Search

A dual-mode compressed high-order-mode dipole loaded with bent stubs is presented for sidelobe suppression. When the high-order modes are introduced to achieve high gain, the sidelobes are generated due to the reverse currents along the dipole. To suppress the sidelobes, the bent stubs are used to impair the reverse currents. By bending the stubs, the sidelobe level (SLL) is decreased by 12 dB, on average. A prototype is fabricated and measured to validate the principles. The measurements show that the gains are higher than 4.4 dBi over the entire operating band of 3.26–4.075 GHz (22.2%). Within the desired n 78-band (3.3–3.8 GHz), the measured radiation patterns are consistent with simulations, and the suppressed SLL is less than −10 dB.

The occurrence of membrane fouling has resulted in limited wastewater treatment applications. The development of superhydrophilic-underwater superoleophobic materials has received significant attention owing to their good anti-fouling properties. However, to fabricate such materials need costly regents and tedious steps. Thus, developing a one-step process to prepare a low-cost material for oil/water separation is still desired. In this study, bio-inspired from an arachnid, inorganic carbon nanotube stainless steel meshes (CNT@SSMs) having superhydrophilic-underwater superoleophobic and excellent anti-fouling properties and a unique fiber structure were fabricated via a one-step thermal chemical vapor deposition method. The CNT@SSMs had a small pore size enabling a high water flux of 10,639 L m−2h−1 and the separation of oily wastewater, including various emulsions, at a high rejection ratio of >98.89%. As a result of its excellent chemical stability under high temperatures, a broad pH range, and saline environments, the CNT@SSM has the potential to be used in extreme conditions. In summary, these CNT@SSMs are easy to fabricate and are low-cost as a result of inexpensive reagents involved. Moreover, these novel superwetting membranes are promising candidates for treatment of hazardous oily wastewater.

Images and short videos that produced by social networks surge in recent years. Image/Video encoders, such as JPEG and H.264, are indispensably involved to reduce the transmitting bandwidth. However, based on our observation, the encoding parameters and their candidates are often preset to fixed values (or fixed candidate values) in real-world scenarios, which might not be the optimal bandwidth allocation strategy. Considering that, we propose an efficient group quality optimization (GQO) framework for multi-channel image/video encoding systems in which the encoding parameters are configured in a perceptual-quality-driven manner. The GQO framework employs adaptive hyper network to predict the relationships between encoding parameters, transmitting resources, and perceptual qualities, i.e., just taking the pristine image as input, the adaptive hyper network could accurately yield a global overview of perceptual quality and transmitting resource varied along encoding parameters. A step-by-step optimization procedure is then employed to search the optimal encoding parameter for each channel so that overall perceptual quality could be maximized under limited transmitting resource. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed GQO framework could achieve higher perceptual quality whilst maintain the same bandwidth compared to traditional allocation strategies where encoding parameters are preset.

Hydrothermal degradation was used to pretreat terylene with an aim of noticeably improving the yield of fermentable monomers: terephthalic acid (TPA), mono (2- hydroxyethyl) terephthalic acid (MHET), bis-hydroxyethyl terephthalate (BHET), and ethylene glycol (EG). After 0.5 h of reaction time at 180 °C, hydrothermal degradation with ammonia led to almost complete conversion of the terylene to TPA, MHET, BHET and EG, which were then transformed by Taonella mepensis WT-6 to bacterial cellulose (BC). Furthermore, the optimum fermentation conditions with the maximum BC yield were 5.0 g/L yeast extract, 30.0 °C, pH 9.0, 8.0% inoculum, and hydrolysate TOC (5.02 g/L). Additionally, mechanical and thermal analysis revealed that the properties of BC produced from TAH medium were similar to those of BC produced with HS medium. Considering the substantial amount of global terylene waste being produced, this study provides an alternative solution for the biosynthesis of BC.

Travel time and monetary cost are the two important factors influencing travelers’ route choice behavior. Rather than combining them together as a single objective, a bi-objective user equilibrium ...

The ability to control the potential landscape in a medium of interacting particles could lead to intriguing collective behavior and innovative functionalities. Here, we utilize spatially reconfigurable magnetic potentials of a pinwheel artificial spin ice structure to tailor the motion of superconducting vortices. The reconstituted chain structures of the magnetic charges in the artificial pinwheel spin ice and the strong interaction between magnetic charges and superconducting vortices allow significant modification of the transport properties of the underlying superconducting thin film, resulting in a reprogrammable resistance state that enables a reversible and switchable vortex Hall effect. Our results highlight an effective and simple method of using artificial spin ice as an in-situ reconfigurable nanoscale energy landscape to design reprogrammable superconducting electronics, which could also be applied to the in-situ control of properties and functionalities in other magnetic particle systems, such as magnetic skyrmions., Comment: To appear in Nano Letters

Chiral transcription and enantioselective separation have garnered significant research interests and showed potential for a broad range of practical applications. Here, we present a novel and facile strategy for chiral templating and enantiomers resolution by coating metal-ion-mediated l -phenylalanine derivatives (LPF/M) with graphene oxide (GO) via simply mixing. The LPF/M hydrogels precipitate from the liquid by encapsulation of GO through coordination interactions and hydrogen bonds, making heterogeneous transfer and separation possible. The chirality inversion of the internal LPF/M nanostructure could be triggered by different addition of metal ions, which further provides means for controlled chiral transfer of guest molecules on the outer GO surfaces as demonstrated in the transcription of thioflavin T (ThT) and 3-aminopyridine (AP) at the supramolecular level. Changing the metal ions also provides control over enantiomer selectivity with outstanding efficiency and reproducibility, as revealed by the separation of racemic mixtures of phenylanine (>98%), lysine (>96%), and histidine (>97%). In addition, the resultant hybrid materials exhibit excellent environmental stability and reusability (more than 20 times) with significant separation efficiency. More importantly, the GO-coated LPF/M could determine the enantiomeric composition of various chiral substrates. The proposed strategy opens up a promising avenue for practical chiral separation application.

Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) databases require processing transactional and analytical queries in isolation to remove the interference between them. To achieve this, it is necessary to maintain different replicas of data specified for the two types of queries. However, it is challenging to provide a consistent view for distributed replicas within a storage system, where analytical requests can efficiently read consistent and fresh data from transactional workloads at scale and with high availability. To meet this challenge, we propose extending replicated state machine-based consensus algorithms to provide consistent replicas for HTAP workloads. Based on this novel idea, we present a Raft-based HTAP database: TiDB. In the database, we design a multi-Raft storage system which consists of a row store and a column store. The row store is built based on the Raft algorithm. It is scalable to materialize updates from transactional requests with high availability. In particular, it asynchronously replicates Raft logs to learners which transform row format to column format for tuples, forming a real-time updatable column store. This column store allows analytical queries to efficiently read fresh and consistent data with strong isolation from transactions on the row store. Based on this storage system, we build an SQL engine to process large-scale distributed transactions and expensive analytical queries. The SQL engine optimally accesses row-format and column-format replicas of data. We also include a powerful analysis engine, TiSpark, to help TiDB connect to the Hadoop ecosystem. Comprehensive experiments show that TiDB achieves isolated high performance under CH-benCHmark, a benchmark focusing on HTAP workloads.

