Enhanced oxygen evolution reaction kinetics through biochar-based nickel-iron phosphides nanocages in water electrolysis for hydrogen production

Highly-efficient and stable non-noble metal electrocatalysts for overcoming the sluggish kinetics of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is urgent for water electrolysis. Biomass-derived biochar has been considered as promising carbon material because of its advantages such as low-cost, renewable, simple preparation, rich structure, and easy to obtain heteroatom by in-situ doping. Herein, Ni₂P–Fe₂P bimetallic phosphide spherical nanocages encapsulated in N/P-doped pine needles biochar is prepared via a simple two-step pyrolysis method. Benefiting from the maximum synergistic effects of bimetallic phosphide and biochar, high conductivity of biochar encapsulation, highly exposed active sites of Ni₂P–Fe₂P spherical nanocages, rapid mass transfer in porous channels with large specific surface area, and the promotion in adsorption of reaction intermediates by high-level heteroatom doping, the (Ni_0.75Fe_0.25)₂P@NP/C demonstrates excellent OER activity with an overpotential of 250 mV and a Tafel slope of 48 mV/dec at 10 mA/cm² in 1 M KOH. Also it exhibits a long-term durability in 10 h electrolysis and its activity even improves during the electrocatalytic process. The present work provides a favorable strategy for the inexpensive synthesis of biochar-based transition metal electrocatalysts toward OER, and improves the water electrolysis for hydrogen production.     

Optical properties and radiation stability of SiO2/ZnO composite pigment prepared by co-sintering method

Thermal control coatings (TCCs) are an essential part of the thermal control systems in the spacecraft. Solar absorptance and emittance are the key performance parameters of TCCs. To develop an ultra-low solar absorption and stable inorganic TCCs for surface radiator, different TCCs were prepared by co-sintering ZnO and SiO₂ nanoparticles to form Zn₂SiO₄/SiO₂ pigment in this work, and the optical properties and radiation stability were systematically studied. It is found that the coating based on composite pigment has high reflectivity in the ultraviolet band and excellent optical performance possessing the low solar absorption of 0.06. In addition, the Zn₂SiO₄/SiO₂ coating demonstrates the highest proton and electron radiation stability because that SiO₂ between Zn₂SiO₄ particles acts as the relaxation center of the defects caused by radiation.     

Adaptive reversible data hiding for JPEG images with multiple two-dimensional histograms

Joint photographic experts group (JPEG) can provide good quality with small file size but also eliminate extensively the redundancies of images. Therefore, hiding data into JPEG images in terms of maintaining high visual quality at small file sizes has been a great challenge for researchers. In this paper, an adaptive reversible data hiding method for JPEG images containing multiple two-dimensional (2D) histograms is proposed. Adaptability is mainly reflected in three aspects. The first one is to preferentially select sharper histograms for data embedding after $K$ histograms are established by constructing the $k$th ($k\in \{1,2,\dots ,K\}$) histogram using the $k$th non-zero alternating current (AC) coefficient of all the quantized discrete cosine transform blocks. On the other hand, to fully exploit the strong correlation between coefficients of one histogram, the smoothness of each coefficient is estimated by a block smoothness estimator so that a sharply-distributed 2D-histogram is constructed by combining two coefficients with similar smoothness into a pair. The pair corresponding to low complexity is selected priorly for data embedding, leading to high embedding performance while maintaining low file size. Besides, we design multiple embedding strategies to adaptively select the embedding strategy for each 2D histogram. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve higher rate–distortion performance which maintaining lower file storage space, compared with previous studies.     

Decomposition and replacement: Spatial knowledge distillation for monocular depth estimation

Knowledge distillation has become a key technique for making smart and light-weight networks through model compression and transfer learning. Unlike previous methods that applied knowledge distillation to the classification task, we propose to exploit the decomposition-and-replacement based distillation scheme for depth estimation from a single RGB color image. To do this, Laplacian pyramid-based knowledge distillation is firstly presented in this paper. The key idea of the proposed method is to transfer the rich knowledge of the scene depth, which is well encoded through the teacher network, to the student network in a structured way by decomposing it into the global context and local details. This is fairly desirable for the student network to restore the depth layout more accurately with limited resources. Moreover, we also propose a new guidance concept for knowledge distillation, so-called ReplaceBlock, which replaces blocks randomly selected in the decoded feature of the student network with those of the teacher network. Our ReplaceBlock gives a smoothing effect in learning the feature distribution of the teacher network by considering the spatial contiguity in the feature space. This process is also helpful to clearly restore the depth layout without the significant computational cost. Based on various experimental results on benchmark datasets, the effectiveness of our distillation scheme for monocular depth estimation is demonstrated in details. The code and model are publicly available at : https://github.com/tjqansthd/Lap_Rep_KD_Depth.     

