An ultrasonic study on ternary xPbO–(45-x)CuO–55B2O3 glasses

A series of xPbO–(45-x)CuO–55B₂O₃ glasses (5 ≤ x ≥ 40 mol %) were prepared by the melt-quenching technique. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns of the prepared glasses are found to have amorphous structure. An extensive ultrasonic study has been made to explore the structural role of PbO and CuO in the borate network. Various elastic properties were calculated from the measured data of density and ultrasonic velocity. Ultrasonic velocity and elastic moduli revealed broad humps at about 20 mol % PbO, which are attributed to the borate anomaly. Below 20 mol % PbO, all Pb²⁺ ions are considered to be entering the borate network as a glass modifier. This results in the transforms the borate network from an open structure to a denser three-dimensional structure due to BO₃ → BO₄ conversion. Beyond 20 mol, addition of PbO results in the formation of metaborate, pyroborate, and orthoborate units with NBOs. This weakness the glass structure and decrease both ultrasonic velocity and elastic moduli. The elastic properties were predicted and quantitatively analyzed by taking into account the effect of boron coordination number on the compositional and structural parameters involved in Makishima–Mackenzie's theory, ring deformation model and bond compression model. An excellent agreement between the computed theoretical and experimental elastic moduli, micro-harness and Poisson's ratio was achieved for majority of samples.     

Sub-band coding of hexagonal images

According to the circle-packing theorem, the packing efficiency of a hexagonal lattice is higher than an equivalent square tessellation. Consequently, in several contexts, hexagonally sampled images compared to their Cartesian counterparts are better at preserving information content. In this paper, novel mapping techniques alongside the wavelet compression scheme are presented for hexagonal images. Specifically, we introduce two tree-based coding schemes, referred to as SBHex (spirally-mapped branch-coding for hexagonal images) and BBHex (breadth-first block-coding for hexagonal images). Both of these coding schemes respect the geometry of the hexagonal lattice and yield better compression results. Our empirical results show that the proposed algorithms for hexagonal images produce better reconstruction quality at low bits per pixel representations compared to the tree-based coding counterparts for the Cartesian grid.     

Additive manufacturing,quasi-static and dynamic compressive behaviours of ceramic lattice structures

Ceramic lattice structures (CLSs) are used for construction in common and extreme environments because of the extraordinary properties of ceramics. In this study, we designed and additively manufactured CLSs with distinct structural parameters to explore their quasi-static and dynamic compressive behaviours in detail. It was demonstrated that both the relative density (?ρ) and inclination angle (ω) had a significant impact on the quasi-static and dynamic mechanical properties of the CLSs. Furthermore, the mathematical relationships between the quasi-static compressive properties, including quasi-static compressive strength (QS), quasi-static Young’s modulus (QY), and quasi-static energy absorption (QE), versus ?ρ and ω obeyed the Gibson–Ashby and Deshpande and Fleck models, respectively. It was revealed by experiment and simulation that as the stiffness increased, the quasi-static failure mode of the CLSs changed from a parallel-vertical-inclined mixed mode to a parallel-vertical mode. In addition, the relationship between the dynamic mechanical properties of the CLSs versus ?ρ and ω also followed the Gibson–Ashby and Deshpande and Fleck models. The exceptional dynamic increase factor indicated that CLSs are highly suitable for extreme environments. These findings will aid in the research and development of customised additively manufactured CLSs.     

复杂环境下氧化铝储槽定向爆破拆除

在较为复杂的环境下,爆破拆除钢筋混凝土氧化铝储槽。该储槽自重大、呈圆形,内有4根立柱支撑下料漏斗。为使储槽顺利定向倒塌,通过爆破方案选择、参数确定,采取梯形切口和预处理以及安全防护和减振措施,使储槽爆破拆除获圆满成功。     

No-Reference Video Quality Assessment using novel hybrid features and two-stage hybrid regression for score level fusion

This paper presents a novel No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR-VQA) model that utilizes proposed 3D steerable wavelet transform-based Natural Video Statistics (NVS) features as well as human perceptual features. Additionally, we proposed a novel two-stage regression scheme that significantly improves the overall performance of quality estimation. In the first stage, transform-based NVS and human perceptual features are separately passed through the proposed hybrid regression scheme: Support Vector Regression (SVR) followed by Polynomial curve fitting. The two visual quality scores predicted from the first stage are then used as features for the similar second stage. This predicts the final quality scores of distorted videos by achieving score level fusion. Extensive experiments were conducted using five authentic and four synthetic distortion databases. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other published state-of-the-art benchmark methods on synthetic distortion databases and is among the top performers on authentic distortion databases. The source code is available at https://github.com/anishVNIT/two-stage-vqa.     

