen gas absorption capacities of novel DESs. Using newly prepared transition-metal-based DESs indexed as TDESs, the interfacial mechanism, detection, quantification, and coordination modes of CO₂ were determined for the first time. The CO₂ has a minimum detection time of 300 s, whereas 500 s of continous ambient CO₂ saturation provided ZnCl₂/ethanolamine (EA) (1:4) and CoCl₂/EA (1:4) TDESs with a maximum CO₂ absorption capacity of 0.2259 and 0.1440 mmol/L, respectively. The results indicated that CO₂ coordination modes of η¹ (C) and η² (O, O) with Zn in ZnCl₂/EA (1:4) TDESs are conceivable. We found that the transition metals in TDESs form an interface at the compact layer of the electrocatalyst, while CO₂ ^•-/CO₂ reside in the diffuse layer. These findings are important because they provide reliable inferences about interfacial phenomena for facile screening of CO₂ capture capacity of DESs or other green solvents.