Analysis of Railway Ballasted Track Stiffness and Behavior with a Hybrid Discrete-Continuum Approach

Railway ballasted track stiffness is an important indicator to identify supporting condition that ensures that the facility is well designed and functioned. Although many studies have been performed on track stiffness based on experimental tests and finite-element methods, the factors influencing the track stiffness have not been completely...

New innovations in pavement materials and engineering: A review on pavement engineering research 2021

Sustainable and resilient pavement infrastructure is critical for current economic and environmental challenges. In the past 10 years, the pavement infrastructure strongly supports the rapid development of the global social economy. New theories, new methods, new technologies and new materials related to pavement engineering are emerging....

Biogas productivity of anaerobic digestion process is governed by a core bacterial microbiota

Anaerobic digestion (AD) has been commercially operated worldwide in full scale as a resource recovery technology underpinning a circular economy. However, problems such as a long start-up time, or system instability, have been reported in response to operational shocks. These issues are usually linked to the dynamics of the functional...

Macro-meso dynamic analysis of railway transition zone: Hybrid DEM/FDM simulation and experimental validation

To probe into the mechanical behaviour of railway transition zone from the macro-meso aspects, a numerical model of transition zone is built that hybrids the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Finite Difference Method (FDM). The DEM is utilised to simulate the ballast bed and sleeper, because it can consider the realistic ballast shapes and...

Effective Approaches of Improving the Performance of Chalcogenide Solid Electrolytes for All-Solid-State Sodium-Ion Batteries

All-solid-state sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) possess the advantages of rich resources, low price, and high security, which are one of the best alternatives for large-scale energy storage systems in the future. Also, the chalcogenide solid electrolytes (CSEs) of SIBs have the characteristics of excellent room-temperature ionic conductivity (10...

Supercritical water oxidation of quinoline with moderate preheat temperature and initial concentration

This work reports an experimental study on supercritical water oxidation of quinoline. Moderate preheat temperature (420 °C–510 °C) and initial concentration (1 wt%–10 wt%) are selected to address the possibility of utilizing the heat released during the reaction, in order to realize high conversion rate at relatively low preheat temperature....

Seasonal behaviour of tidal damping and residual water level slope in the Yangtze River estuary: Identifying the critical position and river discharge for maximum tidal damping

As a tide propagates into the estuary, river discharge affects tidal damping, primarily via a friction term, attenuating tidal motion by increasing the quadratic velocity in the numerator, while reducing the effective friction by increasing the water depth in the denominator. For the first time, we demonstrate a third effect of river discharge...

Poly-crystalline silicon-oxide films as carrier-selective passivating contacts for c-Si solar cells

The poly-Si carrier-selective passivating contacts (CSPCs) parasitically absorb a substantial amount of light, especially in the form of free carrier absorption. To minimize these losses, we developed CSPCs based on oxygen-alloyed poly-Si (poly-SiO_x) and deployed them in c-Si solar cells. Transmission electron microscopy analysis...

High-efficiency black IBC c-Si solar cells with poly-Si as carrier-selective passivating contacts

In this work, we present the application of poly-Si carrier-selective passivating contacts (CSPCs) as both polarities in interdigitated back-contacted (IBC) solar cell architectures. We compared two approaches to form a gap between the back-surface field (BSF) and emitter fingers. It is proved that the gaps prepared by both approaches are...

Sparse Bayesian classification and feature selection for biological expression data with high correlations

Classification models built on biological expression data are increasingly used to predict distinct disease subtypes. Selected features that separate sample groups can be the candidates of biomarkers, helping us to discover biological functions/pathways. However, three challenges are associated with building a robust classification and...

Spherical polyelectrolyte nanogels as templates to prepare hollow silica nanocarriers: observation by small angle X-ray scattering and TEM

Hollow silica nanoparticles were prepared through generating a silica layer in spherical polyelectrolyte nanogels (SPN), which consisted of a solid core of polystyrene (PS) and a shell of crosslinked poly(acrylic acid) (PAA), followed by removing the PS core via solvent dissolution. Small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) in combination with TEM...

Visualization for the Coherent Set of 3D Property Units

There are many 3D objects with denser aggregation that they are fully/partly coherent touched with each other through shared facets, which we called coherent set of 3D objects. Visualization for 3D property unit is an effective way to understand 3D spatial occupation, location and relationship in urban space, particularly in the coherent set of...

The Conversion from CityGML to 3D Property Units

Due to the fast growth of building construction technology and increasing demands on the efficient use of land, human living space are expanded from on the surface to above and under the earth surface. It raises the need for three dimentional (3D) cadastral by realizing that the current cadastral system based on 2D is not appropriate to reflect...

Hydrological Changes of the Irtysh River and the Possible Causes

Hydrological changes of the Irtysh River were analyzed concerning the changes of annual runoff and its distribution features within a year measured by coefficient of variation and concentration degree. Abrupt changes were detected by the heuristic segmentation method. Possible causes of the hydrological changes were investigated considering...