The adsorption of CO₂ can be enhanced through loading amines on adsorbents, therefore, the separation of CO₂ from other gases is promoted. Water plays an important role in this process. Water increases both the adsorption amount of CO₂ and the separation coefficient with N₂ for all amines loaded. However, the effect of loading trialkylamines is not remarkable in the absence of water. The effect of loading dialkylamine does not depend on water, but the adsorbent cannot be regenerated at ambient temperature. In comparison, an adsorbent loading trialkylamine can be regenerated at ambient temperature even in the presence of water with fairly good stability.

1, 3:2, 4-di-p-methylbenzylidene-D-sorbitol (MDBS) is known to be an efficient sorbitol derivative gelator. Two new sorbitol derivative gelators were designed and synthesized in contrast to MDBS in order to study the gel properties of gelators with different structures. Their gelation behavior to 30 solvents was investigated. It was found that the gelation behavior was related to the molecular structure of gelators. Compared with MDBS, the gelator with more hydroxyl in the molecular structure could gel water and that with more aromatic ring could gel aromatic solvent. The fibrous and three-dimensional network of the gels was obtained by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Ultravioletvisible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy revealed that π-π interaction was one of the main driving forces for the formation of gels. The π-π stacking of gelation increases with the number of aromatic rings in the molecular structure of gelator. Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy revealed that the hydrogen bonding was also the main driving force for the formation of gels. The layered structure of the gels was studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD).

In order to separate ZSM-5 zeolite powders from solution easily, a series of magnetic ZSM-5 zeolites were prepared by hydrothermal synthesis with the addition of magnetic Fe₃O₄ particles during the crystalline process. The products were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), infrared (IR) spectrum, energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), specific surface area, magnetic susceptibility and adsorption capability. It was found that the magnetic ZSM-5 zeolites had good magnetism and the magnetic susceptibility increased with the increasing amount of Fe₃O₄ particles. Compared with the pure ZSM-5 zeolite, the adsorption capability of magnetic ZSM-5 zeolites was acceptable. When the magnetic zeolites were used to adsorb Pb²⁺ from solution, the magnetic zeolite powder could be conveniently separated with magnetic separation technology.

The hydrolysate of waste sludge was used as the feedstock of biodiesel production, and its technological feasibility was investigated. Waste sludge, collected from No.3 Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant of Xi’an, was hydrolyzed in two parallel reactors firstly. Yeast was added into one reactor for bioaugmentation, and the other reactor without yeast was used as a control. Then an acid-catalyzed in situ esterification process was carried out to convert the hydrolysate to biodiesel. The results of hydrolysis showed that the reactor bioaugmented with yeast could promote hydrolysis compared with the control one because of an obvious variance in total suspended solid(TSS), volatile suspended solid(VSS) and soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD). Furthermore, gas chromatography (GC) analysis exhibited that the total volatile fatty acid (VFA) was low in the hydrolysate of bioaugmentation reactor; however, its yield of the fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) by in situ esterification was obviously higher when compared with the control one. Therefore, it may be inferred that the hydrolysate of bioaugmentation was mainly inclined to longer-chain fatty acid rather than to VFA. Anyway, an FAMEs yield of 9.24% (wt%) from dried sludge was attained after the 12-d bioaugmentation hydrolysis and succedent esterification. This value was not only higher than that of the control one but also higher than that reported in previous literature. The above results illuminated that it was feasible to produce biodiesel from the bioaugmented hydrolysate of waste sludge.

During the decision-making process, especially in multi-disciplinary complex cases, assessment technique is needed to assist policy-makers in making the right decision. Many of such assessment techniques have been developed for policy-makers, but the inevitable subjectivity of policy-makers often becomes the main obstacle in making the right or proper policy. Interlink decision-making index (IDMI) is a newly proposed assessment method with the advantages of being simple to use and having less human interference over other methods, as it does not require a weighting process of each selection criterion. This paper implements IDMI to assist with decision-making in national or regional low-carbon development, using China as a case study. The Chinese government has announced its carbon emission reduction target along with other development targets by 2020. Many policy settings can be chosen in order to achieve those targets. The problem is how to determine the best setting and the means by which decision-makers can avoid subjectivity and extremes. A number of policy setting options are generated carefully by a system dynamic model under different policy scenarios. The IDMI demonstrates a perfect way to assist in selecting the “best” among all the options that can achieve the goals within the acceptable range.

The influence of the change of structure plane size on seismic response was studied for a soil-structure interaction system. Based on the finite element method, a soil-structure interaction calculation model was established to analyze the seismic response by changing the structure plane size and choosing different earthquake waves for different soil fields. The results show that when the natural periods of vibration for different structure plane sizes are close, under the same earthquake wave, the total displacement on the top layer of the structure and the foundation rotation displacement decrease with the increase of structure plane size, and the proportion of superstructure elastic self-deformation displacement to the total displacement increases with the increase of structure plane size. While for different types of sites and seismic waves, under the horizontal and vertical seismic waves, the seismic responses of different plane sizes have a similar change rule.

