Life cycle assessment of stone buildings in the Taihang mountains of Hebei province: Evolution towards cleaner production and operation

The building sector has gained significant attention due to its remarkably high energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In China's rural areas, stone is a popular building material, but there are unprecedented demands to improve the life-cycle performance of stone buildings. It is essential to preserve the original architectural...

Numerical study on the chemical and electrochemical coupling mechanisms for concrete under combined chloride-sulfate attack

Cementitious materials exposed to marine and saline environments are commonly threatened by a combined attack of sulfate and chloride ions. This study developed a numerical framework to investigate two combined coupling mechanisms of 1) coupled solid-liquid chemical reactions for competitive chloride-sulfate attack and 2) electrostatic multi...

SailVis: Reconstruction and Multifaceted Visualization of Sail Shape

While sailing, sailors rely on their eyes to inspect the sail shape and adjust the configurations to achieve an appropriate shape for a certain the weather condition. Mastering this so-called trimming process requires years of experience since the visual inspection of the sail shape suffers from inaccuracies and many times are difficult to...

Numerical investigation of external sulfate attack and its effect on chloride binding and diffusion in concrete

Reinforced concrete (RC) structures may suffer from serious durability problems during long-term service. To investigate the deterioration of RC structures subjected to the dual attacks of chlorides and sulfates, this study proposes a coupled model for external sulfate attack (ESA) and its effect on chloride binding and diffusion. To account for...

How do political features influence the co-production of government projects? A case study of a medium-sized chinese city

Co-production is a solution by which the government provides public services. Coproduction theory is built upon Western experience and currently focuses on the types of coproduction in different policy stages, the barriers and governance strategies for co-production. However, little attention is paid to how political background will influence...

Element-resolved local lattice distortion in complex concentrated alloys: An observable signature of electronic effects

Complex concentrated alloys (CCAs) are of growing interest due to their outstanding mechanical properties that exceed the property limits of conventional alloys. Whereas the superior properties are often attributed to severe lattice distortion, to date it is not clear what controls the lattice distortion and how it affects the mechanical...

Hourly and Daily Urban Water Demand Predictions Using a Long Short-Term Memory Based Model

This case study uses a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based model to predict short-term urban water demands for the Hefei City of China. The performance of the LSTM-based model is compared with the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, the support vector regression (SVR) model, and the random forests (RF) model based on data...

Engineering atomic-level complexity in high-entropy and complex concentrated alloys

Quantitative and well-targeted design of modern alloys is extremely challenging due to their immense compositional space. When considering only 50 elements for compositional blending the number of possible alloys is practically infinite, as is the associated unexplored property realm. In this paper, we present a simple property-targeted...

Risk Factors and Neuropsychological Assessments of Subjective Cognitive Decline (plus) in Chinese Memory Clinic

Background: Since subjective cognitive decline (SCD) was standardized in 2014, many studies have investigated its features. However, the risk of SCD (plus) progressing to AD is much higher, and yet there have been few studies reporting the risk factors and neuropsychological assessment characteristics of SCD (plus). Objective: To characterize...

A Tale of Two Chinese Transit Metropolises and the Implementation of Their Policies: Shenyang and Dalian (Liaoning Province, China)

To promote sustainable urbanization and combat the economic, environmental, energy and safety issues that go with rapid motorization, the Ministry of Transport in China has introduced the “Transit Metropolis” program with a substantive amount of funds devoted to the implementation of the program in local governments. This represents the largest...

Strategic Use of Analytical Information in Transport Planning in China: How Is It Different from Western Democracies?

Theory on the strategic use of knowledge in planning large infrastructure projects is comparatively well-developed in the fields of public policy and urban/transport planning for Western democracies. But how policymakers make use of knowledge and what position policy analysts hold in non-Western countries still remains largely unknown...

Application of discrete mathematics in urban transportation system analysis

Editorial.

Transit-Oriented Development in China: How can it be planned in complex urban systems?

In recent years most of the Chinese cities have shown a rapid decline in modal split of public transport as a consequence of rapid urbanization and motorization in the “socialist market economy”. It has been witnessed that cars flood into streets; road congestion, air pollution and traffic safety have become major problems in urban China. To...

Swarm intelligence in engineering

Compact collimators for high brightness blue LEDs using dielectric multilayers

A novel method is presented to inject the light of millimeter-sized high-brightness blue LEDs into light guides of submillimeter thickness. Use is made of an interference filter that is designed to pass only those modes that will propagate in the light guide by total internal reflection. Other modes are reflected back to the LED cavity and...

Dielectric multilayer angular filters for coupling LEDs to thin light guides

A new approach is described to couple light from high-power blue LEDs (1x1mm2) into a thin large area light guide using a dielectric interference multilayer as an angular filter. The goal is to achieve large area luminaires such as backlight systems. The method overcomes the drawback of structuring holes or recessions in light guides when using...

A Typology of Strategic Behaviour in PPPs for Expressways: Lessons from China and Implications for Europe

In line with governance trends around the world, a growing number of expressways in the People’s Republic of China are managed as Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). The tremendous growth in demand for mobility in newly emerging economies has led to a gap between investment needs and available public funding. Using private funds is potentially...