BACKGROUND: Lactic acid (LA) is a valuable industrial chemical with wide applications. Presently, the demand for optically pure l‐LA has grown considerably as a result of its applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries, and biodegradable polylactic acid production. The production of l‐LA from food waste (FW) has been discussed in some studies; however, most fermentation is performed under sterile conditions and with the addition of specific lactic acid bacteria. Completely autoclaving organic solid wastes is difficult and economically unfeasible. The aim of this work was to investigate pilot‐scale LA production from FW under sterile and nonsterile conditions. RESULTS: When FW was fermented without sterilization and inoculation, the maximum yield of LA was 0.43 g LA g–¹ total solid (TS) and the proportion of l‐LA was only ≈50%. A newly isolated strain, Lactobacillus paracasei subsp. paracasei 2, which was isolated and identified from FW, was used to improve the proportion of l‐LA in total LA. When nonsterile FW was inoculated with this strain, the proportion of l‐LA increased to 72.3%. After FW was sterilized and inoculated with this strain, the proportion of l‐LA was 98.6% and 98.8% under intermittent and real‐time regulation of pH level, respectively. The maximum LA yield could increase to 0.55 g LA g–¹TS. CONCLUSION: Pilot‐scale LA production from FW was determined by comparing the isomer purity of l‐LA between sterilization and nonsterilization and between inoculation and noninoculation, which provided an important strain and fermentation type for production of high concentration of l‐LA. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry

Clay often has severe detrimental impacts on cement-based materials. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the mechanism causing the deterioration to improve the service life of cement-based materials. Based on accurate dimensional analysis, a mechanism that influences clay is proposed: the intercalation of the side chains of superplasticizer molecules in the interlayer space of the clay. To lessen this harmful effect, a new clay-resistant admixture (CRA) possessing cationic groups of small molecular size was synthesized through a novel dimensional design. The length and width of the side chains of this superplasticizer molecule were 9.50–17.50 and 0.25–0.40 nm, respectively, with a radius of ~3.74 nm in solvent, which is larger than the interlayer spacing of montmorillonite (i.e. 1.09–2.14 nm). The longitudinal and latitudinal lengths of the CRA molecule were 0.468 and 9.456 nm, respectively, ensuring intercalation in the interlayer of montmorillonite. The increase in interlayer spacing of the clay was 0.364 nm following addition of polycarboxylate superplasticizer (PCE) plus CRA and 0.632 nm following addition of PCE, which suggests that the CRA plays the role of a ‘sacrificial agent’ that is preferentially intercalated into the interlayer space of clay to further prevent the side chains of the superplasticizer molecules from entering the interlayer. The aim of this study was to propose a suitable means of synthesizing a new CRA to address the impact of clay through dimensional design and mechanism analysis, which contributes to the theoretical study and technological improvement of cement-based materials.

Geomagnetic matching navigation plays a vital role in the navigation and guidance field, and the construction of geomagnetic reference maps plays a significant role in geomagnetic matching navigation. This paper addresses the problem of generating high-resolution geomagnetic reference maps with limited measured data. Most existing methods can hardly satisfy the accuracy requirements. We base our study on the theory of image super-resolution reconstruction and approach this problem from the perspective of dictionary learning and sparse representation. We propose a method of sparse dictionary initialization based on prior information from rectangular harmonic analysis, and then the K-SVD algorithm is applied to the dictionary training process to improve the performance of the sparse dictionary. Three components of the geomagnetic field are considered for multi-channel sparse representation to enhance the quality of the constructed maps. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms other geomagnetic reference map construction methods in the reconstructed precision as well as the robustness to noise.

Granular computing is a method of studying human intelligent information processing, which has advantage of knowledge discovery. In this paper, we convert a classification problem of sample space into a classification problem of fuzzy clustering granular space and propose a random fuzzy clustering granular hyperplane classifier (RFCGHC) from the perspective of granular computing. Most classifiers are only used to process numerical data, RFCGHC can process not only non-numerical data, such as information granules, but also numerical data. The classic granulation method is generally serial granulation, which has high time complexity. We design a parallel distributed granulation method to enhance efficiency. First, a clustering algorithm with adaptive cluster center number is proposed, where the ratio of standard deviation between categories and standard deviation within categories is as evaluation criterion. The clusters and the optimal amount of cluster centers can be achieved by the method. On the basis of these, sample set can be divided into many subsets and each sample can be granulated by these cluster centers. Then, a fuzzy clustering granular space can be formed, where fuzzy clustering granules, fuzzy clustering granular vectors, and their operators can be defined. In order to get the optimal hyperplane in the fuzzy clustering granular space to classify these samples, we design a loss function and evaluate each category with probability by fuzzy clustering granular hyperplane. In solving the loss function, genetic algorithm based on fuzzy clustering granules is adopted. Experimental results and theoretical analysis show that RFCGHC has good performance.

To broaden the application of oxime ester and obtain a photoinitiating system with high performance in visible light photopolymerization, we prepared the two arylaminocarbazole oxime ester (CZ–OXE), OXE1 and OXE2, with visible absorption. The multicomponent initiation systems of OXE as one of the components were evaluated in visible photopolymerization. Synergism between OXEs and diaryliodonium salt (ION), N-vinylcarbazole (NVK), ethyl 4-dimethylamino benzoate (EDB), and triphenylphosphine (TPP) were experimentally studied via steady state photolysis and fluorescence quenching. The thermodynamic feasibility for electron transfer reaction in photoinitiating systems was confirmed by cyclic voltammetry experiments. Electron spin resonance techniques proved the production of active species in the systems. Polymerization experiments under a 405 nm light source showed that the two-component initiation system OXEs/ION was more efficient than the one-component initiator OXEs. Similarly, three-component OXEs/ION/co-initiator photoinitiating systems are more efficient than OXEs/ION systems.

Magnetic sensors have been widely used for current measurements in diverse industries. In order to achieve a large current measurement without an iron core structure, magnetic sensors are often arranged to be a circular array for designing a new electronic current transformer (ECT). However, this ECT with a circular array of magnetic sensors usually suffers from tradeoffs between the number of sensors and the measurement accuracy. This paper visualizes this tradeoff and proposes a 3-D magnetic-field model to analyze the impact of the magnetic sensor circular array position on current measurements. We develop an analytical expression of the current measurement errors to estimate the minimum number of required magnetic sensors and point out the acceptable deviations of the ECT position under various accuracy classes. Based on the estimation results, we design a new circular array with eight magnetic sensors and build a three-phase current measurement system. The test results demonstrate the efficiency and the robustness of the designed class-1.0 ECT, which successfully maintains accuracy class 1.0 under various position deviations in balanced or unbalanced three-phase power delivery systems.