After the linear analytical method of unsteady flow theory is further improved, an innovative and faster algorithm is introduced. The water storage in a confined aquifer is derived from the water transmissivity coefficient and the water-pressure conductivity coefficient. The water transmissivity coefficient is approximated by a Taylorseries expansion of drawdown, and the water-pressure conductivity coefficient is obtained by the average drawdown. In this algorithm, the distance of the observation points from the pumping well must be short. When the distance is as short as the radius of the main pumping well, the data of the drawdown difference between the sidewall and the center of pumping well are difficult to measure, but the same results can be achieved based on the assumption that the drawdown difference approximates to the drawdown of the observation wells at a radial distance from the pumping well according to the algorithm. Without the help of charts, this algorithm is more concise and efficient, which has been verified by the test of water pumping project in Tianjin Binhai International Airport.

Long-period ground motion has become an important consideration because of the increasing number of large and long-period structures. Therefore, a thorough investigation on the formation and characteristics of long-period ground motion is desirable for engineering applications. In this work, an analytical study is performed to examine the effect of several parameters and the combining mode for equivalent harmonic components on the dynamic response of systems. The results of the work show that the harmonic components in equivalent ground motion are evidently influenced by the intensity rise time, duration, phase and combining mode. Moreover, the long-period ground motions are simplified and simulated by separate harmonic components through proper combination. The findings of the work are believed to be useful in the selection of input ground motion in structural seismic analysis.

In order to research the bond properties between corroded reinforcement bars and concrete, reinforcement bars with different diameters and different types and concrete with different strength levels were treated specially with all soaking and impressed current method, and the bond properties were measured with the pull-out test. The comparative analysis of the bond properties of corroded reinforcement bars was carried out. The results showed that the types of reinforcement bars and concrete had great influence on the bond strength. The corrosion and volume expansion of reinforcement bars made concrete in tensile condition, which tended to produce cracks in parallel reinforced direction. The typical bond failure of plain reinforcement bars was pull-out, while the typical bond failure of ribbed reinforcement bars was split. The bond strength between corroded reinforcement bars and concrete increased with the increase of concrete strength. The bond strength of plain and ribbed reinforcement bars showed a decreasing trend after the first increase with the increase of the extent of corrosion. Through the test, the coefficients of the bond strength of plain and ribbed reinforcement bars were given, respectively.

A data processing method was proposed for eliminating the end restraint in triaxial tests of soil. A digital image processing method was used to calculate the local deformations and local stresses for any region on the surface of triaxial soil specimens. The principle and implementation of this digital image processing method were introduced as well as the calculation method for local mechanical properties of soil specimens. Comparisons were made between the test results calculated by the data from both the entire specimen and local regions, and it was found that the deformations were more uniform in the middle region compared with the entire specimen. In order to quantify the nonuniform characteristic of deformation, the non-uniformity coefficients of strain were defined and calculated. Traditional and end-lubricated triaxial tests were conducted under the same condition to investigate the effects of using local region data for deformation calculation on eliminating the end restraint of specimens. After the statistical analysis of all test results, it was concluded that for the tested soil specimen with the size of 39.1 mm × 80 mm, the utilization of the middle 35 mm region of traditional specimens in data processing had a better effect on eliminating end restraint compared with end lubrication. Furthermore, the local data analysis in this paper was validated through the comparisons with the test results from other researchers.

A new explicit quadratic radical function is found by numerical experiments, which is simpler and has only 70.778% of the maximal distance error compared with the Fisher z transformation. Furthermore, a piecewise function is constructed for the standard normal distribution: if the independent variable falls in the interval (−1.519, 1.519), the proposed function is employed; otherwise, the Fisher z transformation is used. Compared with the Fisher z transformation, this piecewise function has only 38.206% of the total error. The new function is more exact to estimate the confidence intervals of Pearson product moment correlation coefficient and Dickinson best weights for the linear combination of forecasts.

Based on a smoothing symmetric disturbance FB-function, a smoothing inexact Newton method for solving the nonlinear complementarity problem with P ₀-function was proposed. It was proved that under mild conditions, the given algorithm performed global and superlinear convergence without strict complementarity. For the same linear complementarity problem(LCP), the algorithm needs similar iteration times to the literature. However, its accuracy is improved by at least 4 orders with calculation time reduced by almost 50%, and the iterative number is insensitive to the size of the LCP. Moreover, fewer iterations and shorter time are required for solving the problem by using inexact Newton methods for different initial points.