Multi-criteria analysis for screening of reversible metal hydrides in hydrogen gas storage and high pressure delivery applications

Metals and alloys forming reversible hydrides with hydrogen gas are potential building blocks for compact, solid state hydrogen storage systems. Based on the materials’ thermodynamic characteristics, their use as temperature-swing gas compression and delivery systems in the hydrogen economy is also possible. Given the wide variety of materials developed and tested at laboratory and pilot scales, a harmonized method of selecting the feasible material(s) for a particular real-life application is required. This study proposes a system selection framework based on a normalized, multi-criteria metric. Using calculated values of multi-criteria metric, multi-criteria screening and ranking of potential materials has been demonstrated for a particular use case. It is found that the alloy TiMn_1.52 having value of additive metric between 0.25 and 0.35 represents the best material for a single stage system. The alloy pair CaNi₅–Ti_1.5CrMn represents the best alternative for a two-stage system with additive metric values between 0.63 and 0.82. Energy and economic characteristics of the metal hydride gas compression and delivery systems are evaluated and compared with an equivalent mechanical compression system producing the same final effect (i.e., delivery of a given quantity of gas at a defined pressure).     

Effect of fiber-reinforcement on the mechanical behavior of sand approaching the critical state

Several types of ground improvement methods that employ fiber-reinforcement have been developed in recent years. A series of consolidated drained triaxial compression tests has been conducted here to examine the effect of short fibers on the mechanical properties of Toyoura sand. Sand with 0%, 0.2%, 0.4%, and 1% fiber contents, prepared to yield random distribution, was sheared under several confining pressures and controlled via their initial relative densities. The test results showed that the maximum and residual deviatoric stresses increased, whereas the volumetric expansion decreased with an increase in fiber content. Although the stress ratio η (=q/p′) and specific volume changed depending on the fiber content and confining pressure with shear progression, they each reached the same values for a definite fiber content at the end of shearing, independent of initial relative density. In other words, the unique critical state line can be found for a definite fiber content. Moreover, the greater the fiber content, the larger the slope of the critical state line at the end of shearing. Additionally, as the length of fibers shortened with the same percentage of fiber inclusions in sand, the deviatoric stress and the stress ratio decreased, approaching the shear-strain-volumetric response of unreinforced sand.     

Pressure-induced transparency of MgO,Al2O3, AlN,and cBN ceramics at room temperature

The in situ axial X-ray diffraction patterns of four ceramic powder samples (MgO, Al₂O₃, AlN, and cBN) that were compressed in a diamond anvil cell under uniaxial non-hydrostatic conditions were recorded. The microscopic deviatoric stress as a function of the pressure was determined from the X-ray diffraction peak broadening analysis: the curves increased approximately linearly with the pressure at the initial compression stage and then levelled off under further compression. Pressure-induced transparency was observed in all of the samples under compression, and the pressure at the turning point on the curves of the microscopic deviatoric stress versus pressure corresponded to the pressure at which the samples became transparent. Analysis of the microstructural features of the pressure-induced transparent samples indicated that the compression caused the grains to fracture, and the broken grains bonded with each other. We demonstrated that the ceramics’ pressure-induced transparency was a process during which the grains were squeezed and broken, the pores were close between the grains, and the broken grains were re-bonded under compression.     

No-reference quality assessment of dynamic sports videos based on a spatiotemporal motion model

This paper proposes an approach to improve the performance of no-reference video quality assessment for sports videos with dynamic motion scenes using an efficient spatiotemporal model. In the proposed method, we divide the video sequences into video blocks and apply a 3D shearlet transform that can efficiently extract primary spatiotemporal features to capture dynamic natural motion scene statistics from the incoming video blocks. The concatenation of a deep residual bidirectional gated recurrent neural network and logistic regression is used to learn the spatiotemporal correlation more robustly and predict the perceptual quality score. In addition, conditional video block-wise constraints are incorporated into the objective function to improve quality estimation performance for the entire video. The experimental results show that the proposed method extracts spatiotemporal motion information more effectively and predicts the video quality with higher accuracy than the conventional no-reference video quality assessment methods.