Hot-compression of aluminum alloy 5182 was carried out on a Gleeble-1500 thermo-simulator at deformation temperature ranging from 350 °C to 500 °C and at strain rate from 0.01 s⁻¹ to 10 s⁻¹ with strain range from 0.7 to 1.9. The microstructures and macro-textures evolution under different conditions were investigated by polarized optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis, respectively. The basic trend is that the hot-compression stress increases with the decrease of temperature and increase of strain rate, which is revealed and elucidated in terms of Zener-Hollomon parameter in the hyperbolic sine equation with the hot-deformation activation energy of 143.5 kJ/mol. An empirical constitutive equation is proposed to predict the hot-deformation behavior under different conditions. As deformation temperature increases up to 400 °C, at strain rate over 1 s⁻¹, dynamic recrystallization (DRX) occurs. Cube orientation {100}〈001〉 is detected in the recrystallized sample after hot-compression.

2017 aluminum alloy plates with an ultrafine grained (UFG) structure were produced by equal channel angular processing (ECAP) and then were joined by underwater friction stir welding (underwater FSW). X-ray diffractometer (XRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and microhardness tester were adopted to investigate the microstructural and mechanical characteristics of the FSW joint. The results indicate that an ultrafine grained microstructure with the mean grain size of ∼0.7 μm is obtained in the weld nugget by using water cooling. However, The FSW joint exhibits softening compared with the ultrafine grained based material and the heat affected zone (HAZ) has the lowest hardness owing to the coarsening of the strengthening precipitates.

The effect of indium addition on the corrosion behavior of AP65 Mg alloy was examined. The indium modified AP65 exhibits accelerated pitting corrosion and overall corrosion, but there is almost no incubation period at the onset of corrosion. Polarization curve measurements indicate that the indium modified AP65 has more negative corrosion potential, which is an improvement aspect of the electrochemical activation. The corrosion current density increases from 0.126 to 0.868 mA/cm² with and without 2.0% (mass fraction) indium addition. The mean potentials of AP65 negatively shift from −1.491 V to −1.584 V by adding 2.0% indium. The effect of indium addition on the corrosion performance of AP65 seems to be associated with the decrease of cathode-to-anode area ratio of the alloy, which may change the electrochemical anode and cathode polarization behavior of the alloy.

The effect of different molar ratios of Y₂O₃ and Y(NO₃)₃ on the microstructure and electrical response of ZnO-Bi₂O₃-based varistor ceramics sintered at 1 000 °C was investigated, and the mechanism by which this doping improves the electrical characteristics of ZnO-Bi₂O₃-based varistor ceramics was discussed. With increasing amounts of Y(NO₃)₃ or Y₂O₃ in the starting composition, Y₂O₃, Sb₂O₄ and Y-containing Bi-rich phase form, and the average grain size significantly decreases. The average grain size significantly decreases as the contents of rare earth compounds of Y(NO₃)₃ or Y₂O₃ increase. The maximum value of the nonlinear coefficient is found at 0.16% Y(NO₃)₃ or 0.02% Y₂O₃ (molar fraction) doped varistor ceramics, and there is an increase of 122% or 35% compared with the varistor ceramics without Y(NO₃)₃ or Y₂O₃. The threshold voltage V_T of Y(NO₃)₃ and Y₂O₃ reaches at 1 460 V/mm and 1 035 V/mm, respectively. The results also show that varistor sample doped with Y(NO₃)₃ has a remarkably more homogeneous and denser microstructure in comparison to the sample doped with Y₂O₃.

CaO-B₂O₃-SiO₂ (CBS) glass powders are prepared by conventional glass melting method at different melting temperatures, whose properties and microstructures are characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It is found that there are SiO₂ and some unknown phases in CBS glass melting liquid from 1 300 °C to 1 500 °C and the amount of these phases decreases with the increase of the melting temperature. The CBS glass melted at 1 450 °C could be sintered from 830 °C to 930 °C and the bulk densities of the samples are all higher than 2.4 g/cm³. From the points of the properties and energy conservation, the melting temperature of 1 450 °C is the optimal melting temperature. The glass ceramic sintered at 850 °C exhibits better dielectric properties: ɛ_r=6.33, tan δ=2.2×10⁻³ at 10 GHz, and the major phases of the samples are CaSiO₃, CaB₂O₄ and SiO₂.

