Abstract To improve forestry solid waste reuse, reduce building energy consumption, and increase building capacity, preparing lightweight concrete with new materials has gained recent attention. This paper used waste wood and expanded perlite (EP) to design lightweight thermal insulation recycled concrete (LTIRC) with different volume admixtures. Compared to mineral aggregate, wood aggregate (WA) and EP show large differences in water absorption, particle morphology, density, and crushing index. Therefore, this paper comprehensively evaluated the dry density, mechanical properties, thermal properties, chloride ion permeability, and frost resistance of LTIRC. The results showed WA and EP introduction effectively reduced concrete bulk weight and met the dry density standard for lightweight concrete. Regarding thermal insulation performance, both WA and EP are characterized by porous, low–density, and low thermal conductivity. Consequently, LTIRC thermal conductivity was reduced by up to 76.5% versus conventional concrete, effectively increasing resistance to heat flow through concrete and providing potential for building energy savings. Additionally, WA and EP addition caused LTIRC to experience mechanical and durability property deterioration. However, some LTIRCs achieved over 80% of the strength of natural aggregate concrete. Moreover, WA addition inhibited internal crack generation in LTIRC and slowed concrete damage from increased WA and EP dosage. The maximum mass loss of LTIPC was 2.72% after 100 freeze–thaw cycles. LTIPC precast panels are suitable for preparing low–carbon insulated building wall panels.
Abstract. Soil acidity has become a serious constraint in dry land crop production systems of acidic Ultisols in tropical and subtropical regions of southern China, where winter wheat and canola are cultivated as important rotational crops. Regardless of other common existing concerns in acidic Ultisols of southern China, it needs to be investigated whether soil acidity has any effect on wheat and canola growth. There is little information on the determination of critical soil pH as well as aluminium (Al) concentration for wheat and canola crops. The objective of this study was to determine the critical soil pH and exchangeable aluminium concentration (AlKCl) for wheat and canola production. Two pot cultures with two Ultisols from Hunan and Anhui were conducted for wheat and canola crops in a controlled growth chamber, with a completely randomized design. A soil pH gradient ranging from 3.7 (Hunan) and 3.97 (Anhui) to 6.5, with three replications, was used as a treatment. Aluminium sulfate (Al2(SO4)3) and hydrated lime (Ca(OH)2) were used to obtain the target soil pH levels. Plant height, shoot dry weight, root dry weight, and chlorophyll content (SPAD value) of wheat and canola were adversely affected by soil acidity in both locations. The critical soil pH and AlKCl of the Ultisol from Hunan for wheat were 5.29 and 0.56 cmol kg−1, respectively. At Anhui, the threshold soil pH and AlKCl for wheat were 4.66 and 2.36 cmol kg−1, respectively. On the other hand, the critical soil pH for canola was 5.65 and 4.87 for the Ultisols from Hunan and Anhui, respectively. The critical soil exchangeable Al for canola cannot be determined from the experiment of this study. The results suggested that the critical soil pH and AlKCl varied between different locations for the same variety of crop, due to the different soil types and their other soil chemical properties. The critical soil pH for canola was higher than that for wheat for both Ultisols, thus canola was more sensitive to soil acidity. Therefore, we recommend that liming should be undertaken to increase soil pH if it falls below these critical soil pH levels for wheat and canola production.
Trajectory data can be used to predict traffic congestion and analyze crowd behavior patterns, which makes it more important in daily applications. For a long time, the volume of location data collected by various equipment will obtain an high speed increasing. Hence, it will be a enormous challenge to storage and transmit that big data. Due to the fact that traditional trajectory compression algorithms such as Douglas-Peucker algorithm are fast but not optimal algorithms. So, a kind of parallel algorithm utilizing Hopfield Neural Network is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm is an optimization algorithm with parallel computing capability, which satisfies fast processing to some extent. Finally, experience shows that the proposed algorithm can implement trajectory compression with fixed compression ratio and less accuracy loss compared with other existing algorithms.
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Geometric active contours have many advantages over parametric active contours, such as computational simplicity and the ability to change the curve topology during deformation. While many of the capabilities of the older parametric active contours have been reproduced in geometric active contours, the relationship between the two has not always been clear. We develop a precise relationship between the two which includes spatially-varying coefficients, both tension and rigidity, and non-conservative external forces. The result is a very general geometric active contour formulation for which the intuitive design principles of parametric active contours can be applied. We demonstrate several novel applications in a series of simulations.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of biological tissues often have low contrast. Spectroscopic optical coherence tomography (SOCT) methods have been developed to enhance contrast but remain limited because most tissues are not spectrally active in the frequency bands of laser sources commonly used in OCT. Near-infrared (NIR) dyes with absorption spectra features within the OCT source spectrum can be used for enhancing contrast in this situation. We introduce and demonstrate the use of NIR dyes as contrast agents for SOCT. Contrast-enhanced images are compared with fluorescence microscopy, demonstrating a link between SOCT and fluorescence imaging.