Re-Looking into the Active Moieties of Metal X-ides (X- = Phosph-, Sulf-, Nitr-, and Carb-) Toward Oxygen Evolution Reaction

Non-precious metal-based catalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) have been extensively studied, among which the transition metal X-ides (including phosph-ides, sulf-ides, nitr-ides, and carb-ides) materials are emerging as promising candidates to replace the benchmark Ir/Ru-based materials in alkaline media. However, it is controversial whether the metal Xides host the real active sites since these metal Xides are thermodynamically unstable under a harsh OER environment—it has been reported that the initial metal Xides can be electrochemically oxidized and transformed into corresponding oxides and (oxy)hydroxides. Therefore, the metal Xides are argued as “pre-catalysts”; the electrochemically formed oxides and (oxy)hydroxides are believed as the real active moieties for OER. Herein, the recent advances in understanding the transformation behavior of metal Xides during OER are re-looked; importantly, hypotheses are provided to understand why the electrochemically formed oxides and (oxy)hydroxides catalysts derived from metal Xides are superior for OER to the as-prepared metal oxides and (oxy)hydroxides catalysts.     

致密砂岩油藏能量补充方式评价及优化

针对致密砂岩油藏大规模体积压裂开发后能量补充困难的问题,利用自主设计制作的大型人造三维岩心物理模型和物理模拟实验舱,开展致密砂岩油藏能量补充方式优化研究。实验结果表明:致密砂岩油藏压裂开发过程中,地层能量损耗严重,采取注水或注气的方式可有效进行能量补充;地层中裂缝规模越大,越有利于原油渗流,后续补充能量的传播范围越广,有助于进一步提高原油采收率;从提高驱油效率和扩大波及系数方面优选吞吐渗吸介质,CO₂均优于活性水,CO₂吞吐开发在矿场试验中取得了显著的增油效果,因此,CO₂吞吐作为一种有效的能量补充方式在致密油开发中展现了良好的应用前景。该文分析了致密砂岩储层水平井压裂开发的渗流规律,优选出致密砂岩储层大规模压裂开发后最佳渗吸介质,可为致密砂岩油藏开发设计提供重要的理论依据。     

坚硬顶板下巷道锚网索喷联合支护技术实践

干河煤矿+80水平三采区皮带巷上部赋存坚硬岩层,围岩压力较大;针对坚硬顶板条件,拟定以强主动支护为主的对策,即采用锚网索喷联合支护技术;应用表明,该巷道围岩变形量不大,验证了该支护技术安全可靠。     

A Terahertz Video Camera Patch Sheet with an Adjustable Design based on Self-Aligned, 2D,Suspended Sensor Array Patterning

Terahertz (THz) imaging is expected to become powerful tools for non-destructive inspections. To ensure the practical use of THz non-destructive monitoring, versatile THz imagers with adjustable designs that can eliminate the complexities and the bulkiness of the device are urgently required. Herein, a self-aligned filtration process for a 2D, free-standing carbon nanotube film array and its application to a THz video camera patch are reported. The presented techniques enable a) to freely design the camera size, sensor array pattern, and suspended shape according to its applications, b) to cut the camera patch into desired shapes, and c) to attach them to the objects that are intended to be measured. Real-time, non-destructive monitoring of various infrastructures is demonstrated. These results indicate that it can function regardless of restrictions, such as the shapes and locations of the measurement samples, thus providing a strong possibility for use in future non-destructive sensor networks.     

Various density light field image coding based on distortion minimization interpolation

In recent years, the light field (LF) as a new imaging modality has attracted wide interest. The large data volume of LF images poses great challenge to LF image coding, and the LF images captured by different devices show significant differences in angular domain. In this paper we propose a view prediction framework to handle LF image coding with various sampling density. All LF images are represented as view arrays. We first partition the views into reference view (RV) set and intermediate view (IV) set. The RVs are rearranged into a pseudo sequence and directly compressed by a video encoder. Other views are then predicted by the RVs. To exploit the four dimensional signal structure, we propose the linear approximation prior (LAP) to reveal the correlation among LF views and efficiently remove the LF data redundancy. Based on the LAP, a distortion minimization interpolation (DMI) method is used to predict IVs. To robustly handle the LF images with different sampling density, we propose an Iteratively Updating depth image based rendering (IU-DIBR) method to extend our DMI. Some auxiliary views are generated to cover the target region and then the DMI calculates reconstruction coefficients for the IVs. Different view partition patterns are also explored. Extensive experiments on different types LF images also valid the efficiency of the proposed method.     