Although numerous fluorescent probes are designed to detect the pH value in the past decades, developing fluorescent probes for extreme alkalinity (pH > 14) detection in aqueous solution is still a great challenge. In this work, we utilized 1H-imidazo[4,5-f][1, 10] phenanthroline (IP) group as the recognition group of hydroxyl ion and introduced two triethylene glycol monomethyl ether groups to improve its solubility. This IP derivative, BMIP, possessed good solubility (25 mg/mL) in water. It displayed high selectivity toward extreme alkalinity (pH > 14) over other ions and pH (from extreme acidity to pH = 14). From 3 to 6 mol/L OHˉ, the exact concentration of OHˉ could be revealed by BMIP and the whole detection process just needed a short time (≤ 10 s). Meanwhile, it exhibited good anti-interference ability and repeatability during the detection process. Through optical spectra and NMR analysis, its detection mechanism was proved to be deprotonation by hydroxyl ion and then aggregation-induced enhanced emission. Our study presents a new basic group based on which researchers can develop new fluorescent probes that can detect extreme alkalinity (pH > 14) in aqueous solution.

The mechanism of deactivation of MnOx/TiO2 is studied. The MnOx/TiO2 catalyst prepared by co-precipitation method has poor stability, the NO conversion decreased to about 50% after 100 h denitrification. Catalyst activity and physicochemical properties of the catalyst before and after SCR denitrification were compared and analyzed through BET, XRD, SEM, which indicated that dispersion of active sites and surface area of catalyst were decreased after 100 h denitrification. Catalyst activity and surface chemical compositions were investigated by XPS, H2-TPR, NH3-TPD, which shown that content of Mn3+ and chemisorbed oxygen on the surface decreases. The different active sites of catalyst and adsorption characteristics of reacting gases (NH3 and NO) over catalyst before and after denitrification was investigated through in-situ DRIFT. It was found that NO is more easily adsorbed on the surface of catalyst than NH3 and form nitrate. The nitrate that did not participate in the reaction gradually accumulate on the surface of the catalyst, which inhibits the adsorption of NH3. This is the main reason for the deactivation of the catalyst.

In this paper, we propose a method to analytically solve some types of DC lumped-parameter equivalent circuit models for solar cells with S-shaped I-V characteristics measured under illumination. Based on the models proposed previously by other authors, we present the set of equations describing solar cell’s terminal current and voltage, derive the analytical solutions of I-V characteristics, and give discussions about the effects from the model parameters on solar cells’ I-V characteristics. The comparisons between the proposed solutions and the least square method results illustrate that the solution calculation scheme is not only both accurate and efficient, but also valid in the whole operation regime of solar cells especially for the S-shaped kink in the first quadrant. Finally, the solutions are validated by the reconstructed experimental data to demonstrate that they can be adopted in the practical applications of solar cells. As a result, the feature of the proposed solutions can decrease computation complexity, ease the extraction process of the solar cells’ model fitting parameters, and increase simulation accuracy.

A novel variable pH control operation strategy was developed for maximizing energy and resource recovery from food waste by integrating the ultra-fast hydrolysis and lipid fermentation. Food waste after fast hydrolyzed by homemade hydrolytic enzymes, the separated solids can be directly applied as biofertilizer, while the liquor was used for microbial lipid production with oleaginous yeast Rhodosporidium toruloides 2.1389. A novel variable pH control strategy was thus developed for enhanced lipid production. As such, a lipid yield of 11.10 g/kg food waste was obtained, which contained about 5% of highly value-added docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). The residual soluble COD (SCOD) after lipid fermentation was used as organic source for further biomethane production by anaerobic digestion with a biomethane yield of 0.287 L CH₄/g SCOD removed. According to these results, it was estimated that about 7713 tonnes of biodiesel and 422 tonnes of high-value DHA could be produced yearly from Singapore's food waste, together with 32,392 tonnes of dry biofertilizer and 6.48 × 10^6 m³ of methane gas. Compared to the conventional lipid based-biodiesel production, the total economic revenue could be increased by a factor of 2.03 by adopting the proposed variable pH control strategy due to the high commercial value of DHA. It is expected that the approach developed in this study can open a new window for future food waste management. Gao Zhen and Qunhui Wang are grateful to the supports from Guangxi Key Research and Development Program (Guike AB18126087) and China Scholarship Council (CSC, 201706460066).

Measurement of visual quality is of significant importance to many image processing tasks. The target of image quality assessment (IQA) is to design effective computational models in order to automatically predict the quality of images in a perceptual consistent manner. We propose a full reference (FR) IQA metric based on deep convolutional neural networks and information-theoretic IQA framework. The previous proposed PAVIF is incorporated into the powerful convolutional network VGG19. Both the reference and distorted image are fed into the VGG19, and the output of each channels in the first 35 layers are utilized to measure the perceptual quality difference. The final objective score is obtained by averaging all the channel-wise quality scores. Experimental results on TID2013 and LIVE image database demonstrate that our proposed metric is competitive with many state-of-the-art IQA metrics.

Due to the great similarity to the natural extracellular matrix and minimally invasive surgeries, injectable hydrogels are appealing biomaterials in cartilage and bone tissue engineering. Nevertheless, undesirable mechanical properties and bioactivity greatly hamper their availability in clinic applications. Here, we developed an injectable nanocomposite hydrogel by in situ growth of CaP nanoparticles (ICPNs) during the free-radical polymerization of dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate (DMAEMA) and 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) matrix (PDH) for bone regeneration. The ICPNs are self-assembled by incorporation of poly-l-glutamic acid (PGA) with abundant carboxyl functional groups during the formation of carboxyl–Ca2+ coordination and further CaP precipitation. Furthermore, the carboxyl groups of PGA could interact with the tertiary amines of DMAEMA fragments and thus improve the mechanical strength of hydrogels. Upon mixing solutions of DMAEMA and HEMA bearing PGA, Ca2+, and PO43–, this effective and dynam...

A pilot-scale multilevel contact oxidation reactors system, coupled with saran lock carriers, was applied for the treatment of poultry farm wastewater. The removal efficiencies of CODcr, ammonia, and the total nitrogen as well as the elimination performance of CODcr and total nitrogen along the three-level contact oxidation tanks under six designed operational models were investigated. Based on the performance of the nitrogen removal of the saran lock carriers and the distribution of anoxic–aerobic interspace under the suitable operation model, the mechanism of nitrogen removal of the system was also explored. The results revealed that the intermittent aeration under parallel model is the most suitable operation model, while the removal efficiencies of CODcr, ammonia, and the total nitrogen were 86.86%, 84.04%, and 80.96%, respectively. The effluent concentration of CODcr, ammonia, and the total nitrogen were 55.6 mg/L, 8.3 mg/L, and 12.0 mg/L, which satisfy both the discharge standard of pollutants for livestock and poultry breeding industry (GB 18596–2001) and the first grade of the integrated wastewater discharge standard (GB 8978–1996). Moreover, the mechanism for the nitrogen removal should be attributed to the plenty of anoxic–aerobic interspaces of the biofilm and the three-dimensional spiral structure of the saran lock carriers, where the oxygen-deficient distribution was suitable for the happening of the simultaneous nitrification and denitrification process. Therefore, the multilevel contact oxidation tanks system is an effective pathway for the treatment of the poultry farm wastewater on the strength of a suitable operation model and novel carriers.

