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The development of semiconducting polymers with good processability in green solvents and competitive electrical performance is essential for realizing sustainable large-scale manufacturing and commercialization of organic electronics. A major obstacle is the processability-performance dichotomy that is dictated by the lack of ideal building blocks with balanced polarity, solubility, electronic structures, and molecular conformation. Herein, through the integration of donor, quinoid and acceptor units, an unprecedented building block, namely TQBT, is introduced for constructing a serial of conjugated polymers. The TQBT, distinct in non-symmetric structure and high dipole moment, imparts enhanced solubility in anisole-a green solvent-to the polymer TQBT-T. Furthermore, PTQBT-T possess a highly rigid and planar backbone owing to the nearly coplanar geometry and quinoidal nature of TQBT, resulting in strong aggregation in solution and localized aggregates in film. Remarkably, PTQBT-T films spuncast from anisole exhibit a hole mobility of 2.30 cm2 V-1 s-1, which is record high for green solvent-processable semiconducting polymers via spin-coating, together with commendable operational and storage stability. The hybrid building block emerges as a pioneering electroactive unit, shedding light on future design strategies in high-performance semiconducting polymers compatible with green processing and marking a significant stride towards ecofriendly organic electronics.

TOUGHREACT-Brine implements the Pitzer ion activity model into V3.85-OMP and above, taking advantage of all code upgrades since the release of its predecessor version V1.21-Pitzer, including Open-MP parallelization of the geochemical computations, bug fixes, and upgrades to simulate the osmotic flow of water and two-dimensional Poiseuille flow for applications to membrane desalination. Contrarily to the previous standalone V1.21-Pizer version, this “Brine” version has been fullyintegrated into TOUGHREACT V4.00-OMP, which can be run with or without the Pitzer ion activity model option. In this report, we present:(1) The Pitzer ion-interaction theory and implemented model into TOUGREACT, (2) Input requirements for using the new Brine options, (3) Verification test cases, and (4) Sample problems.

This article focuses on a novel three-dimensional reconstruction system that maps large archeological caves using data collected by a small unmanned aircraft system with red, green, and blue-depth cameras. Cave sites often contain the best-preserved material in the archeological record. Yet few sites are fully mapped. Large caves environment usually contains complex geometric structures and objects, which must be scanned with long overlapped camera trajectories for better coverage. Due to the error in camera tracking of such scanning, reconstruction results often contain flaws and mismatches. To solve this problem, we propose a framework for surface loop closure, where loops are detected with a compute unified device architecture accelerated point cloud registration algorithm. After a loop is detected, a novel surface loop filtering method is proposed for robust loop optimization. This loop filtering method is robust to different scan patterns and can cope with tracking failure recovery so that there is more flexibility for unmanned aerial vehicles to fly and record data. We run experiments on public data sets and our cave data set for analysis and robustness tests. Experiments show that our system produces improved results on baseline methods.

TOUGHREACT-Brine implements the Pitzer ion activity model into V3.85-OMP and above, taking advantage of all code upgrades since the release of its predecessor version V1.21-Pitzer, including Open-MP parallelization of the geochemical computations, bug fixes, and upgrades to simulate the osmotic flow of water and two-dimensional Poiseuille flow for applications to membrane desalination. Contrarily to the previous standalone V1.21-Pizer version, this “Brine” version has been fullyintegrated into TOUGHREACT V4.00-OMP, which can be run with or without the Pitzer ion activity model option. In this report, we present:(1) The Pitzer ion-interaction theory and implemented model into TOUGREACT, (2) Input requirements for using the new Brine options, (3) Verification test cases, and (4) Sample problems.

This study used a static bidirectional multifunctional loading system. The system conducted bidirectional compression tests on scaled specimens of slurry masonry schist under freeze–thaw cycling conditions. This study aimed to investigate the influence of bidirectional stress coupling with freeze–thaw cycles on the mechanical properties of slurry masonry schist. The results indicate that lateral pressure can increase the peak stress of slurry masonry schist, while freeze–thaw cycles have an adverse effect on the material's internal pore structure, counteracting the gain effect of lateral pressure. This study also employed acoustic emission (AE) technology to analyze the evolution of slurry masonry schist failure characteristics. The findings reveal that freeze–thaw cycles accelerate the failure of slurry masonry schist during loading, and lateral pressure to some extent mitigates the damage development of slurry masonry schist. The synergistic effect of lateral pressure and freeze–thaw cycles alters the fracture mode of slurry masonry schist. Acoustic emission signal localization demonstrates numerous AE localization points in the interface transition zone, forming a coherent signal band where cracks propagate toward complete interface penetration. The crack extension process of the slurry masonry schist was investigated using the digital image correlation (DIC) method. The results indicated that macroscopic cracks formed in the strain localization zone, resulting in fracture damage to the specimens, with interfacial debonding identified as the primary failure mode for slurry masonry schist structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study published in the journal Synlett discusses a new method for the chemical recycling of plastic waste, specifically polystyrene. The study focuses on the use of an iron-based catalyst to degrade polystyrene into benzoic acid under mild conditions. The research explores different catalysts and solvent effects, and demonstrates the potential for plastic degradation using atmospheric air. This study provides valuable insights into the development of more efficient and sustainable methods for plastic recycling, offering a potential solution to the significant environmental problem of plastic waste. Additionally, another article presents a novel approach for the selective degradation of polystyrene products using a photoinduced iron catalyst. The study shows that this approach is highly effective in converting polystyrene waste into valuable chemicals such as formic acid and benzoic acid. The research provides insights into the potential for chemical upcycling of common polystyrene products and waste, offering a promising avenue for reducing plastic waste. [Extracted from the article]

The design of trajectory tracking controllers for smart driving cars still faces problems, such as uncertain parameters and it being time-consuming. To improve the tracking performance of the trajectory tracking controller and reduce the computation of the controller, this paper proposes an improved model predictive control (MPC) method based on fuzzy control and an online update algorithm. First, a vehicle dynamics model is constructed and a feedforward MPC controller is designed; second, a real-time updating method of the time domain parameters is proposed to replace the previous method of empirically selecting the time domain parameters; lastly, a fuzzy controller is proposed for the real-time adjustment of the weight coefficient matrix of the model predictive controller according to the lateral and heading errors of the vehicle, and a state matrix-based cosine similarity updating mechanism is developed for determining the updating nodes of the state matrix to reduce the controller computation caused by the continuous updating of the state matrix when the longitudinal vehicle speed changes. Finally, the controller is compared with the traditional model prediction controller through the co-simulation of CARSIM and MATLAB/Simulink, and the results show that the controller has great improvement in terms of tracking accuracy and controller computational load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]