Mid-infrared transmittance of submicron silver slit arrays was numerically studied with the finite difference time domain method. The slit width varies from 50 nm to 300 nm and a square feature may attach at either or both slit sides. Although the side length of features is one or two orders of magnitude shorter than the wavelength, the attached nanoscale features can modify the transmittance significantly. The transmittance was also further investigated in detail by looking into the electromagnetic fields and Poynting vectors of selected slit geometries. The investigation results show that such change can be attributed to the cavity resonance effect inside the slit arrays. The work is of great importance to the wavelength-selective devices design in optical devices and thermal application fields.

The aim of this work is to analyze the stress distributions on a crown-luting cement-substrate system with a finite-element method in order to predict the likelihood of interfacial micro cracks, radial or circumferential cracks, delamination, fracture and delamination with torsion. The contact and layer interface stresses in elastic layered half-space indented by an elastic sphere were examined using finite element method. The model consists of crown, luting cement and substrate. The solutions were carried out for three different elastic moduli of luting cement. It was placed between the cement and the substrate as a middle layer and its elastic module was chosen lower than the elastic module of crown and higher than the elastic module of dentin. An axisymmetric finite element mesh was set up for the stress analysis. Stress distributions on the contact surface and the interfaces of crown-luting cement and luting cement-dentin have been investigated for three different values of luting cement by using ANSYS. The effects of the luting cement which has three different elastic moduli on the pressure distribution and the location of interfacial stresses of the multi-layer model have been examined. The mechanism of crack initiation in the interfaces and interfacial delamination was also studied quantitatively. For each luting cement, the pressure distribution is similar at the contact zone. Stress discontinuities occur at the perfect bonding interfaces of the crown-luting cement and the substrate-luting cement. The maximum stress jumps are obtained for the highest and the lowest elastic module of the luting cement. In the crown-luting cement-substrate system, failures may initiate at crown-luting cement region for luting cement with the lowest elastic module value. In addition, failures at luting cement-substrate region may occur for luting cement with the highest elastic module. In the luting cement, the medium elastic module value is more suitable for stress distribution in crown-luting cement-substrate interfaces.

Cu₂O particles with different shapes were prepared via reducing Cu(II) in alkaline system by glucose at 50 °C. The products were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). It is found that the shape of Cu₂O particles changes with the change of concentration of NaOH. The different shapes of Cu₂O particles are due to the absorption of OH-ions on Cu₂O particles, which arise the variety of growth mode of Cu₂O, and then influence the morphology of Cu₂O particles.

Chloropropyl-functionalized mesoporous MCM-41(MCM-41-(CH₂)₃Cl) was synthesized in alkaline medium by the microwave radiation one-pot method, using cetyltrimethy-lammoniumbromide (CTAB) as novel template, tetraethoxysilane (TEOS) as silica source, and chloropropyltriethoxysilane (ClPTES) as the coupling agent. The microstructure of MCM-41-(CH₂)₃Cl was characterized by the means of X-ray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen absorption-desorption, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results show that a successful synthesis of MCM-41-(CH₂)₃Cl with well structure is obtained. The optimal microwave power is 120 W and the best microwave time is 50 min. The dosage of chloropropyltriethoxysilane on the structure of chloropropyl-functionalized MCM-41 was also investigated. It is found that the chloropropyltriethoxysilane volume between 0.8 mL and 1.6 mL is favorable for the formation of highly ordered MCM-41-(CH₂)₃Cl mesostructure.

A novel cloud-point extraction (CPE) was successfully used in preconcentration of biphenol A (BPA) from aqueous solutions. Majority of BPA is extracted into the surfactant-rich phase. The parameters affecting the CPE such as concentration of surfactant and electrolyte, equilibration temperature and time and pH of sample solution were investigated. The samples were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet detection. Under the optimized conditions, preconcentration of 10 mL sample gives a preconcentration factor of 11. The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) are 0.1 μg/L and 0.33 μg/L, respectively. The linear range of the proposed method is 0.2–20 μg/L with correlation coefficients greater than 0.998 7 and the spiking recoveries are 97.96%–100.42%. The interference factor was tested and the extraction mechanism was also investigated. Thus, the developed CPE has proven to be an efficient, green, rapid and inexpensive approach for extraction and preconcentration of BPA from water samples.

