Understanding individual defects in CdTe thin-film solar cells via STEM: From atomic structure to electrical activity

Here we review a systematic study of the structure-property correlations of a series of defects in CdTe solar cells. A variety of experimental methods, including aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy, electron energy loss spectroscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and electron-beam-induced current have been combined with density-functional theory. The research traces the connections between the structures and electrical activities of individual defects including intra-grain partial dislocations, grain boundaries and the CdTe/CdS interface. The interpretations of the physical origin underlying the structure-property correlation provide insights that should further the development of future CdTe solar cells.     

Salient object detection via boosting object-level distinctiveness and saliency refinement

Many salient object detection approaches share the common drawback that they cannot uniformly highlight heterogeneous regions of salient objects, and thus, parts of the salient objects are not discriminated from background regions in a saliency map. In this paper, we focus on this drawback and accordingly propose a novel algorithm that more uniformly highlights the entire salient object as compared to many approaches. Our method consists of two stages: boosting the object-level distinctiveness and saliency refinement. In the first stage, a coarse object-level saliency map is generated based on boosting the distinctiveness of the object proposals in the test images, using a set of object-level features and the Modest AdaBoost algorithm. In the second stage, several saliency refinement steps are executed to obtain a final saliency map in which the boundaries of salient objects are preserved. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.     

Saliency detection for panoramic landscape images of outdoor scenes

Saliency detection has been researched for conventional images with standard aspect ratios, however, it is a challenging problem for panoramic images with wide fields of view. In this paper, we propose a saliency detection algorithm for panoramic landscape images of outdoor scenes. We observe that a typical panoramic image includes several homogeneous background regions yielding horizontally elongated distributions, as well as multiple foreground objects with arbitrary locations. We first estimate the background of panoramic images by selecting homogeneous superpixels using geodesic similarity and analyzing their spatial distributions. Then we iteratively refine an initial saliency map derived from background estimation by computing the feature contrast only within local surrounding area whose range and shape are changed adaptively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm detects multiple salient objects faithfully while suppressing the background successfully, and it yields a significantly better performance of panorama saliency detection compared with the recent state-of-the-art techniques.     

沉管隧道地震反应分析局部精细化建模中的几个问题

通过大型沉管隧道的实例分析和前期研究成果,重点讨论沉管隧道地震反应分析中建立局部三维精细化模型时所应关注的4个问题:1模型范围大小的问题;2上覆水体动水作用的简化;3时域分析中阻尼矩阵的合理建模及其影响;4地震输入方式的选择与影响等。文中通过工程算例验证局部三维精细化建模的合理方式,研究结果表明:考察某段沉管管节的地震反应时,应至少考虑该管节两端各三段相邻管节的影响和轴向5倍以上土层厚度范围的土层影响;上覆水体可近似采用等效附加质量的方式模拟;当沉管隧道-土层体系的基频低于输入地震波的卓越频率时,易采用基于体系基频的优化方法来确定Rayleigh比例阻尼矩阵的比例系数;沿沉管隧道轴向的多点地震输入对隧道地震反应有较大影响,应加以充分关注。     

Simulation of air flow in the IEA Annex 20 test room—validation of a simplified model for the nozzle diffuser in isothermal test cases

The modeling of air supply devices has been identified from the International Energy Agency (IEA) Annex 20 project as one of the most important problems in applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict air flow pattern and air distribution in buildings, and the complicated HESCO nozzle diffuser used in the IEA Annex 20 test room has been proved to be particularly difficult to model. In a previous study, a simplified model for this diffuser was developed and validated against experimental data. It has been shown that this model can yield good prediction for the wall jet flow issued from the diffuser, but whether this model is capable of correctly predicting the global flow pattern in the whole test room was not known. In this paper, the benchmark data of the IEA Annex 20 Test Cases B2 and B3 were used to evaluate the performance of the model for the prediction of the global air flow pattern in the test room. It was demonstrated that this model can predict the air flow pattern in the whole test room for both the Test Cases B2 and B3 with reasonable accuracy. The significance of a velocity correction when comparing the numerical prediction with experimental data obtained using omni-directional anemometers was also discussed.     