Fructosyltransferases have been used in the industrial production of fructooligosaccharides (FOS). However, it is still not possible to explain the difference in FOS production based on the variations observed in the FOS synthesizing enzymes of A. niger. In the present study, a novel fructosyltransferase (FT-A) from A. niger TCCC41686 with high FOS synthesis ability was characterized. The FT-A gene was obtained and expressed in Pichia pastoris. A homology model of FT-A showed that the changes of residues identified outside the conserved domains were found to have an effect on its characteristics and its FOS-synthesis capacity. The optimal activity of the recombinant FT-A was observed at 50 °C and pH 6.0, and it was stable below 50 °C and over the range of pH 3.0–11.0. The Km and Vmax values of FT-A were 151.13 g L−1 and 6.55 g L−1 min−1, respectively. The production of FOS using the recombinant FT-A remained above 60% during 50–80 min of synthesis based on sucrose as substrate. The novel fructosyltransferase (FT-A) investigated in this study can potentially be applied for the efficient industrial production of FOS. The results also provide more valuable information for explaining the relationship between the structure and function of the FT-A.

A novel layer by layer (LbL) assembled structure with phosphorylcholine groups was fabricated to improve the hemocompatibility of paclitaxel/chitosan (PTX/CS) nanofibers (NF) coatings The random copolymers with phosphorylcholine groups poly (2‑methacryloyloxy-ethylphosphorylcholine‑co‑methacrylicacid) (PMAs) were synthesized through free radical polymerization and then first PMA layer formed on PTX/CS NF coatings via electrostatic interactions. After that CS polycation and PMA polyanion thin films LbL formed on PTX/CS NF coatings. The LbL structure was confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and water contact angle. The drug release in vitro indicated that the PMA modified PTX/CS NF coatings (PTX/CS-PMA NF coatings) showed a sustained slower release of PTX drug. The LbL coatings containing phosphorylcholine groups could significantly reduce proteins adsorption, platelets adhesion and cell adhesion. They showed a lower platelet (about 6%) and protein (30–40%) (bovine serum albumin, BSA; bovine plasma fibrinogen, Fg) adhesion. Meanwhile, the adhesion of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) was also found reduced. These results demonstrate that the preparation of PMA modified coatings is a simple strategy to improve the hemocompatibility of PTX/CS NF coatings, has good potential for application in blood-contacting materials and devices. Statement of significance We develop a simple method to improve the hemocompatibility of paclitaxel/chitosan (PTX/CS) nanofibers (NF) coatings, which can significantly reduce the protein adsorption, and the adhesion of cells and platelets. Using layer by layer (LbL) assembly with PMA polyanion and CS polycation, multilayered PMA/CS films formed on the PTX/CS NF coatings. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and water contact angle characterization demonstrated that a cell outer membrane mimetic structure was formed on the PTX/CS NF coatings. The hemocompatibility of modified surface was significantly improved as shown by 94% adhesion suppression for platelets and 60–70% adsorption suppression for bovine plasma fibrinogen (Fg) and bovine serum albumin (BSA). The drug release in vitro indicated that the PMA modified PTX/CS NF (PTX/CS-PMA) coatings had a sustained drug release. Thus this paper provides a facile method for fabricating cell outer membrane mimetic structure which can improve hemocompatibility of blood-contacting material surfaces.

Tungsten-based coatings without TiC addition (TiC-free) and with 1.5 wt% TiC addition (TiC-doped) were fabricated by supersonic atmospheric plasma spraying (SAPS) technique, respectively. The as-sprayed coatings were then irradiated by laser. The results showed that the as-sprayed coatings were mainly composed of lamellar structure. TiC phase located mainly at lamellar gaps of the as-sprayed TiC-doped coating with a morphology of strip filled the gaps. The as-sprayed TiC-doped coating exhibited dense structure, lower porosity, reduced oxygen content and higher thermal conductivity as compared with the as-sprayed TiC-free coating. The as-irradiated coatings could be divided into remelted zone, un-remelted zone and/or mixing zone. Cracks were more easily formed in the as-irradiated TiC-free coating than in the as-irradiated TiC-doped coating. The stripped TiC phase in the as-sprayed TiC-doped coating changed into quasi-spherical/spherical ones in the remelted zone of the irradiated coating and distributed along the tungsten grain boundaries. The averaged tungsten grain size in the remelted zone of the as-irradiated TiC-doped coating was about 5.4 μm and that of the as-irradiated TiC-free coating was about 14.8 μm. There were about 96 wt% α(W) and about 4 wt% γ(W) existed in the remelted zone near the surface of the as-irradiated TiC-free coating. Only α(W) could be received in the remelted zone far from the surface of the as-irradiated TiC-free coating and the remelted zone of the as-irradiated TiC-doped coating. There were no obvious diffraction peaks for γ(W) could be indexed from the XRD patterns for the as-irradiated TiC-doped coating. The ability of the as-sprayed TiC-doped coating to resist laser irradiation was greater than the as-sprayed TiC-free coating, mainly attributing to the higher thermal conductivity of the as-sprayed TiC-doped coating and the refinement effect of TiC particles in the as-irradiated TiC-doped coating.

In recent decades, metasurfaces have emerged as an exotic and appealing group of nanophotonic devices for versatile wave regulation with deep subwavelength thickness facilitating compact integration. However, the ability to dynamically control the wave–matter interaction with external stimulus is highly desirable especially in such scenarios as integrated photonics and optoelectronics, since their performance in amplitude and phase control settle down once manufactured. Currently, available routes to construct active photonic devices include micro-electromechanical system (MEMS), semiconductors, liquid crystal, and phase change materials (PCMs)-integrated hybrid devices, etc. For the sake of compact integration and good compatibility with the mainstream complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process for nanofabrication and device integration, the PCMs-based scheme stands out as a viable and promising candidate. Therefore, this review focuses on recent progresses on phase change metasurfaces with dynamic wave control (amplitude and phase or wavefront), and especially outlines those with continuous or quasi-continuous atoms in favor of optoelectronic integration.

Bovine serum albumin (BSA) microspheres were prepared through a facile and low-cost route including a high-speed dispersion of BSA in cross-linking solution followed by spray drying. Interestingly the as-prepared BSA microspheres possess unique blue-green, green, green-yellow, and red fluorescence when excited by specific wavelengths of laser or LED light. The studies of UV-visible reflectance spectra and fluorescence emission spectra indicated that four classes of fluorescent compounds are presumably formed during the fabrication processes. The formation and the potential contributors for the unique green and red autofluorescence were also discussed and proposed though the exact structures of the fluorophores formed remain elusive due to the complexity of the protein system. The effect of spray-drying conditions on the morphology of spray-dried samples was investigated and optimized. FTIR was further employed to characterize the formation of the functional groups in the as-prepared autofluorescent microspheres. Good in vitro and in vivo biocompatibility was demonstrated by the cytotoxicity test on the A549 cancer cells and tissue histological analysis, respectively. The autofluorescent BSA microspheres themselves were then applied as a novel tracer for convenient tracking/modeling of the biodegradation of autofluorescent BSA microspheres injected into mouse model based on noninvasive, time-dependent fluorescence images of the mice, in which experimental data are in good agreement with the proposed mathematical model. All these studies indicate that the as-developed protein microspheres exhibiting good biocompatibility, biodegradability, and unique autofluorescence, can significantly broaden biomedical applications of fluorescent protein particles.