A new vision-based approach was presented for predicting the behavior of the ball carrier-shooting, passing and dribbling in basketball matches. It was proposed to recognize the ball carrier’s head pose by classifying its yaw angle to determine his vision range and the court situation of the sportsman within his vision range can be further learned. In basketball match videos characterized by cluttered background, fast motion of the sportsmen and low resolution of their head images, and the covariance descriptor, were adopted to fuse multiple visual features of the head region, which can be seen as a point on the Riemannian manifold and then mapped to the tangent space. Then, the classification of head yaw angle was directly completed in this space through the trained multiclass LogitBoost. In order to describe the court situation of all sportsmen within the ball carrier’s vision range, artificial potential field (APF)-based information was introduced. Finally, the behavior of the ball carrier-shooting, passing and dribbling, was predicted using radial basis function (RBF) neural network as the classifier. Experimental results show that the average prediction accuracy of the proposed method can reach 80% on the video recorded in basketball matches, which validates its effectiveness.

To obtain a good drivability and high efficiency of the micro-electric vehicle, a new driving in-wheel motor design was analyzed and optimized. Maxwell software was used to build finite element simulation model of the driving in-wheel motor. The basic features and starting process were analyzed by field-circuit coupled finite element method. The internal complicated magnetic field distribution and dynamic performance simulation were obtained in different positions. No-load and load characteristics of the driving in-wheel motor was simulated, and the power consumption of materials was computed. The conformity of the final simulation results with the experimental data indicates that this method can be used to provide a theoretical basis to make further optimal design of this new driving in-wheel motor and its control system, so as to improve the starting torque and reduce torque ripple of the motor. This method can shorten the development cycle of in-wheel motors and save development costs, which has a wide range of engineering application value.

The electrode regulator system is a complex system with many variables, strong coupling and strong nonlinearity, while conventional control methods such as proportional integral derivative (PID) can not meet the requirements. A robust adaptive neural network controller (RANNC) for electrode regulator system was proposed. Artificial neural networks were established to learn the system dynamics. The nonlinear control law was derived directly based on an input-output approximating method via the Taylor expansion, which avoids complex control development and intensive computation. The stability of the closed-loop system was established by the Lyapunov method. The current fluctuation relative percentage is less than ±8% and heating rate is up to 6.32 °C/min when the proposed controller is used. The experiment results show that the proposed control scheme is better than inverse neural network controller (INNC) and PID controller (PIDC).

The vectorial structure of cosine-Gaussian beams (cGBs) is investigated in the far field regime based on the vector plane wave spectrum and the method of stationary phase. The energy flux densities of TE or TM term and the ratio of the energy flux of TE or TM term in the whole beam are demonstrated. It is found that the spot configurations of the energy flux densities associated with the TE and TM terms depend on the polarization angle and the beam parameter of the incident cGB. And the far field may be entirely transverse magnetic or transverse electric under appropriate polarization angle and beam parameter.

The advantage of built-up sleeved backup roll was described. Based on the stress distribution analysis and simulation for the built-up sleeved backup roll by using finite element method, the effects of roll sleeve thickness and shrink range on the stress-strain field were studied. Finally, based on the methodology and strategy of the fatigue analysis, fatigue life of backup roll was estimated by using the stress-strain data obtained through finite element simulation. The results show that roll sleeve thickness and shrink range have a great influence on sleeve stress distribution of built-up sleeved roll. Under the circumstance of ensuring transferring enough torque, the shrink range should be kept small. However, thicker roll sleeve has longer roll service life when the shrink range is constant.

Double self-adaptive fuzzy PID algorithm-based control strategy was proposed to construct quasi-cascade control system to control the speed of the acid-pickling process of titanium plates and strips. It is very useful in overcoming non-linear dynamic behavior, uncertain and time-varying parameters, un-modeled dynamics, and couples between the automatic turbulence control (ATC) and the automatic acid temperature control (AATC) with varying parameters during the operation process. The quasi-cascade control system of inner and outer loop self-adaptive fuzzy PID controller was built, which could effectively control the pickling speed of plates and strips. The simulated results and real application indicate that the plates and strips acid pickling speed control system has good performances of adaptively tracking the parameter variations and anti-disturbances, which ensures the match of acid pickling temperature and turbulence of flowing with acid pickling speed, improving the surface quality of plates and strips acid pickling, and energy efficiency.

