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Glycine functionalized activated carbon adsorption material (NOPAC-GLY-X) was successfully prepared by one-step thermal decomposition using agricultural waste navel orange peel as a precursor. Through batch adsorption experiments, it is found that the adsorption performance of Gd(III) on activated carbon can be significantly enhanced by glycine modification. The adsorption isotherms of the NOPACs conformed to the Langmuir isotherm model, and the maximum adsorption capacity of the activated carbon sample NOPAC-Gly-60 is approximately 48.5 mg/g. The Gd(III) adsorption capacity of navel orange peel activated carbon can be doubled after glycine modification, and the adsorption efficiency of gadolinium can reach 99% at pH=7. The physicochemical properties of the prepared adsorbents were characterized by BET, FTIR, EA, and XPS. The characterization test shows that the specific surface area of the sample increases from 1121 to 1523 m2/g, and the ratio of (N+O)/C increases from 10.8% to 30.0% by the glycine modification. After five cycles of adsorption-desorption, the adsorption capacity can still be maintained at 88% of the initial capacity. NOPAC-GLY-60 has excellent adsorption selectivity for Gd(III). With the obvious advantages of simple synthesis steps and low cost, the activated carbon modification method adopted in this study has great application value in the field of rare earth adsorption and recovery.

Mechanical allodynia impinges on the life quality of patients. Hen Egg Lysozyme (HEL) is a substance extracted from eggs that is commonly used to inhibit bacterial activity. The role of HEL in regulating and treating pain is unclear. Here, we find that HEL selectively attenuates static mechanical allodynia of mice induced by complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA), spinal nerve ligation (SNL) and chemotherapeutic agent. RNA-seq screening reveals that CFA significantly reduces the expression of Parkin in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons of mice, while pre-administration of HEL increases the expression of Parkin and remits the static mechanical allodynia induced by Parkin-siRNA. Moreover, HEL increases the interaction between nuclear respiratory factor 1 (NRF1) and histone acetyltransferase P300 and then enhances the NRF1 mediated histone acetylation in prkn promoter region in DRGs of mice. Further, Parkin interacts with mechanotransducing ion channel TACAN (Tmem120a) and knockdown of Parkin significantly increases the membrane trafficking of TACAN in sensory neurons of mice. While pre-administration of HEL inhibits the increased membrane trafficking of TACAN in sensory neurons of mice induced by Parkin-siRNA. In addition, pre-given of HEL also significantly attenuates the static mechanical allodynia induced by overexpression of TACAN in mice, and the effect of HEL can be blocked by Parkin-siRNA. This indicates that HEL increases the expression of Parkin through epigenetic mechanisms and then decreases TACAN membrane trafficking in sensory neurons to relieve static mechanical hypersensitivity. Therefore, we reveal a novel function of HEL, which is a potential substance for the treatment of static mechanical pain.

Fuzzy variational inequalities (FVIs) are modeling tools used to characterize a variety of fuzzy decision making problems arising in mathematical optimization, control theory, operations research, and game theory. Fractional order delay differential equations are also finding applications in all disciplines including chemistry, physics, and finance. The aim of this paper is to introduce and study a new dynamical fuzzy system, named the fractional differential fuzzy variational inequality (FDFVI) with delay, which bridges these two areas of research and broadens the class of problems amenable to be studied under the fuzzy environments. By using the KKM theorem and monotonicity arguments, we show that the solution set of the FVI is nonempty, convex and compact. We also establish the upper semicontinuity of the solution mapping U of the FVI involved in the FDFVI with delay. Moreover, we obtain an existence of the mild solution for the FDFVI with delay by employing Bohnenblust-Karlin's fixed point theorem. In addition, we provide an approximating algorithm to find a solution of the FDFVI with delay. Finally, we give two numerical examples to illustrate our main results.

The large volume expansion and poor electrical conductivity of copper phosphide (Cu3P) during the cycle limit their further application as anode of lithium-ion batteries. Therefore, polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) modified Cu3(BTC)2-derived (BTC = 1, 3, 5-Benzentricarboxylic acid) in-situ N/P-co-doped Octahedron carbon encapsulated Cu3P nanoparticles (Cu3P@NPC) are successfully prepared through a two-step process of carbonization and phosphating. The N/P-co-doped Octahedron carbon matrix improves the conductivity of Cu3P and moderates the volume expansion during the lithiation/delithiation process. Meanwhile, the interaction between the Cu3P and the doped carbon matrix is methodically explored by using density functional theory (DFT). Through the analysis of the partial charge density, the density of states and the Bader charge, and the calculation results verify the correctness of the experimental observation results, that is, Cu3P@NPC has good electrochemical performance. The results show that Cu3P@NPC, as the anode of Lithium-ion batteries, has excellent electrochemical performance: it exhibits satisfactory rate performance (251.9 mAh g−1 at 5.0 A g−1) and excellent cycle performance (336.4 mAh g−1 at 1 A g−1 over 1000 cycles). This article provides an effective strategy for the encapsulation of metal phosphide nanoparticles in a doped carbon matrix.

