Fabrication of tungsten oxide photoanode by doctor blade technique and investigation on its photocatalytic operation mechanism

WO₃ is a potential material candidate for construction of photoanode for solar driven water splitting. In this work, μm-thick porous WO₃ photoanode is prepared by depositing a stable ink made of WO₃ nanoparticles and Aristoflex velvet polymer in water using the doctor blade technique, followed by a sintering in air. The nature of WO₃ nanoparticles, its loading mass on F-doped tin oxide electrode as well as sintering temperature are examined in order to optimize the photocatalytic activity of the resultant WO₃ photoanode. The operation of WO₃ photoanode is investigated by varying the light illumination direction and light incident intensity as well as changing the nature of the electrolyte. Dissolved tungsten in electrolyte is quantified by ICP-MS providing insights into the influences of electrolyte nature and operating conditions to the corrosion of WO₃. It is proposed that the H₂O₂ and OH^. radical generated as by-products of the photo-driven water oxidation on the photoanode surface are harmful species that accelerate the dissolution of WO₃.     

大坝安全监控指标的制定

本文论述了大坝安全监控指标的含义、制定安全监控指标的意义、制定安全监控指标的基本原则、制定大坝施工阶段和首次蓄水阶段以及运行阶段安全监控指标的方法。     

High modulus of isotactic polypropylene attained by coextrusion with atactic polystyrene

Orientation-induced crystallization of crystallizable polymer melts can occur, under certain conditions, during flow through converging channels. Attempts have been made to achieve this phenomenon in a two-phase system, i.e., during simultaneous extrusion of a continuous concentric core of polypropylene within a polystyrene matrix through a conical duct. On one occasion, using Carlona P SY6100 (MFI = 11.0) with Hostyren N2000-V-01 (MFI = 25.0), a highly oriented polypropylene thread with a modulus of 14.6 GPa and a melting point of 178°C was extruded at a die temperature of approximately 170°C and a pressure lower than 40 MPa. It is, in principle, possible to form highly oriented, fiber-like structures as reinforcing elements in a polymer matrix.     

Iterative method for the design of DFT filter Bank

Multirate adaptive filters have numerous advantages such as low computational load, fast convergence, and parallelism in the adaptation. Drawbacks when using multirate processing are mainly related to aliasing and reconstruction effects. These effects can be minimized by introducing appropriate problem formulation and employing sophisticated optimization techniques. In this paper, we propose a formulation for the design of a filter bank which controls the distortion level for each frequency component directly and minimizes the inband aliasing and the residual aliasing between different subbands. The advantage of this problem formulation is that the distortion level can be weighted for each frequency depending on the particular practical application. A new iterative algorithm is proposed to optimize simultaneously over both the analysis and the synthesis filter banks. This algorithm is shown to have a unique solution for each iteration. For a fixed distortion level, the proposed algorithm yields a significant reduction in both the inband aliasing and the residual aliasing levels compared to existing methods applied to the numerical examples.     

Immersive electronic books for surgical training

Immersive electronic books (IEBooks) for surgical training will let surgeons explore previous surgical procedures in 3D. The authors describe the techniques and tools for creating a preliminary IEBook, embodying some of the basic concepts.     

Digital Laguerre filter design with maximum passband-to-stopband energy ratio subject to peak and Group delay constraints

In this paper, we formulate a general design of transversal filter structures with maximum relative passband-to-stopband energy ratio subject to complex frequency response constraints in the passband and the stopband as well as additional constraints such as constraints. These constraints are important for applications where the suppression of noise at certain frequencies are important. Additional constraints are introduced allowing approximately linear phase and constant group delay in the passband. For a given set of basis functions, the design problem can be formulated as a semi-infinite quadratic optimization problem in the filter coefficients, which are the decision variables to be optimized. In this paper, we focus on the design of digital Laguerre filter and digital finite impulse response (FIR) filter structures. A modified bridging algorithm is developed for searching for the optimum pole of the Laguerre filters. Design examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

An improved technique for exfoliating and dispersing nanoclay particles into polymer matrices using supercritical carbon dioxide

An environmentally benign process, which uses supercritical carbon dioxide (sc-CO₂) as a processing aid, is developed in this work to help exfoliate and disperse nanoclay into the polymer matrices. The process relies on rapid expansion of the clay followed by direct injection into the extruder where the mixture is dispersed into the polymer melt. Results from the mechanical properties, rheological studies, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) show that this method represents a significant improvement relative to direct melt blending in single or twin-screw extruders or other methods using sc-CO₂. The greatest mechanical property response was a result of directly injecting pre-mixed sc-CO₂ and nanoclay into the polypropylene melt during extrusion. It was observed that for concentrations as high as 6.6 wt% (limited only by present process capabilities), XRD peaks were eliminated, suggesting a high degree of exfoliation. Mechanical properties such as modulus increased by as much as 54%. The terminal region of the dynamic mechanical spectrum was similar to that of the base polymer, contrary to what is frequently reported in the literature.     

Illumination invariant object tracking with adaptive sparse representation

Since the introduction of the sparse representation-based tracking method named ?₁ tracker, there have been further studies into this tracking framework with promised results in challenging video sequences. However, in the situation of large illumination changes and shadow casting, the tracked object cannot be modeled efficiently by sparse representation templates. To overcome this problem, we propose a new illumination invariant tracker based on photometric normalization techniques and the sparse representation framework. With photometric normalization methods, we designed a new illumination invariant template presentation for tracking that eliminates the illumination influences, such as brightness variation and shadow casting. For a higher tracking accuracy, we introduced a strategy that adaptively selects the optimum template presentation at the update step of the tracking process. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the previous ?₁ and some state-of-the-art algorithms in tracking sequences with severe illumination effects.