In converged heterogeneous wireless networks, vertical handoff is an important issue in radio resource management and occurs when an end user switches from one network to another (e.g., from wireless local area network to wideband code division multiple access). Efficient vertical handoff should allocate network resources efficiently and maintain good quality of service (QoS) for the end users. The objective of this work is to determine conditions under which vertical handoff can be performed. The channel usage situation of each access network is formulated as a birth-death process with the objective of predicting the available bandwidth and the blocking probability. A reward function is used to capture the network bandwidth and the blocking probability is expressed as a cost function. An end user will access the certain network which maximizes the total function defined as the combination of the reward function and the cost function. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the network performance, including higher bandwidth for end users and lower new call blocking and handoff call blocking probability for networks.

Service composition is a hot and active research area in service-oriented computing which has gained great momentum. An quality of service (QoS) oriented and tree-based approach was proposed to implement service composition efficiently. Firstly, service descriptions were transformed to mapping relations which denote the association between input and output concepts. Then, the service composition problems were resolved by building mapping relation tree dynamically based on the divide and conquer method, and all mapping relation trees were combined without redundant branch to obtain the composition scheme. Finally, the optimal composition scheme was chosen based on quality of service attributes including the preference of service request. Experiment results illustrate that this method can improve the composition efficiency and reduce the searching time by increasing the number of services in repository.

With the great commercial success of several IPTV (internet protocal television) applications, PPLive has received more and more attention from both industry and academia. At present, PPLive system is one of the most popular instances of IPTV applications which attract a large number of users across the globe; however, the dramatic rise in popularity makes it more likely to become a vulnerable target. The main contribution of this work is twofold. Firstly, a dedicated distributed crawler system was proposed and its crawling performance was analyzed, which was used to evaluate the impact of pollution attack in P2P live streaming system. The measurement results reveal that the crawler system with distributed architecture could capture PPLive overlay snapshots with more efficient way than previous crawlers. To the best of our knowledge, our study work is the first to employ distributed architecture idea to design crawler system and discuss the crawling performance of capturing accurate overlay snapshots for P2P live streaming system. Secondly, a feasible and effective pollution architecture was proposed to deploy content pollution attack in a real-world P2P live streaming system called PPLive, and deeply evaluate the impact of pollution attack from following five aspects: dynamic evolution of participating users, user lifetime characteristics, user connectivity-performance, dynamic evolution of uploading polluted chunks and dynamic evolution of pollution ratio. Specifically, the experiment results show that a single polluter is capable of compromising all the system and its destructiveness is severe.

Internet traffic classification plays an important role in network management, and many approaches have been proposed to classify different kinds of internet traffics. A novel approach was proposed to classify network applications by optimized back-propagation (BP) neural network. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was used to optimize the BP neural network. And in order to increase the identification performance, wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) was used to extract several hidden features from the time-frequency information of network traffic. The experimental results show that the average classification accuracy of various network applications can reach 97%. Moreover, this approach optimized by BP neural network takes 50% of the training time compared with the traditional neural network.

To quickly find documents with high similarity in existing documentation sets, fingerprint group merging retrieval algorithm is proposed to address both sides of the problem: a given similarity threshold could not be too low and fewer fingerprints could lead to low accuracy. It can be proved that the efficiency of similarity retrieval is improved by fingerprint group merging retrieval algorithm with lower similarity threshold. Experiments with the lower similarity threshold r=0.7 and high fingerprint bits k=400 demonstrate that the CPU time-consuming cost decreases from 1 921 s to 273 s. Theoretical analysis and experimental results verify the effectiveness of this method.

In order to maintain vibration performances within the limits of the design, a vibration-based feature extraction method for dynamic characteristic using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and wavelet analysis was proposed. The proposed method was verified experimentally and numerically by implementing the scheme on engine block. In the implementation process, the following steps were identified to be important: 1) EMD technique in order to solve the feature extraction of vibration signals; 2) Vibration measurement for the purpose of confirming the structural weak regions of engine block in experiment; 3) Finite element modeling for the purpose of determining dynamic characteristic in time region and frequency region to affirm the comparability of response character corresponding to improvement schemes; 4) Adopting a feature index of IMF for structural improvement based on EMD and wavelet analysis. The obtained results show that IMF of signal is more sensitive to response character corresponding to improvement schemes. Finally, examination of the results confirms that the proposed vibration-based feature extraction method is very robust, and focuses on the relative merits of modification and full-scale structural optimization of engine, together with the creation of new low-vibration designs.