Bimetal oxides have attracted much attention due to their unique characteristics caused by the synergistic effect of bimetallic elements, such as adjustable operating voltage and improved electronic conductivity. Here, a novel bimetal oxide Sn0.918Sb0.109O2@graphene (TAO@G) was synthesized via hydrothermal method, and applied as anode material for lithium ion batteries. Compared with SnO2, the addition of Sb to form a bimetallic oxide Sn0.918Sb0.109O2 can shorten the band gap width, which is proved by DFT calculation. The narrower band gap width can speed up the lithium ions transport and improve the electrochemical performances of TAO@G. TAO@G is a structure in which graphene supports nano-sized TAO particles, and it is conducive to the electrons transport and can improve its electrochemical performances. TAO@G achieved a high initial reversible discharge specific capacity of 1176.3 mA h g−1 at 0.1 A g−1 and a good capacity of 648.1 mA h g−1 at 0.5 A g−1 after 365 cycles. Results confirm that TAO@G is a novel prospective anode material for LIBs.

High entropy oxides (HEOs) have attracted the attention of researchers due to their high theoretical specific capacity and structural stability. However, the effect of elements in HEOs on material properties is unknown. In this work, HEOs (FeNiCrMnZn)3O4 and (FeNiCrMnMg)3O4 were successfully synthesized and used as anode materials for lithium ion batteries. The effects of Zn and Mg on the properties of HEOs were studied from the aspects of crystal structure, micro morphology, and surface valence. Results show that Zn enhances the lithium storage performance of HEOs theoretically, which is verified in the later electrochemical performance tests. (FeNiCrMnZn)3O4 is better than (FeNiCrMnMg)3O4 in all aspects of rate properties, cycle performance, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Therefore, the introduction of electrochemically active metals, such as Zn, can improve the performance of HEOs, thereby providing ideas for the subsequent design and application of HEOs.

A thermal protection material (TPM) was prepared using Al2O3-phosphate, expanded aluminosilicate, and phenolics through compression molding and the gradient heating reaction technique, and the effect of the high-temperature treatment on the properties of the composites were investigated. Scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy were used to analyze the structures and compositions of the composites. After the high-temperature treatment, the composites exhibited increased porosity, decreased density, and generated SiC particles with high strength and temperature resistance. The prepared composites have high compressive strength and compression deformation ability of the bending point. Thermogravimetric analysis, coefficient of thermal conductivity measurements, and expansion analysis were carried out to evaluate the thermal properties of the composites, and the effects of the preparation conditions on the thermal properties of the composites were investigated. The results showed that the prepared composites exhibited complete morphology, excellent high-temperature resistance, high compressive strength and toughness, and low thermal conductivity before and after the high-temperature treatment at 1000 °C, and hence showed great potential for future thermal protection applications.

Under the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) framework, this paper proposes a simple yet efficient focus measure (FM) in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain for fast multi-focus image fusion. At first, the DCT coefficients of multi-focus source images in JPEG format are read directly. Then, the initial decision map is constructed according to the proposed FM using only a few low-order DCT coefficients. Finally, the final decision map is refined with morphological operation, and the fused image is achieved by a simple fusion rule. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method takes at least 1 % less fusion time than the existing fastest methods by neural network while ensuring the fusion effect in both visual perception and objective evaluations. Therefore, the proposed method is more suitable for wireless visual sensor network (WVSN) nodes with edge computing than the state-of-the-art methods.

Growing electroactive materials directly on a three-dimensional conductive substrate can effectively reduce the “ineffective area” of the electrode during the electrochemical reaction, increase the utilization rate of the material, and thus increase the energy density of the device. Using the network structure of the three-dimensional conductive substrate to design electrode materials with unique microstructures can also improve the stability of the materials. In this work, we obtained different copper-based materials on the copper foam (CF) by in-situ growth method, and designed an independent three-dimensional layered CuO@NiCoFe-S (CuO@NCFS) core–shell nanostructure composite material. CuO@NCFS exhibits excellent electrochemical performance, reaching a specific capacitance of 4551 mF cm−2 at a current density of 1 mA cm−2 with good cycle stability (94.2% after 5000 cycles). In addition, the asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) uses CuO@NCFS as the positive electrode and rGO as the negative electrode, which can provide an energy rate density of 4.5 mW cm−2 at a high energy density of 99.9 μWh cm−2. The findings provide some insight into rational design of electrode materials for high performance energy storage.

It has become a research hotspot to detect whether a face is natural or GAN-generated. However, all the existing works focus on whole GAN-generated faces. So, an improved Xception model is proposed for locally GAN-generated face detection. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one to address this issue. Some improvements over Xception are as follows: (1) Four residual blocks are removed to avoid the overfitting problem as much as possible; (2) Inception block with the dilated convolution is used to replace the common convolution layer in the pre-processing module of the Xception to obtain multi-scale features; (3) Feature pyramid network is utilized to obtain multi-level features for final decision. The first locally GAN-based generated face (LGGF) dataset is constructed by the pluralistic image completion method on the basis of FFHQ dataset. It has a total 952,000 images with the generated regions in different shapes and sizes. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model which outperforms some existing models, especially for the faces having small generated regions.