Physiologically Active Molecules and Functional Properties of Soybeans in Human Health—A Current Perspective

In addition to providing nutrients, food can help prevent and treat certain diseases. In particular, research on soy products has increased dramatically following their emergence as functional foods capable of improving blood circulation and intestinal regulation. In addition to their nutritional value, soybeans contain specific phytochemical substances that promote health and are a source of dietary fiber, phospholipids, isoflavones (e.g., genistein and daidzein), phenolic acids, saponins, and phytic acid, while serving as a trypsin inhibitor. These individual substances have demonstrated effectiveness in preventing chronic diseases, such as arteriosclerosis, cardiac diseases, diabetes, and senile dementia, as well as in treating cancer and suppressing osteoporosis. Furthermore, soybean can affect fibrinolytic activity, control blood pressure, and improve lipid metabolism, while eliciting antimutagenic, anticarcinogenic, and antibacterial effects. In this review, rather than to improve on the established studies on the reported nutritional qualities of soybeans, we intend to examine the physiological activities of soybeans that have recently been studied and confirm their potential as a high-functional, well-being food.     

Flower‐shaped ultra‐wideband fractal antenna

A flower‐shaped ultra‐wideband fractal antenna is presented. It comprises a fourth iterative flower‐shaped radiator, asymmetrical stub‐loaded feeding line, and coplanar quarter elliptical ground planes. A wide operating band of 12.12 GHz (4.58‐16.7 GHz) for S ₁₁ ≤ ? 10 dB is achieved along with an overall antenna footprint of 15.7 × 11.4 mm². In addition, other desirable characteristics, that is, omnidirectional radiation patterns, peak gain upto 5 dB, and fidelity factor more than 75% are achieved. A good agreement exists between the simulation and measured results. The obtained results illustrate that this antenna has wide operating range and compact dimensions than available structures.     

Electrical and optical characteristics of atmospheric helium jet array plasma

In this paper, a honeycomb structure jet array with seven jet units was adopted to generate plasmas. Both the average discharge power and the emission intensity of the main excited species increase with increasing applied voltage. There are three stages of discharge evolution at different applied voltages: initial discharge, uniform discharge and strong coupling discharge.The spatial distribution of the emission intensity of the excited species can be divided into three categories: growth class, weakening class and variation class. The gas temperature along the whole plasma plume at different applied voltages is maintained at around 320K and can be widely used in heat-labile applications.     

Influences of the inner diameter of the solid shielding tube on the characteristics of the radio-frequency cold atmospheric plasma jet

Active control of the local environment of the cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) jet is of great importance in actual applications since the CAP operates in an open atmosphere with the inevitable entrainment of the surrounding cold air. In this paper, the solid shielding effects of the cylindrical quartz tubes with different inner diameters on the characteristics of the CAP jets driven by a radio-frequency (RF) power supply are studied experimentally. The experimental results show that the total length of the shielded plasma jet can be increased significantly by an appropriate combination of the quartz tube inner diameter and that of the plasma generator nozzle exit with other parameters being unchanged. This phenomenon may be qualitatively attributed to the loss of diffusion of the charged particles in the radial direction under different inner diameters of the quartz tubes. Compared with the plasma free jet, the plasma shielding jet is produced with optimized parameters including longer plasma jet length, higher concentrations of chemically reactive species, higher rotational, vibrational, and electron excitation temperatures when the inner diameters of the solid shielding tube and the generator nozzle exit are the same. A maximum plasma jet length of 52.0 cm is obtained in contrast to that of 5.0 cm of the plasma free jet in this study. The experimental results indicate that the solid shielding effect provides a new method for the active control of the local environment of the RF-CAP jet operating in an open atmosphere.     

Nonuniform linear array DOA estimation using EM criterion

In this letter, we address the problem of Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation with nonuniform linear array in the context of sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. The nonuniform array output is deemed as an incomplete-data observation, and a hypothetical uniform linear array output is treated as an unavailable complete-data observation. Then the Expectation-Maximization (EM) criterion is directly utilized to iteratively maximize the expected value of the complete-data log likelihood under the posterior distribution of the latent variable. The novelties of the proposed method lie in its capability of interpolating the actual received data to a virtual uniform linear array, therefore extending the achievable array aperture. Simulation results manifests the superiority of the proposed method over off-the-shelf algorithms, specially on circumstances such as low SNR, insufficient snapshots, and spatially adjacent sources.