A fast global convergence algorithm, small-world optimization (SWO), was designed to solve the global optimization problems, which was inspired from small-world theory and six degrees of separation principle in sociology. Firstly, the solution space was organized into a small-world network model based on social relationship network. Secondly, a simple search strategy was adopted to navigate into this network in order to realize the optimization. In SWO, the two operators for searching the short-range contacts and long-range contacts in small-world network were corresponding to the exploitation and exploration, which have been revealed as the common features in many intelligent algorithms. The proposed algorithm was validated via popular benchmark functions and engineering problems. And also the impacts of parameters were studied. The simulation results indicate that because of the small-world theory, it is suitable for heuristic methods to search targets efficiently in this constructed small-world network model. It is not easy for each test mail to fall into a local trap by shifting into two mapping spaces in order to accelerate the convergence speed. Compared with some classical algorithms, SWO is inherited with optimal features and outstanding in convergence speed. Thus, the algorithm can be considered as a good alternative to solve global optimization problems.

Most transactional memory (TM) research focused on multi-core processors, and others investigated at the clusters, leaving the area of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) system unexplored. The existing TM implementations made significant performance degradation on NUMA system because they ignored the slower remote memory access. To solve this problem, a latency-based conflict detection and a forecasting-based conflict prevention method were proposed. Using these techniques, the NUMA aware TM system was presented. By reducing the remote memory access and the abort rate of transaction, the experiment results show that the NUMA aware strategies present good practical TM performance on NUMA system.

The features of the techniques of fast reducing roasting (FRR) and conventional magnetic roasting, as well as tremendous demands of iron ores in iron and steel industry of China, were briefly described. The test equipment suitable for FRR of fine-grained materials was introduced. Weakly magnetic materials with grain size of <0.30 mm were converted into strongly magnetic materials by FRR for several to dozens of seconds. In a weakly reducing atmosphere and at 740–800 °C, refractory powder iron material (<0.30 mm) which is rich in specularite, limonite and Mg-Mn siderite was subjected to FRR for a few seconds to 60 s. Concentrate with iron grade of 55.67%–55.21%, high contents of Mg and Mn in the ore is obtained and the yield of magnetic separation reaches 81.66%–86.57%. The results of X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis and magnetism detection of the material before and after FRR indicate that weakly magnetic material is mainly converted into strongly magnetic material Fe₃O₄ with specific saturation magnetic moment. The efficiency of FRR is consistent with TFe recovery of magnetic separation; meantime, the specific saturation magnetic moment increases from 33 to 42 times after FRR. Calculations show that speeds of flash magnetic roasting are obtained from several dozen to two or three hundred times, compared with rotary kiln or shaft furnace. This indicates that it is practicable to use the fast reducing roasting technique to improve the comprehensive utilization of iron ore resources.

The effects of soil and water conservation (SWC) on soil properties are well documented. However, definitive and quantitative information of SWC and its interactions with soil properties on soil productivity is lacking for hilly red soil region of southern China. Experiments were conducted in the hilly red soil region of southern China for seven years in three runoff plots, each of which represented different SWC forest-grass measures. Principal component analysis and multiple regression techniques were used to relate the aboveground biomass (representing soil productivity) to soil properties. Based on the final regression equations, soil organic carbon content (S_oc) is significantly correlated with soil productivity under the condition of forest-grass measures, whereas pH value and cation exchange capacity (C_ec) are the main factors for soil productivity without SWC. Therefore, SWC plays an important role in sequestering S_oc and improving soil productivity.

The differences in XRD patterns, elemental compositions, FT-IR spectra and TG-DSC curves of extract residues obtained by NaOH, and NaOH assisted with anthraquinone (AQ) extraction procedures were studied. The extract residues are mainly comprised of humin fractions associated with inorganic minerals. XRD analysis shows that there is no typical peak of organic carbon because those organic humin fractions appear as a highly disordered substance. The peak of quartz is dominant. The elementary analysis shows that assistant AQ in NaOH solution can break the link of organic humic substances with inorganic minerals. And aromatization degree of humin fractions obtained by NaOH is smaller than that obtained by NaOH assisted with AQ. FT-IR analysis displays that various groups exist in those two humin fractions obtained by different extraction procedures. There are some differences in FT-IR curves between two humin fractions. TG-DSC analysis shows that thermal decomposition occurs during the heating of testing samples. By contrast, the humin fractions associated with inorganic minerals obtained by NaOH possess a higher thermal decomposition range.