In this study, the classification problem is solved from the view of granular computing. That is, the classification problem is equivalently transformed into the fuzzy granular space to solve. Most classification algorithms are only adopted to handle numerical data; random fuzzy granular decision tree (RFGDT) can handle not only numerical data but also nonnumerical data like information granules. Measures can be taken in four ways as follows. First, an adaptive global random clustering (AGRC) algorithm is proposed, which can adaptively find the optimal cluster centers and maximize the ratio of interclass standard deviation to intraclass standard deviation, and avoid falling into local optimal solution; second, on the basis of AGRC, a parallel model is designed for fuzzy granulation of data to construct granular space, which can greatly enhance the efficiency compared with serial granulation of data; third, in the fuzzy granular space, we design RFGDT to classify the fuzzy granules, which can select important features as tree nodes based on information gain ratio and avoid the problem of overfitting based on the pruning algorithm proposed. Finally, we employ the dataset from UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository for verification. Theory and experimental results prove that RFGDT has high efficiency and accuracy and is robust in solving classification problems.

The regression problem is a valued problem in the domain of machine learning, and it has been widely employed in many fields such as meteorology, transportation, and material. Granular computing (GrC) is a good approach of exploring human intelligent information processing, which has the superiority of knowledge discovery. Ensemble learning is easy to execute parallelly. Based on granular computing and ensemble learning, we convert the regression problem into granular space equivalently to solve and proposed boosted fuzzy granular regression trees (BFGRT) to predict a test instance. The thought of BFGRT is as follows. First, a clustering algorithm with automatic optimization of clustering centers is presented. Next, in terms of the clustering algorithm, we employ MapReduce to parallelly implement fuzzy granulation of the data. Then, we design new operators and metrics of fuzzy granules to build fuzzy granular rule base. Finally, a fuzzy granular regression tree (FGRT) in the fuzzy granular space is presented. In the light of these, BFGRT can be designed by parallelly combing multiple FGRTs via random sampling attributes and MapReduce. Theory and experiments show that BFGRT is accurate, efficient, and robust.

A blockchain voting system based on the feedback mechanism and Wilson score is proposed to solve the problem of the malicious votes behavior. Firstly, the relatively accurate supporting rate and ranking for candidates are obtained using the Wilson score. Secondly, different feedback coefficients are calculated according to the above parameters. Finally, the account points are adjusted according to the feedback coefficients. The feedback mechanism is designed in the voting smart contract, and the smart contract is deployed on the blockchain to ensure the enforcement of the feedback mechanism. A fully functional smart contract is designed and briefly verified in this paper. The experiment is conducted under the K-out-of-L type of weighted voting. Experimental results show that the Wilson score can accurately modify the candidates&rsquo, supporting rates, and the feedback mechanism can effectively suppress malicious votes.

Transphosphatidylation catalyzed by phospholipase D has gained increasing attention for producing phosphatidylserine (PS), which can be used in functional food and medicine. In this study, we investigated the effects of six signal peptides on the secretion of PLD (PLDsa) from Streptomyces antibioticus TCCC 21059 in the food-grade GRAS bacterium Bacillus subtilis. It indicated that the optimal signal peptide DacB with an Ala-X-Ala sequence motif at the C-terminus showed the highest secretory expression ability, resulting in increased production of 2.84 U/mL PLDsa. Then PLDsa was immobilized on the epoxy-based carriers, and one of these carriers allowed PLDsa loading of up to 2.7 mg/g. The immobilized PLDsa was more stable over a wide range of pH value (4.5–7.5) and temperature (16 °C–60 °C) than free PLDsa. Subsequently, the synthesis of PS from soybean phosphatidylcholine (PC) was carried out in purely aqueous solution using immobilized PLDsa, leading to a high yield of 65%. The immobilized PLDsa catalyst maintained a relative PS production of 60% after 5 recycles. Notably, the use of toxic solvent was completely eliminated in the whole process, which would be more profitable for the application of PS.

High-efficiency optoelectronic devices require materials with suitable band gap, excellent carrier mobility, strong light-matter interaction, and high thermal- and photostability. Herein, we report two layered materials of group VI, namely, $\mathrm{Se}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ and $\mathrm{Te}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$, which meet all those desired criteria. Both materials are stable with 1T-$\mathrm{Mo}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$-like structure, and exhibit in-direct gap semiconducting feature and possess extraordinary electronic transport properties with isotropic carrier mobilities outperforming their $\mathrm{Mo}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ analog. Using the $GW$ approach for determining the quasiparticle electronic structure and Bethe-Salpeter equation accounting for the many-body excitonic effects, the optical properties of both materials have been identified. We find that exciton effects are significant in both materials that is characterized by the large binding energy of 0.66 and 0.84 eV for monolayer $\mathrm{Se}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ and $\mathrm{Te}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$, respectively. The absorption edges lie in the optimal energy window of $1.0\text{--}1.5\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{eV}$, which enables strong photoabsorption covering the whole visible-light region. Finally and importantly, we demonstrate that the in-direct nature of those materials can be violated by capping them with 2H-$\mathrm{Mo}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ to form a van der Waals heterostructure, while keeping the gap in the energy favorable region. Those physical and optical characteristics make few-layer $\mathrm{Se}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ and $\mathrm{Te}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ highly appealing for room-temperature light-emitting devices and, particularly, solar harvesting devices.

The rapid development of nanotechnology has provided new strategies for the treatment of tumors. Nano-scale hydroxyapatite (HAP), as the main component of hard tissues in humans and vertebrates, have been found to specifically inhibit tumor cells. However, achieving controllable synthesis of HAP and endowing it with cancer cell-targeting properties remain enormous challenges. To solve this problem, we developed polyacrylic acid-coordinated hydroxyapatite nanoparticles (HAP–PAA) and further chemically grafted them with folic acid (HAP–PAA-FA) for cancer treatment in this study. The nucleation sites and steric hindrance provided by the PAA greatly inhibited the agglomeration of the nanoparticles, and at the same time, the excess functional groups further modified the surface of nanoparticles to achieve targeting efficiency. The spherical, low-crystallinity HAP–PAA nanoparticles exhibited good tumor cell lethality. After grafting the nanoparticles with folic acid for molecular targeting, their cellular uptake and specific killing ability of tumor cells were further enhanced. The HAP–PAA-FA nanoparticle system exerted a regulatory effect on the tumor microenvironment and had good biological safety. All the above results indicate that this research will broaden the application of hydroxyapatite in tumor treatment.

