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In semantic segmentation, generalizing a visual system to both seen categories and novel categories at inference time has always been practically valuable yet challenging. To enable such functionality, existing methods mainly rely on either providing several support demonstrations from the visual aspect or characterizing the informative clues from the textual aspect (e.g., the class names). Nevertheless, both two lines neglect the complementary intrinsic of low-level visual and high-level language information, while the explorations that consider visual and textual modalities as a whole to promote predictions are still limited. To close this gap, we propose to encompass textual and visual clues as multi-modal prototypes to allow more comprehensive support for open-world semantic segmentation, and build a novel prototype-based segmentation framework to realize this promise. To be specific, unlike the straightforward combination of bi-modal clues, we decompose the high-level language information as multi-aspect prototypes and aggregate the low-level visual information as more semantic prototypes, on basis of which, a fine-grained complementary fusion makes the multi-modal prototypes more powerful and accurate to promote the prediction. Based on an elastic mask prediction module that permits any number and form of prototype inputs, we are able to solve the zero-shot, few-shot and generalized counterpart tasks in one architecture. Extensive experiments on both PASCAL- 5 i and COCO- 20 i datasets show the consistent superiority of the proposed method compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches, and a range of ablation studies thoroughly dissects each component in our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively that verify their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excessive fluoride presence in water poses significant environmental and public health risks, necessitating the development of effective remediation techniques. Conventional aluminum–based adsorbents face inherent limitations such as limited pH range and low adsorption capacity. To overcome these challenges, we present a facile solvent-thermal method for synthesizing a carbon-doped aluminum-based adsorbent (CDAA). Extensive characterization of CDAA reveals remarkable features including substantial carbon-containing groups, unsaturated aluminum sites, and a high pH at point of zero charge (pHpzc). CDAA demonstrates superior efficiency and selectivity in removing fluoride contaminants, surpassing other adsorbents. It exhibits exceptional adaptability across a broad pH spectrum from 3 to 12, with a maximum adsorption capacity of 637.4 mg/g, more than 110 times higher than alumina. The applicability of the Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second-order models effectively supports these findings. Notably, CDAA exhibits rapid kinetics, achieving near-equilibrium within just 5 min. Comprehensive analyses utilizing Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) offer detailed insights into the mechanisms involving electrostatic attraction, ion exchange, and ligand exchange. Carbon-based groups play a role in ligand exchange processes, synergistically interacting with the unsaturated aluminum structure to provide a multitude of adsorption sites. The exceptional attributes of CDAA establish its immense potential as a transformative solution for the pressing challenge of fluoride removal from water sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the potential of utilizing aluminum and yttrium amended (Al/Y amended) sewage sludge biochar (Al/Y-CSBC) for efficient fluoride removal from wastewater. The adsorption kinetics of fluoride on bimetallic modified Al/Y-CSBC followed the pseudo-second-order model, while the adsorption isotherm conformed to the Freundlich equation. Remarkably, the material exhibited excellent fluoride removal performance over a wide pH range, achieving a maximum adsorption capacity of 62.44 mg·g−1. Moreover, Al/Y-CSBC demonstrated exceptional reusability, maintaining 95% removal efficiency even after six regeneration cycles. The fluoride adsorption mechanism involved ion exchange, surface complexation, and electrostatic adsorption interactions. The activation and modification processes significantly increased the specific surface area of Al/Y-CSBC, leading to a high isoelectric point (pHpzc = 9.14). The incorporation of aluminum and yttrium metals exhibited a novel approach, enhancing the adsorption capacity for fluoride ions due to their strong affinity. Furthermore, the dispersing effect of biochar played a crucial role in improving defluoridation efficiency by enhancing accessibility to active sites. These findings substantiate the significant potential of Al/Y-CSBC for enhanced fluoride removal from wastewater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organic superlattices, consisting of alternating thin films of different organic molecules, are expected to provide new molecule assembly and unique properties that are applicable to advanced optoelectronic devices. Adopting organic superlattice as the structure of active layer may be an appropriate trade-off between planar heterojunctions and bulk heterojunction. With this structure, exciton diffusion efficiency and carrier mobility can be appropriately improved at the same time, leading to the optimization of device performance. In this paper, superlattice organic photodiodes based on heterojunction composed of C60 and zinc phthalocyanine were fabricated and characterized. We demonstrate good optoelectronic properties of these devices with superlattice structure through experimental data. It is found that the performances of the devices are strongly dependent on the incident optical power and the number of heterojunction periods, n. We optimized n and obtained high-responsive devices. The SL-OPD with n = 3 exhibits the photoresponsivity up to 5.21 (± 0.26) A W−1 at the incident optical intensity of 0.068 (± 0.003) mW cm−2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encapsulation is indispensable for organic thin-film electronic devices to ensure reliable operation and long-term stability. For thin-film encapsulating organic electronic devices, insulating polymers and inorganic metal oxides thin films are widely used. However, spin-coating of insulating polymers directly on organic electronic devices may destroy or introduce unwanted impurities in the underlying organic active layers. And also, sputtering of inorganic metal oxides may damage the underlying organic semiconductors. Here, we demonstrated that by utilizing vacuum evaporated lithium fluoride (LiF) as protective buffer layer, spin-coated insulating polymer polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and sputtered inorganic material ErO, can be successfully applied for thin film encapsulation of copper phthalocyanine (CuPc)-based organic diodes. By encapsulating with LiF/PVA/LiF trilayer and LiF/ErO bilayer films, the device lifetime improvements of ~10 and 15 times can be achieved. These methods should be applicable for thin-film encapsulation of all kinds of organic electronic devices. Moisture-induced hole trapping, and Al top electrode oxidation are suggest to be the origins of current decay for the LiF/PVA/LiF trilayer and LiF/ErO bilayer films encapsulated devices, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microscopic structures of Zn(II) adsorbed on anatase TiO surface with different densities were studied using extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy and density functional theory (DFT) calculation. Quantitative analysis of the EXAFS spectra showed that microscopic structures of Zn(II) were fourfold coordinated complexes, and different microscopic structures were present of the solid surface. Three modes of corner-corner/sharing-corner/sharing-edge adsorptions on anatase (101) face cluster were calculated by the DFT method. The results from DFT method were consistent with the EXAFS fittings. The optimized Zn-O average distance of the Zn-O tetrahedron was determined as about 2.00 Å. The Zn-Ti distance was 3.69 Å for the corner-corner adsorption, 3.35 Å for the sharing-corner adsorption, and 3.02 Å for the sharing-edge adsorption. According to the adsorption energies calculated by the DFT method, the microscopic structure of corner-corner adsorption was less stable than those of the other adsorption modes. With the increasing adsorption density, the corner-corner adsorption mode would be enhanced more intensively than the other adsorption modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]