The gas-based direct reduction of iron ore pellets was carried out by simulating the typical gas composition in coal gasification process, Midrex and Hyl-III processes. The influences of gas composition and temperature on reduction were studied. Results show that the increasing of H₂ proportion is helpful to improve the reduction rate. However, when φ(H₂):φ(CO)>1.6:1, changes of H₂ content have little influence on it. Appropriate reduction temperature is about 950 °C, and higher temperature (1 000 °C) may unfavorably slow the reduction rate. From the kinetics analysis at 950 °C, the most part of reduction course is likely controlled by interfacial chemical reaction mechanism and in the final stage controlled by a combined effect of gaseous diffusion and interfacial chemical reaction mechanisms. From the utilizations study of different reducing gases at 950 °C, the key step in reduction course is the 3rd stage (FeO→Fe), and the utilization of reducing gas increases with the rise of H₂ proportion.

Mining operation, especially underground coal mining, always has the remarkable risks of ground control. Passive seismic velocity tomography based on simultaneous iterative reconstructive technique (SIRT) inversion is used to deduce the stress redistribution around the longwall mining panel. The mining-induced microseismic events were recorded by mounting an array of receivers on the surface, above the active panel. After processing and filtering the seismic data, the three-dimensional tomography images of the p-wave velocity variations by SIRT passive seismic velocity tomography were provided. To display the velocity changes on coal seam level and subsequently to infer the stress redistribution, these three-dimensional tomograms into the coal seam level were sliced. In addition, the boundary element method (BEM) was used to simulate the stress redistribution. The results show that the inferred stresses from the passive seismic tomograms are conformed to numerical models and theoretical concept of the stress redistribution around the longwall panel. In velocity tomograms, the main zones of the stress redistribution around the panel, including front and side abutment pressures, and gob stress are obvious and also the movement of stress zones along the face advancement is evident. Moreover, the effect of the advance rate of the face on the stress redistribution is demonstrated in tomography images. The research result proves that the SIRT passive seismic velocity tomography has an ultimate potential for monitoring the changes of stress redistribution around the longwall mining panel continuously and subsequently to improve safety of mining operations.

A complex lead-zinc-silver sulfide ore containing 2.98% Pb, 6.49% Zn and 116.32×10⁻⁴ % Ag (mass fraction) from Yunnan Province, China, was subjected to this work. Research on mineral processing was conducted according to the properties of the lead-zinc-silver ore. Under low alkalinity condition, the lead minerals are successfully separated from the zinc minerals with new reagent YZN as zinc depressant, new reagent BPB as lead collector, CuSO₄ as zinc activator and ethyl xanthate as zinc collector. The associated silver is mostly concentrated to the lead concentrate. With the process utilized in this work, a lead concentrate of 51.90% Pb with a recovery of 82.34% and a zinc concentrate of 56.96% Zn with a recovery of 81.98% are produced. The silver recovery in the lead concentrate is 80.61%. Interactions of flotation reagents with minerals were investigated, of which the results indicate that the presence of proper amount of Na₂S can precipitate Pb²⁺ and has a sulfidation on oxidized lead minerals. The results also show that Na₂CO₃ and YZN used together as combined depressants for sphalerite can signally improve the depressing effect of new reagent YZN on sphalerite.

A brief review of the former studies on the mechanisms of soil rheology and microstructure is presented. Then a microstructure model and a set of rheological constitutive relations for soft clays, which describe how the rheological consolidation settlement develops, are established in the framework of the catastrophe theory. The validity of this model is verified by a series of rheological consolidation experiments with different loading rates. The experimental data show that creep deformation can be clearly observed in these tests, and the consolidation settlement is loading rate dependent. The characteristics of the deformation can be explained and reproduced successfully using the model. It can be concluded that only the biggest set of voids would collapse for one load increment. Parameters in the model, k and η, are gained by curve fitting. With only two free parameters, good fits of the data are achieved.

In order to investigate the compressibility, particularly the secondary compression behaviour, soil structure and undrained shear strength of Shanghai Clay, a series of one-dimensional consolidation tests (some up to 70 d) and undrained triaxial tests on high-quality intact and reconstituted soil specimens were carried out. Shanghai Clay is a lightly overconsolidated soil (OCR=1.2–1.3) with true cohesion or bonding. Due to the influence of soil structures, the secondary compression index C_α varies significantly with consolidation stress and the maximum value of C_α occurs in the vicinity of preconsolidation stress. Measured coefficients of secondary compression generally fall in the range of 0.2%–0.8% based on which Shanghai Clay can be classified as a soil with low to medium secondary compressibility. The effect of soil structures on the compressibility of Shanghai Clay is found to reduce with an increase in depth. Soil structure has an important influence on initial soil stiffness, but does not appear to affect undrained shear strength significantly. Undrained shear strengths of intact Shanghai Clay from compression tests are approximately 20% higher than those from extension tests.