Transdermal drug delivery of propranolol hydrochloride (PRH) is promising for the treatment of infantile hemangioma (IH). Clinically used PRH hydrogel fails to reach the deep IH for complete recovery. In this study, the PRH-loaded cubic nanoparticles (CNPs) were prepared to promote the transdermal effect of PRH. A remote drug loading method was developed to prepare the PRH-CNPs. For the traditional passive drug loading method, the largest encapsulation efficiency (EE%) was around 50%. The remote drug loading was performed by increasing the pH of the mixture of blank CNPs and PRH solution. The optimal PRH-CNPs showed an EE% of 90.15 ± 2.44% at pH 8.5. The permeation of the PRH solution was poor while the PRH-CNPs showed greatly enhanced skin permeation. It was found that smaller-sized PRH-CNPs contributed to increased skin permeation and retention. In addition, the PRH-CNPs had higher cytotoxicity towards the EOMA cells when compared with the PRH solution. During storage for 1 month, the PRH-CNPs kept stable size distribution, pH, and EE%. In conclusion, results of this study suggested that the PRH-CNPs could be a potential candidate for the treatment of the IH by transdermal delivery.

We present a nanoparticle size-separation device based on a nanofluidic rocking Brownian motor. It features a ratchet-shaped electrostatic particle potential with increasing barrier heights along the particle transport direction. The sharp drop of the particle current with barrier height is exploited to separate a particle suspension into multiple sub-populations. By solving the Fokker--Planck equation, we show that the physics of the separation mechanism is governed by the energy landscape under forward tilt of the ratchet. For a given device geometry and sorting duration, the applied force is thus the only tunable parameter to increase the separation resolution. For the experimental conditions of 3.5 V applied voltage and 20 s sorting, we predict a separation resolution of $\sim 2$ nm, supported by experimental data for separating spherical gold particles of nominal 80 and 100 nm diameters., 5 pages, 4 figures plus supplemental material

Nanomicelles, by virtue of their prominent biocompatibility, degradability, and ability to solubilize hydrophobic drugs, have been widely used as the most effective delivery platform for anticancer drugs. However, undesirable drug-loading capacity, unfeasible modification, poor in vivo stability, and intratumoral penetration remain to be addressed. Herein, we introduce a novel core/shell PEGylated poly(glycerol sebacate) (PEGS)/hydroxyapatite (HA) hybrid nanomicelle based on a unique triblock PEGS substrate with functional carboxyls in terminals and free hydroxyls as pendant groups. The hydrophobic doxorubicin (DOX) can be controllably encapsulated in the core of nanomicelles via hydrogen bonding, and ensuing in situ mineralization of HA occurs as a shell layer with the electrostatic effect between the carboxylate radical (COO-) and calcium ion (Ca2+). Through optimizing the coordination of PEGS nanomicelles and HA mineralization, 20-30 nm spherical nanoparticles can be formed with considerable drug loading (0.38 mg DOX/1 mg nanoparticles) and a sensitive pH-responsive release (about 50% release amount at pH 5.6 while

InP quantum dots (QDs) are considered as one of the most promising candidates of Cd- or Pb-based QDs in the applications of display and lighting. However, the performances of blue InP QDs and the corresponding light emitting devices (LEDs) are far inferior to those of their red and green counterparts, which strongly limits the development of InP QD based LEDs (QLEDs) technology. Here, high quantum yield (∼81%) and large size (∼7.0 ± 0.9 nm) InP/GaP/ZnS//ZnS QDs with a thick shell have been successfully synthesized by a shell engineering approach, and the corresponding QLEDs exhibit a record brightness and external quantum efficiency of 3120 cd·m-2 and 1.01%, respectively. Large-scale density functional theory calculations on thousands-of-atoms QDs indicate that thicker-shell ones favor a more balanced carrier injection in the QD film and simultaneously suppress the FRET between closely packed QDs, which collectively contribute to the improved blue device performances.

This article reports new tris‐cyclometalated Ir complexes containing mixed‐C^N ligands, (C^N1)2Ir(C^N2), which are a rarely explored class of Ir(III) complexes. Two new mixed 2‐phenylpyridine (ppy) / 4‐methyl‐2,5‐diphenylpyridine (mdp) complexes (ppy)2Ir(mdp) and (ppy)Ir(mdp)2 have been synthesized and their optoelectronic properties have been systematically characterized. Photoluminescence quantum yield values are 0.76‐0.85; excited state lifetimes are 0.07‐0.11 μs. Phosphorescent organic light emitting devices (PhOLEDs) based on these emissive complexes in a very simple device architecture reproducibly showed slightly higher external quantum efficiency (EQE) and power efficiency (PE) values compared with devices using the analogous conventional homoleptic Ir complexes Ir(ppy)3 and Ir(mdp)3, and the heteroleptic complexes (ppy)2Ir(acac) and (mdp)2Ir(acac). The new complexes (ppy)2Ir(mdp) 3 and (ppy)Ir(mdp)2 4 give PhOLEDs with EQEmax and PEmax values of 26.7 and 26.0% / 94.7 and 94.1 lm W−1, respectively, and very high values are retained at the practical luminances of 100 and 1000 cd m−2. The values for (ppy)2Ir(mdp) are 26.3% and 73.6 lm W−1 (at 100 cd m−2) and 24.6% and 53.5 lm W−1 (at 1000 cd m−2). These efficiencies are comparable with the highest reported values of PhOLEDs using conventional Ir(III) emitters in more complicated device structures. Mixed C^N ligand systems are, therefore, a viable strategy for developing new efficient phosphorescent emitters.

A pilot-scale (5 m3/d) study was applied for the treatment of a high-strength poultry manure wastewater by using a multi-level biological contact oxidation tanks system with novel carriers. Firstly, four kinds of carriers including porous block carriers, sponge globoid carriers, fiber ball carriers, and suspend plastic carriers were compared at lab-scale experiment to choose the best performed carriers for the further application in pilot scale experiment. Then, the performance of the pollutants elimination during the whole pilot-scale reactor as well as the contribution efficiency of each tank under different influent pollutants loads were investigated. Finally, the biomass evaluation on the carriers and the mechanism of nitrogen removal were also explored. The conclusion showed that the effluent quality could satisfy the discharge standard of pollutants for livestock and poultry breeding industry (GB 18596-2001) when the influent organic load was less than 3.64 kg CODcr/(m3 d) during the pilot-scale system placed with the porous block carriers. The contact oxidation tank I dominated the average contribution efficiency of CODcr (89.2%), ammonia (69.6%), and the total nitrogen (57.3%) during the three-level biological contact oxidation tanks. The step-feed operational model was suggested to further increase the pollutants removal capacity of the following Tank II and Tank III. The oxygen-deficient environment of the biofilm and the proper three-dimensional spiral structure of the carriers were suitable for the happening of the simultaneous nitrification and denitrification occurred in the pilot-scale aerobic reactor.