基于连续运行GPS基准站系统的城市三维大地测量基准建设方案探讨

本文分析了福州三维大地测量基准现状与存在的问题,介绍了GPS网络RTK的定位原理,提出了基于连续运行GPS基准站系统的城市三维大地测量基准建设方案以及基于移去-计算-恢复(RCR)算法来求得其他待求GPS点的高程异常技术和方法。     

Effects of trace zirconium on the initiation and propagation behavior of fatigue cracks in Cu–6Ni–2Mn–2Sn–2Al alloy

The effects of trace Zr on the fatigue behavior of Cu–6Ni–2Mn–2Sn–2Al alloy were studied through the initiation and growth behavior of a major crack. When stress amplitude was less than σ_a = 350 MPa, the fatigue life of Zr-containing alloys was about 2 times larger than that of alloy without Zr. When σ_a = 400 MPa, the effects of Zr addition on fatigue life disappeared. Increased fatigue life due to Zr addition resulted from an increase in crack initiation life and microcrack growth life. Zr addition generated strengthened grain boundaries (GBs) that developed from the precipitation of SnZr compounds. Strengthened GBs contributed to the increase in crack initiation life. The effects of Zr addition on fatigue behavior were discussed with relation to the behavior of microcracks.     

Effect of deformation temperature on microstructure evolution in aluminum alloy 2219 during hot ECAP

The effect of deformation temperature on microstructure evolution during equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) was studied in a coarse-grained aluminum alloy 2219 in a wide temperature interval from 250 to 475 °C. The structural changes taking place during ECAP up to strains of 12 are classified into the following three stages irrespective of deformation temperatures: i.e. (1) an incubation period for formation of the embryos of deformation bands (DBs) at low strains; (2) development of large-scale DBs followed by grain fragmentation at moderate strains; (3) rapid development of new grain at high strains. Microstructure development in stages 1 and 2 is hardly influenced by temperature, while that in stage 3 is most significantly affected at higher temperature. An increase in the pressing temperature leads to decreasing the volume fraction of new grains and increasing the average grain size in stage 3. This can be attributed to relaxation of strain compatibility between grains due to frequent operation of dynamic recovery and grain boundary sliding at higher temperature. The mechanism of grain refinement is discussed in detail.     

Numerical simulation for stress/strain distribution and microstructural evolution in 42CrMo steel during hot upsetting process

Based on experimental results, the dynamic recrystallization mathematical models of 42CrMo steel were derived. The effects of strain rates on the strain/stress distribution and microstructural evolution in 42CrMo steel during hot upsetting process were simulated by integrating the thermo-mechanical coupled finite element model. The results show that the deformation of the specimen is inhomogeneous, and the degree of the deformation inhomogeneity decreases with the increase of strain rates. The distribution of the effective stress in the specimen is also inhomogeneous, and the locus of the maximum effective stress changes with the variations of strain rates. The dynamic recrystallization volume fraction decreases with the increase of strain rates. The distribution of the dynamic recrystallization grain is inhomogeneous in the deformed specimen, and the average dynamic recrystallization grain size decreases as the strain rate is increased. A good agreement between the predicted and experimental results confirmed that the derived dynamic recrystallization mathematical models can be successfully incorporated into the finite element model to predict the microstructural evolution in the hot upsetting process for 42CrMo steel.     

Image-based finite element mesh construction for material microstructures

One way of computing the macroscopic behavior of a material sample with complex microstructure is to construct a finite element model based on a micrograph of a representative slice of the material. The quality of the results produced with such a model obviously depends on the quality of the constructed mesh. In this article, we describe a set of routines that modify and improve the quality of a 2D mesh. Most of the routines are guided by an effective element “energy” functional, which takes into account the shape quality of the elements and the homogeneity of the elements as determined from an underlying segmented image. The interfaces and boundaries in the image arise naturally from the segmentation process. From these routines, we construct a close-to-automatic mesh generator that requires only a few inputs, such as the linear sizes of the largest and smallest features in the micrograph.