The model of pressure solution for granular aggregate was introduced into the FEM code for analysis of thermo-hydro-mechanical (T-H-M) coupling in porous medium. Aiming at a hypothetical nuclear waste repository in an unsaturated quartz rock mass, two computation conditions were designed: 1) the porosity and the permeability of rock mass are functions of pressure solution; 2) the porosity and the permeability are constants. Then the corresponding numerical simulations for a disposal period of 4 a were carried out, and the states of temperatures, porosities and permeabilities, pore pressures, flow velocities and stresses in the rock mass were investigated. The results show that at the end of the calculation in Case 1, pressure solution makes the porosities and the permeabilities decrease to 10%–45% and 0.05%-1.4% of their initial values, respectively. Under the action of the release heat of nuclear waste, the negative pore pressures both in Case 1 and Case 2 are 1.2–1.4 and 1.01–1.06 times of the initial values, respectively. So, the former represents an obvious effect of pressure solution. The magnitudes and distributions of stresses within the rock mass in the two calculation cases are the same.

The railway tunnel concrete lining exposed to sulfate-bearing groundwater beyond 40 years in southwest of China was investigated. Field investigation, sulfate ions content and corroded products analysis, macro/microscopic test were carried out. Results show that under the tunnel concrete lining structure and its served environmental conditions, sulfate solutions permeate concrete lining and accumulate on windward-side of concrete lining, resulting in the increase of sulfate ions content on windward-side and the diffusion of sulfate ions from windward-side to waterward-side, which cause the concrete lining of windward-side damaged seriously but the waterward-side of concrete lining is still in perfect condition. It is confirmed that structural characteristic of tunnel and environmental conditions lead to physical attack with the leaching of concrete and sodium sulfate crystallization as well as chemical corrosion with formation of gypsum in high sulfate concentration and formation of thaumasite in proper temperature rather than formation of ettringite. These achievements can provide academic and technical supports for understanding the deterioration mechanism of concrete lining as well as constructing railway tunnel under sulfate attack.

A proven beam-track contact model was used to analyze the track-structure interaction of CWR (continuously welded track) on bridge. Considering the impact of adjacent bridges, the tower-cable-track-beam-pier-pile finite element model of the cable-stayed bridge was established. Taking a bridge group including 40-32 m simply-supported beam and (32+80+112) m single-tower cable-stayed bridge and 17–32 m simply-supported beam on the Kunming-Shanghai high-speed railway as an example, the characteristics of CWR longitudinal force on the cable-stayed bridge were studied. It is shown that adjacent bridges must be considered in the calculation of the track expansion force and bending force on cable-stayed bridge. When the span amount of adjacent bridges is too numerous, it can be simplified as six spans; the fixed bearing of adjacent simply-supported beams should be placed on the side near the cable-stayed bridge; the track expansion device should be set at the bridge tower to reduce the track force near the bridge abutment.

According to the characteristics of large underground caverns, by using the safety factor of surrounding rock mass point as the control standard of cavern stability, RandWPSO-LSSVM optimization feedback method and flow process of large underground cavern anchor parameters were established. By applying the optimization feedback method to actual project, the best anchor parameters of large surge shaft five-tunnel area underground cavern of the Nuozhadu hydropower station were obtained through optimization. The results show that the predicted effect of LSSVM prediction model obtained through RandWPSO optimization is good, reasonable and reliable. Combination of the best anchor parameters obtained is 114131312, that is, the locked anchor bar spacing is 1 m × 1 m, pre-stress is 100 kN, elevation 580.45–586.50 m section anchor bar diameter is 36.00 mm, length is 4.50 m, spacing is 1.5 m × 2.5 m; anchor bar diameter at the five-tunnel area side wall is 25.00 mm, length is 7.50 m, spacing is 1 m × 1.5 m, and the shotcrete thickness is 0.15 m. The feedback analyses show that the optimization feedback method of large underground cavern anchor parameters is reasonable and reliable, which has important guiding significance for ensuring the stability of large underground caverns and for saving project investment.