The residues of food waste after removing waste cooking oils could be converted to microbial lipid by oleaginous yeasts and microbial lipid could be used as a raw material of biodiesel with waste cooking oils. This process would have positive environmental and economic benefits. However, the composition of food waste is extremely complex. Many types of organic acids, such as lactic acid and acetic acid, could be accumulated during the collection, transportation and storage processes. The effects of these substances on microbial lipid production remained unknown. In this study, food waste saccharified liquid (FWSL) without any additional nutrients was fed to Rhodosporidium toruloides 2.1389 for microbial lipid production. Total biomass concentration, lipid concentration and lipid yield increased by 87.4%, 69.4% and 69.3%, respectively, compared with the YPD medium. Remarkably, increasing the concentration of lactic acid in the medium promoted the total biomass concentration of yeast. Furthermore, lipid concentration decreased slightly when single lactic acid or single acetic acid concentration was below 5 g/L or 1 g/L in the culture media. Metal elements that were present in the medium had considerable synergistic effects on lipid production. When four metal elements (i.e. Mg, Ca, Na and K) were present in the medium, total biomass concentration, lipid concentration, lipid content and lipid yield increased by 22.01%, 33.51%, 9.43% and 33.33%, respectively, compared with those in the control group. The interaction among the FWSL compositions that led to the promotion of microbial lipid production was beyond the inhibition effect. The engineering implication analysis evidently suggested that the process of microbial lipid production from FWSL was economically feasible and had potential industrial application prospects.

Nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions have attracted much attention for increasing concern on the quality of the atmospheric environment. In view of NO decomposition in the cement production process, the preparation of Cu-Al/SiO2 porous material and its effect on NO decomposition were studied, and the denitrification mechanism was proposed in this paper. The NO decomposition performance of the Cu-Al/SiO2 porous material was tested via the experimental setup and infrared spectrometer and micro gas chromatography (GC). The result shows that the Cu-Al/SiO2 porous material with the template of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) had a better NO decomposition rate than materials with other templates when the temperature was above 500 &deg, C, and NO decomposition rate could approach 100% at high temperatures above 750 &deg, C. Structure analysis indicates that the prepared Cu-Al/SiO2 material structure was a mesoporous structure. The X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Ultraviolet&ndash, visible spectrophotometry (UV&ndash, Vis) results of the denitrification product show that the Cu-Al/SiO2 material mainly decomposed to Cu2O and Si2O, and the CuO decomposed to Cu2O and O2 at high temperature. The Cu(I)O was considered as the active phase. The redox process between Cu(II)O and Cu(I)O was thought to be the denitrification mechanism of the Cu-Al/SiO2 porous material.

Colloidal quantum dots (QDs) of group III-V are considered as promising candidates for next-generation environmentally friendly light emitting devices, yet there appears to be only limited understanding of the underlying electronic and excitonic properties. Using large-scale density functional theory with the hybrid B3LYP functional solving the single-particle states and time-dependent density functional theory accounting for the many-body excitonic effects, we have identified the structural, electronic, and excitonic optical properties of InP, GaP, and GaInP QDs containing up to a thousand atoms or more. The calculated optical gap of InP QD appears in excellent agreement with available experiments, and it scales nearly linearly with the inverse diameter. The radiative exciton decay lifetime is found to increase surprisingly linearly with increasing the dot size. For GaP QDs we predict an unusual electronic state crossover at a diameter of around 1.5 nm, whereby the nature of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) state switches its symmetry from ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}}_{5}$-like at a larger diameter to ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}}_{1}$-like at a smaller diameter. After the crossover, the absorption intensity of the band-edge exciton states is significantly enhanced. Finally, we find that Vegard's law holds very well for GaInP random alloyed quantum dots down to ultrasmall sizes with less than a hundred atoms. The obtained energy gap bowing parameter of this common-cation compound in QD regime appears positive, size-dependent, and much smaller than its bulk parentage. The volume deformation, dominating over the charge exchange and structure relaxation effects, is mainly responsible for the QD energy gap bowing. The impact of excitonic effects on the optical bowing is found to be marginal. The present work provides a road map for a variety of electronic and optical properties of colloidal QDs in group III-V that can guide spectroscopic studies.

The biocompatibility and anticancer effect of hydroxyapatite nanoparticles (HAPNs) are compelling and promising in cancer nanomedicine. However, the essential role of fetal bovine serum (FBS) in a biological environment possibly determining the state of agglomeration and intracellular fate of HAPNs (length: ~ 60 nm; width: ~ 20 nm) has never been studied. Here, we investigated the importance of FBS in agglomeration and cell response of HAPNs in human osteosarcoma MG-63 cells. Protein adsorption on the surface of HAPNs after mixing with different concentrations of FBS was confirmed using transmission electron microscope (TEM), attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy, quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D), and thermogravimetric analysis (TG). The adsorption of serum protein improved dispersed state and stabilization of HAPNs, which was evidenced by dynamic light scattering (DLS), inverted microscope, and scanning electron microscope (SEM). More specifically, the agglomerate size of HAPNs in cell culture medium without FBS was above 1400 nm, while the agglomerate size of HAPNs with 10% FBS was decreased to about 200 nm and maintained for at least five days. Meanwhile, serum protein adsorption on HAPN surface enhanced cellular uptake and anticancer efficacy of HAPNs in MG-63 cells.

Five blue-emitting cationic Ir(III) materials with the form [ I r ( C ∧ N ) 2 ( N ∧ N ) ] + , where C ∧ N = 2-(2,4-difluorophenyl)pyridine (dfppy) cyclometalating ligands, and N ∧ N = biimidazole-type ancillary ligands, are investigated through a comprehensive theoretical scheme. Experimental researches concentrating on decorations of ancillary ligand, revealed that complex with 1,1′-CH3-2,2′-biimidazole (dMebiim) ancillary ligand is a non-emissive material due to the detrimental twisting of dMebiim resulting from steric hindrance of the methyl groups. When getting rid of methyl substituents that becomes the complex with a 1,1′-H-2,2′-biimidazole ancillary ligand, the quantum efficiency has been lifted to a large extent. Further rigidifying the biimidazole-type ancillary ligands, complex with an ortho-xylyl-tethered biimidzole ancillary ligand (1) was synthesized and has a higher quantum yield. From experimental aspect, the approaches employed in quantum efficiency enhancement is mainly concentrate on geometrical control through chelate effect. However, from theoretical aspect, we are not confined the strategies to rigidify the biimidazole ligand by divers chelates. In this study, our comprehensive theoretical scheme is firstly employed on the synthesized complex 1. Results show that the calculated radiative ( k r )and non-radiative ( k n r ) decay rates are consistence with the experimental findings. And further vibrational analysis clarified its nuclear behaviors during electronic transitions. Based on such vibrational analysis, it is found that substituting on the flanks of biimidzole can also effectively avoid detrimental twist. Therefore, in this study, we provide several new designed Ir(III) materials with substituent groups on the flanks of biimidzole, with the consideration of electron-withdrawing or -donating characters of the substituent groups. And Ir(III) materials with better performance are predicted from theoretical aspect.