VO2/GaAs异质结的制备及其光电特性研究

采用直流磁控溅射和后退火氧化工艺在p型GaAs单晶衬底上成功制备了n-VO_2/pGaAs异质结,研究了不同退火温度和退火时间对VO_2/GaAs异质结性能的影响,并分析其结晶取向、化学组分、膜层质量以及光电特性。结果表明,在退火时间2 h和退火温度693 K下能得到相变性能最佳的VO_2薄膜,相变前后电阻变化约2个数量级。VO_2/GaAs异质结在308 K、318 K和328 K温度下具有较好的整流特性,对应温度下的阈值跳变电压分别为6.9 V、6.6 V和6.2 V,该结果为基于VO_2相变特性的异质结光电器件的设计与应用提供了可行性。     

一种改进的特征匹配算法在碎片云测量建模中的应用

为满足超高速撞击典型Whipple防护构型的损伤评估需求,利用图像处理技术对碎片云序列阴影图像进行深入研究。使用超高速序列激光阴影成像仪得到三组不同实验条件下碎片云发展过程的高清阴影图像,分别对每组最具代表性的2帧进行图像处理分析;根据碎片云图像特点以及碎片运动特性,提出了一种改进的碎片二次特征匹配算法,该方法包含碎片粗定位、特征定义及初匹配和精确匹配三步策略;通过运用改进的匹配算法,对选取的相邻两帧图片完成碎片高效匹配,并提取匹配碎片的运动参数,进而分析碎片的速度分布和飞行角度分布,获取二次碎片云相关运动特性;得到三组实验各自的轨迹模拟图。根据得到的轨迹分析结果分别对三组实验的后板损伤进行估计,并通过与防护构型的实际损伤结果进行比较,验证了该方法的有效性。     

Experimental study on prediction model of wet gas pressure drop across single-orifice plate in horizontal pipes in the low gas phase Froude number region

The pressure drop prediction of wet gas across single-orifice plate in horizontal pipes had been solved satisfactorily under an annular-mist flow in the upstream of orifice plates. However, this pressure drop prediction is still not clearly determined when the upstream is in an intermittent flow or stratified flow, which is corresponding to a region of low Fr_G (gas phase Froude number) in the flow pattern map of wet gases. In this study, the wet gas pressure drop across a single-orifice plate was experimentally investigated in the low Fr_G region. By the experiment, the flow pattern transition in the downstream of single-orifice plates, as well as the effects of Fr_G and Fr_L (liquid phase Froude number) on Φ_G (gas phase multiplier), were determined and compared when the upstream is in the flow pattern transition and the stratified flow region, respectively. Prediction performances were examined on the available pressure drop models. It was found that no model could be capable of jointly predicting the wet gas pressure drop in the low Fr_G region with an acceptable accuracy. With a new method of correlating Fr_G and Fr_L simultaneously, new correlations were proposed for the low Fr_G region. Among which the modified Chisholm model shows the best prediction accuracies, with the prediction deviations of Φ_G being within 7% and 3% when the upstream is in flow pattern transition and stratified flow region, respectively.     

Fabrication of Cu/graphite film/Cu sandwich composites with ultrahigh thermal conductivity for thermal management applications

Effective thermal management of electronic integrated devices with high powder density has become a serious issue, which requires materials with high thermal conductivity (TC). In order to solve the problem of weak bonding between graphite and Cu, a novel Cu/graphite film/Cu sandwich composite (Cu/GF/Cu composite) with ultrahigh TC was fabricated by electro-deposition. The micro-riveting structure was introduced to enhance the bonding strength between graphite film and deposited Cu layers by preparing a rectangular array of micro-holes on the graphite film before electro-deposition. TC and mechanical properties of the composites with different graphite volume fractions and current densities were investigated. The results showed that the TC enhancement generated by the micro-riveting structure for Cu/GF/Cu composites at low graphite content was more effective than that at high graphite content, and the strong texture orientation of deposited Cu resulted in high TC. Under the optimizing preparing condition, the highest in-plane TC reached 824.3 W·m⁻¹·K⁻¹, while the ultimate tensile strength of this composite was about four times higher than that of the graphite film.     

太赫兹可调谐滤波器设计

为了实现太赫兹信号的可调谐滤波，设计了一种基于柔性材料的太赫兹可调谐滤波器。通过扭曲特氟龙（Teflon）波导形成环型谐振器，实现了160～200 GHz频段的带阻滤波功能。改变谐振腔长可实现自由频谱范围（FSR）和滤波频点的调谐，实验测试了自由频谱范围在1.9 GHz和2.8 GHz间切换以及相应的滤波特性。研究表明，谐振腔长一定时，改变弯曲半径可实现滤波阻带抑制度的调节，柔性材料太赫兹环型谐振器可用于可调谐滤波，且具有较高的自由度。     

基于太赫兹光谱的人参和西洋参鉴别

为了快速区分人参和西洋参，依据两者所含的人参皂苷在太赫兹波段具有不同指纹光谱，提出了一种基于人参皂苷的太赫兹光谱鉴别人参和西洋参的方法。采用MATLAB软件识别人参和西洋参的太赫兹光谱，同时根据太赫兹光谱特征并通过标准的主成分分析(PCA)区分出人参、西洋参。实验结果表明，基于太赫兹光谱的主成分分析可精确区分出人参、西洋参，并且还可以应用于其他类似物质的区分中。