In order to study the water flow in the drainage layer of highway under steady-state condition, one-dimensional (1D) Boussinesq equation-based model with Dupuit-Forchheimer assumption was established and the semi-analytical solutions to predict the water-table height were presented. In order to validate the model, a two-dimensional (2D) saturated flow model based on the Laplace equation was applied for the purpose of the model comparison. The water-table elevations predicted by 1D Boussinesq equation-based model and 2D Laplace equation-based model match each other well, which indicates that the horizontal flow in drainage layer is dominated. Also, it validates the 1D Boussinesq equation-based model which can be applied to predict the water-table elevation in drainage layer. Further, the analysis was conducted to examine the effect of infiltration rate, hydraulic conductivity and slope of drainage layer on the water-table elevation. The results show that water-table falls down as the ratio of I_s to K decreases and the slope increases. If the aquifer becomes confined by the top of drainage layer due to the larger ratio of I_s to K or smaller slope, the solution presented in this work can also be applied to approximate the water-table elevation in unconfined sub-section as well as hydraulic head in the confined sub-section.

For solving the difficult problem of leakage detection in city gas pipelines, a method using acoustic technique based on instantaneous energy (IE) distribution and correlation analysis was proposed. Firstly, the basic theory of leakage detection and location was introduced. Then the physical relationship between instantaneous energy and structural state variation of a system was analyzed theoretically. With HILBERT-HUANG transformation (HHT), the instantaneous energy distribution feature of an unstable acoustic signal was obtained. According to the relative contribution method of the instantaneous energy, the noise in signal was eliminated effectively. Furthermore, in order to judge the leakage, the typical characteristic of the instantaneous energy of signal in the input and output end was discussed using correlative analysis. A number of experiments were carried out to classify the leakage from normal operations, and the results show that the leakages are successfully detected and the average recognition rate reaches 93.3% among three group samples. It is shown that the method using acoustic technique with IED and correlative analysis is effective and it may be referred in other pipelines.

With the increasing traffic demand, the closely built three or more tunnels with large section play a significant role in the tunnel construction. However, the interaction among tunnels has important influences on the security and economy of tunnel engineering, and the calculation of pressure from the surrounding rock during the excavation is one of the problems that need to be solved urgently. Based on the practical engineering of three tunnels, the load model of three tunnels was proposed in consideration of the interaction and excavation sequence between tunnels. In comparison with the load model of single tunnel, the construction mechanical characteristics of the three tunnels were analyzed. The results show that the rock pressure of three tunnels calculated by the current tunnel design code is not reliable, and the interaction force increases with the spacing between tunnels.

Cavity resonance noise of passenger car tires is generated by interacting excitation between a tire structure and the fill gas (air), and generally lies in a frequency range of 200–250 Hz. As such, this noise is strongly perceived and may be a serious source of driver annoyance. Thus, many studies regarding the cavity noise mechanism and its reduction have already been conducted. In this work, a vibro-acoustic coupled analysis was conducted between a tire structure and air cavity. Using this analysis, we can more accurately simulate the tire noise performance in the region of the cavity resonance frequency. An analysis of the effects of variation of tire contour design factors was conducted, using design-of-experiments methods. Finally, a multi-objective optimization was performed using in-house codes to reduce the cavity noise level while minimizing the loss of other performances, such as diminished ride comfort and handling caused by the variations of contour. As a result of this optimization, an optimized contour shape was derived, which satisfied the multi-objective performances.

Determining the optimal timing is the core of preventive maintenance. Highway agencies always face with the challenge of determining optimal timing for preventive maintenance, particularly in China where there are no condition indicators designed for determining adequate timing for applying preventive maintenance and little literature relating to the development of pavement performance. This work presented the indicators, including crack ratio (R_C), rutting depth (D_R), international roughness index (I_IR) and sideway force coefficient (C_SF) to determine the adequate timing for preventive maintenance in China. The proper ranges of each indicator to apply to preventive maintenance were then recommended. They are 0.28%–1.4% for R_C, 10–15 mm for D_R, 1.97–3.5 for I_IR, 40–50 for C_SF. Based on pavement condition survey data collected on the test roads in Hebei Province, China, on the application of slurry seal at different timings, the pavement performance was established and the adequate timings for applying slurry seal was studied. Based on benefit-cost analysis, it is suggested that the fourth year is the optimal timing for applying slurry seal based on the condition in China. A framework is established to determine the adequate timings of applying other preventive maintenance methods.