In situ preparation of well-dispersed CuO nanocatalysts in heavy oil for catalytic aquathermolysis

We developed an in situ synthesis strategy for preparing well-dispersed CuO nanoparticles as aquathermolysis catalyst for viscosity reduction in Shengli heavy oil(China). A Cu(OH)_2-contained microemulsion was employed as a carrier to disperse the precursor Cu(OH)_2 to the heavy oil phase. Under aquathermolysis condition(240 ℃, 2.5 MPa of N_2), the Cu(OH)_2 precursors would first be converted in situ to well-crystallized and size-homogeneous CuO nanoparticles naturally, catalyzed by which the viscosity of Shengli heavy oil could be reduced as much as 94.6%; simultaneously, 22.4% of asphaltenes were converted to light components. The agglomeration of the in situ prepared monoclinic CuO nanoparticles could be negligible throughout the catalytic reaction. Based on the characterization results of ~1 H NMR, elemental analysis and GC-MS of oil samples before and after catalytic aquathermolysis, the mechanism for viscosity reduction of heavy oil in the catalytic system was investigated.

EMAP: An Efficient Mutual Authentication Protocol for Passive RFID Tags

Radio frequency identification （RFID） system is a contactless automatic identification system, which uses small and low cost RFID tags. The primary problem of current security and privacy preserving schemes is that, in order to identify only one single tag, these schemes require a linear computational complexity on the server side. We propose an efficient mutual authentication protocol for passive RFID tags that provides confidentiality, untraceability, mutual authentication, and efficiency. The proposed protocol shifts the heavy burden of asymmetric encryption and decryption operations on the more powerful server side and only leaves lightweight hash operation on tag side. It is also efficient in terms of time complexity, space complexity, and communication cost, which are very important for practical large-scale RFID applications.