A unified critical state model for geomaterials with an application to tunnelling

This paper is prepared in honour of Professor E.T. Brown for his outstanding contributions to rock mechanics and geotechnical engineering and also for his personal influence on the first author's research career in geomechanics and geotechnical engineering. As a result, we have picked a topic that reflects two key research areas in which Professor E.T. Brown has made seminal contributions over a long and distinguished career. These two areas are concerned with the application of the critical state concept to modelling geomaterials and the analysis of underground excavation or tunnelling in geomaterials.Partially due to Professor Brown's influence, the first author has also been conducting research in these two areas over many years. In particular, this paper aims to describe briefly the development of a unified critical state model for geomaterials together with an application to cavity contraction problems and tunnelling in soils.     

Isolation of antimicrobial agent from the marine algae Cystoseira hakodatensis

Cystoseira hakodatensis is an unutilised brown algae belonging to family Sargassaceae. A crude methanol extract from the algae showed inhibitory effects on the growths of Bacillus cereus and Bacillus licheniformis. To isolate the major antimicrobial agent, a sequential active‐guided isolation procedure was applied: liquid–liquid extraction, column chromatography and bio‐autography. A marked antimicrobial agent (active α) was isolated in hydrophobic fraction and was determined to phenolics without carbohydrates and proteins by phytochemical test. Regarding the antimicrobial potential, the isolated active α showed better inhibitory effects against B. cereus and B. licheniformis at 2 and 4 times of lower concentrations (62.5 and 31.3 μg mL^?1) in comparison with epigallocatechin gallate. These results showed that C. hakodatensis is a potential source of antimicrobial agent capable of preventing the growth of the two bacteria.     

Irreversible deformation and the superplasticity of a TN-1 alloy during thermal cycling through the martensitic transformations ranges under loading

The influence of the thermal cycling conditions on the thermal-cycling creep of a TN-1 alloy and the related irreversible deformations is studied. The conditions under which an anomalous increase in the irreversible deformations begins are determined. The structural mechanism of the irreversible deformations of an equiatomic alloy is shown to be analogous to the structural mechanism of metal creep at high temperatures: it predominantly has a dislocation character. It is proposed to use the effect of anomalous increase in the deformation of materials with reversible martensitic transformations for forming parts made of these materials at low temperatures.     

EPMDA: an efficient privacy-preserving multi-dimensional data aggregation scheme for edge computing-based IoT system

In order to perform multi-dimensional data aggregation operations efficiently in edge computing-based Internet of things (IoT) systems, a new efficient privacy-preserving multi-dimensional data aggregation (EPMDA) scheme is proposed in this paper. EPMDA scheme is characterized by employing the homomorphic Paillier encryption and SM9 signature algorithm. To improve the computation efficiency of the Paillier encryption operation, EPMDA scheme generates a pre-computed modular exponentiation table of each dimensional data,and the Paillier encryption operation can be implemented by using only several modular multiplications. For the multi-dimensional data, the scheme concatenates zeros between two adjacent dimensional data to avoid data overflow in the sum operation of ciphertexts. To enhance security, EPMDA scheme sets random number at the high address of the exponent. Moreover, the scheme utilizes SM9 signature scheme to guarantee device authentication and data integrity. The performance evaluation and comparison show that EPMDA scheme is more efficient than the existing multi-dimensional data aggregation schemes.     

基于Cortex-M的嵌入式设备固件更新方法研究

本文提出了一种基于分散加载技术实现Boot程序和用户应用程序在同一个工程编写开发的固件更新方法 .通过编写分散加载规范文件在工程中实现代码存储区分区.为了保证固件更新的稳定性和可靠性,在固件下载过程中引入CRC校验、丢包错包重传等容错技术.实验结果 验证了方法的有效性和可靠性.     

V2O5/RGO/Pt nanocomposite on oxytetracycline degradation and pharmaceutical effluent detoxification

The cover image is based on the Research Article V₂O₅/RGO/Pt nanocomposite on oxytetracycline degradation and pharmaceutical effluent detoxification by Mohan, H et al., DOI: 10.1002/jctb.6238 .