We propose an explicit surface-potential-based direct current (dc) model for fully depleted polysilicon (poly-Si) thin-film transistors (TFTs). Being analytical and explicit, the proposed model is a solid base for compact models of these devices. The essential for our model is the explicit calculation of the surface potential, using the Lambert W function. Subsequently, using the surface potential, we also develop the expressions for charge and current, employing well established approaches, which include integration of carrier’s charge for drain current. Furthermore, the solutions of surface potential and drain current were validated by numerical results and experimental data, respectively. Finally, we discussed in detail about the effects on the surface potential and dc properties from the full depleted poly-Si TFT parameters. As a result, such a model is suitable to be implemented into computer-aided simulations of both device and circuit designs, due to its high computational accuracy and efficiency.

High concentration p-type AlInP material is an important layer to achieve low resistant and large carrier confinement in short-wavelength red-light laser diodes (LDs). To investigate the Mg doping behavior and other characteristics in the red-light LDs with tensile GaInP well structure, two LDs wafers with different Mg-doped AlInP cladding layers were grown by the metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) method. Incorporation and activation behavior of Mg atoms in heavily-doped AlInP were analyzed by the comparisons between hole concentration and atom concentration. We demonstrate that it is possible to achieve hole concentration above 1018 cm−3 using Mg dopant in AlInP layers just by an in-situ annealing. Furthermore, a hole concentration as high as 2.92 × 1018 cm−3 was achieved after post rapid thermal annealing in the N2 atmosphere, which is the highest hole doping concentrations reported to-date for the p-AlInP material.

The importance of irregular applications such as graph analytics is rapidly growing with the rise of Big Data. However, parallel graph workloads tend to perform poorly on general-purpose chip multiprocessors (CMPs) due to poor cache locality, low compute intensity, frequent synchronization, uneven task sizes, and dynamic task generation. At high thread counts, execution time is dominated by worklist synchronization overhead and cache misses. Researchers have proposed hardware worklist accelerators to address scheduling costs, but these proposals often harden a specific scheduling policy and do not address high cache miss rates. We address this with Minnow, a technique that augments each core in a CMP with a lightweight Minnow accelerator. Minnow engines offload worklist scheduling from worker threads to improve scalability. The engines also perform worklist-directed prefetching, a technique that exploits knowledge of upcoming tasks to issue nearly perfectly accurate and timely prefetch operations. On a simulated 64-core CMP running a parallel graph benchmark suite, Minnow improves scalability and reduces L2 cache misses from 29 to 1.2 MPKI on average, resulting in 6.01x average speedup over an optimized software baseline for only 1% area overhead.

A series of functional CeBiO x nanofibers (NFs) with different Ce:Bi molar ratios were successfully prepared by a facile two-step synthetic procedure including electrospinning and calcination. After systematic characterization of their morphology and structure/composition using various advanced techniques, the as-synthesized CeBiO x NFs were employed to modify screen-printed electrodes (SPEs) for the determination of fever reliever/pain reducer drug acetaminophen (AP) via both cyclic voltammetry (CV) and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). The results showed that the electrocatalytic activity of CeBiO x NFs was heavily dependent on Ce:Bi molar ratio and the Ce 0.75 Bi 0.25 O x NFs resulted in the highest electro-oxidation signal for AP among all Ce:Bi molar ratios tested in this study. Moreover, the Ce 0.75 Bi 0.25 O x NFs modified SPE showed a sensitivity of 360 μA mM −1 cm −2 , a low detection limit of 0.2 μM (signal to noise ratio of 3), a wide linear range up to 130 μM for DPV-based AP detection, and good intra- and inter-electrode reproducibility. Both the selectivity against uric acid, glucose, dopamine, ascorbic acid and the accuracy of the developed sensor for real sample analysis were also investigated using commercial paracetamol tablets and AP-spiked human serum samples.

The reaction mechanism of selective catalytic reduction of NO with ammonia (SCR) on MnOx/TiO2 catalysts was investigated through experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculation. Firstly, the catalytic performance of catalyst with different molar ratios of MnOx/TiO2 was investigated and then was analyzed by NH3 temperature programmed desorption (NH3-TPD). The crystalline structure and the valence state of the MnOx/TiO2 catalyst were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). According to the results, the model of MnOx/TiO2 was established. Secondly, the different active sites of catalyst surface and adsorption characteristics of reacting gases during the SCR reaction based on in-situ DRIFT was investigated. Finally, the energy of different elemental reaction and isomerization of intermediate was calculated by MS Dmol3. It was found that the main active substance of catalyst was Mn4+ species which distributed dispersedly on the catalyst surface. The introduction of MnOx dopant can promote the adsorption of gas and reduce the formation energy of oxygen vacancy. The complete catalytic cycle goes in three steps: (a) Lewis acid site reaction follows Eley-Rideal mechanism; (b) Bronsted acid site reaction follows Langmuir-Hinshelwood mechanism; (c) Regeneration of catalyst.

Most traditional voltage transformers in transmission and distribution networks are installed inside the substations. Nearly no accessible voltage information in the real-time scale is available for field engineers to carry out the field measurement for the purposes of the power quality inspection and the equipment maintenance. In order to offer an on-site and easy-to-use solution for the field measurement, the authors propose a novel electric-field (EF) sensor array based technique for measuring the overhead-line voltage. Based on the EFs measured by the EF sensor array and the partially known overhead-line geometry information from utilities, the proposed voltage algorithm can accurately calculate each-phase voltage without an on-site calibration before conducting the field measurement. The simulation results demonstrate that the authors' proposed technique with only three EF sensors can accurately calculate the overhead-line voltages and successfully reconstruct the real-time three-phase waveforms. The experiment results verify the feasibility of the proposed voltage sensor for the overhead-line voltage measurement.

Bi2X3 (X = S, Se, and Te) binary compounds have been widely studied as thermoelectric materials and reference topological insulators. Replacing one of the X atoms with a different atom Y of the same group has resulted in a new family of ternary compounds Bi2X2Y (X, Y = O, S, Se, and Te), which have attracted increasing attention very recently. By means of first-principles calculations within density functional theory, we have systematically studied the geometric structures and electronic properties of the whole family of these ternary compounds. We find that these compounds can be divided into two major groups. The first is traditional semiconductors, which include (i) Bi2O2Y, (ii) Bi2S2Y, and (iii) Bi2OY2. The other is topological insulators, which are (i) Bi2Se2Y and (ii) Bi2Te2Y. The optimized lattice parameters, band gaps as well as effective masses are in excellent agreement with recently available experimental measurements. In particular, we have found a new semiconductor material Bi2S2Te, which possesses an orthorhombic structure in space group pnma with a moderate direct gap of 0.5 eV at the HSE06 level and a small hole effective mass (∼0.22m0), which should favour fast hole transport and deserves further experimental studies. This work provides a road map for the exploration of the fundamental properties of the ternary compounds in this family as well as for their practical applications at the device level.