With the global express delivery industry growing rapidly, the service that uses high-speed rail (HSR) passenger trains to carry parcels has been introduced in China, signaling that the competition between HSR and air transport is no longer limited to the passenger sector. In this paper, we build a simple model to study the competition between air and rail in both the passenger market and the cargo market. We consider the transport operators face passengers directly but they rely on a forwarder at the downstream for the cargo service. Three scenarios are investigated: 1) both the passenger and the cargo sectors are only served by air transport; 2) the passenger sector is served by both air transport and HSR while the cargo sector is only served by air transport; and 3) both sectors are served by both transport modes. We find that when airlines use aircraft belly to transport cargo while the belly capacity is limited, it is possible that introducing HSR as a competitor in the passenger sector is social welfare deteriorating. However, social welfare will always be improved if HSR enters not only the passenger sector but also the cargo sector.

In this work, the (1-x)CaWO4-xNa2WO4 (x = 0.1, 0.2, denoted as 0.9CW-0.1NW and 0.8CW-0.2NW, respectively) ultralow-loss microwave dielectric ceramics were prepared via solid-state reaction method. Using low melting-point Na2WO4 as sintering aid to prepare CaWO4 Na2WO4 composite ceramics, the sintering temperature of CaWO4 was successfully reduced while maintaining excellent microwave performance. The optimal microwave dielectric properties have been achieved at 900 °C for 0.9CW-0.1NW ceramic: er = 9.0, Q × f = 105660 GHz, tanδ = 1.1 × 10−4 and τf = −35.4 ppm/°C at a frequency of 12.0 GHz. For the 0.8CW-0.2NW ceramic, the optimal microwave dielectric properties have been obtained at 740 °C, with er = 8.5, Q × f = 97014 GHz, tanδ = 1.2 × 10−4 and τf = −37.4 ppm/°C at a frequency of 11.8 GHz. In summary, both composite ceramics exhibit low sintering temperatures, excellent dielectric properties and chemical compatibility with the Ag electrode. The findings of this study provide an effective approach to prepare novel composite ceramics as promising candidates for LTCC applications.

In this paper, the plasma coupled catalyst was used for the dry reforming of methane (DRM). The impacts of the reaction temperature, the molar ratio of CO2/CH4, and the concentration of the main gas components (N2, H2, CO, H2O) on the conversion rate of CH4 and the energy efficiency of plasma catalysis were observed. The results shows that the conversion rate of CH4 is 41.57%, with La-Ni/γ-Al2O3 as the catalyst, the reaction temperature being 450°C and the molar ratio of CO2/CH4 being 1.0, and without other gases. The conversion rate of CH4 increases with the increase of the molar ratio of CO2/CH4. The conversion rate of CH4 is 92.82% respectively during DRM by plasma catalysis, with the molar ratio of CO2/CH4 being 5.0. The reaction temperature and the molar ratio of CO2/CH4 have a significant effect on CH4 conversion. The excited particles in the system are influenced by the changes of gas composition, which affect not only CH4 conversion directly, but also the carbon deposition on the surface of catalyst. The addition of N2 and H2O in the reaction system not only improves conversion of CH4 but also inhibits carbon deposition; the addition of H2 and CO reduces the conversion of CH4 significantly. The results are expected to provide basic data and reference for the development of the synthetic process of chemicals through biomass gasification.

This paper sets up an integrated economic model to analyze an optimal public-private partnership (PPP) in financing a high-speed rail (HSR) project. The model considers the HSR's spillover onto the regional economy, which is uncertain in terms of both the direction (i.e., benefiting or harming the regional economy) and magnitude. The optimal private ownership is found to increase with the expected value of the marginal economic spillover of HSR traffic. In view of the risk sharing, the government also raises the private ownership when there is a higher uncertainty concerning the marginal spillover. However, when either the expected value of the marginal spillover or its uncertainty gets too high, the government may choose not to adopt PPP, but rather to entirely finance HSR projects with public funds. Essentially, in this case, PPP would require too much private ownership and as a result, seriously reduce social welfare. Finally, we apply our analytical results to offer an explanation for why China has so far implemented PPP for HSR construction only in its eastern/coastal regions.

In this paper, (1-x)Li2MoO4(LMO)-xNi0.2Cu0.2Zn0.6Fe2O4 (NCZO) ceramic composites were consolidated using cold sintering method at a temperature of 150 °C, which is far below the sintering temperature of NZFO ceramic-based systems via conventional ceramic preparation method. The phase composition, microstructure, dielectric properties and magnetic properties of the as-cold-sintered LMO-NCZO ceramic composites were studied. The relative density of all composites is larger than 95 % at a cold sintering temperature of 150 °C for 30 min under a uniaxial pressure of 200 MPa. XRD results showed that the composites were only composed of two phases. SEM revealed that the NCZO particles were enwrapped by the LMO phase. The 0.46LMO-0.54NCZO ceramic composite exhibited excellent magnetodielectric properties with an effective permittivity of about 8.3, a dielectric loss of 0.003, a permeability of 7 and a magnetic loss of 0.024 (@10 MHz), which make it potentially applicable in the miniaturization of electronic devices.