ABSTRACT Discharge of coke-oven wastewater to the environment may cause severe contamination to it and also threaten the flora and fauna, including human beings. Hence before dumping it is necessary to treat this dangerous effluent in order to minimize the damage to the environment. Conventional technologies have inherent drawbacks however, biological treatment is an advantageous alternative method. In the present study, bacteria were isolated from the soil collected from the sites contaminated by coke-oven effluent rich in phenol and cyanide. Nucleotides sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis showed the identity of the selected phenol and cyanide degrading isolates NAUN-16 and NAUN-1B as Pseudomonas putida and Pseudomonas stutzeri, respectively. These two isolates tolerated phenol up to 1800 mg L-1 and cyanide up to 340 mg L-1 concentrations. The isolates were immobilized on activated charcoal, saw dust and fly ash. The effluent was passed through the column packed with immobilized cells with a flow rate of 5 mL min-1. The isolates showed degradation of phenol up to 80.5% and cyanide up to 80.6% and also had the ability to reduce biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand and lower the pH of effluent from alkaline to near neutral. The study suggests the utilization of such potential bacterial strains in treating industrial effluent containing phenol and cyanide, before being thrown in any ecosystem.

Abstract A novel Quadruple-shaped Dielectric Resonator Antenna (DRA) excited by a coaxial feed is investigated. The dielectric used for investigation is biodegradable polymer based dielectric material having a dielectric constant (εr) of 3.45 and dielectric loss tangent (δ) =0.02. The resulting antenna offers broad impedance bandwidth of 63.2% for |S11| < −10 dB from 2.8 to 5.2 GHz frequency band. This antenna is suitable for practical use in WLAN (5.15-5.35 GHz) and Wi-Max (3.4-3.69 GHz) applications. The results show the peak gain of the antenna is 4.5dBi at resonant frequency 3.8 GHz. It is also observed that the new proposed structure of Quadrupleshaped DRA offers broadside radiation patterns and high efficiency for the entire operating band. The simulated and experimental results are well in agreement.