High-index ferroelectric thin films show excellent dielectricity, piezoelectricity and switching behaviors. Understanding the misfit strain relaxation behavior may prove beneficial to gaining insights into the high-quality growth of high-index ferroelectric films. In this study, ferroelectric PbTiO3 thin films were deposited on the (101)-oriented (La, Sr)(Al, Ta)O3 substrate by pulsed laser deposition and were investigated using (scanning) transmission electron microscopy. Two types of misfit dislocations with line directions of 〈111〉 and [010] were found at the interface. The 〈111〉 dislocation exhibited Burgers vectors of a[011] or $a\left[ {0\bar{1}1} \right]$ , while the [010] dislocation featured Burgers vectors of $a\left[ {\bar{1}01} \right]$ . The former might be generated by gliding, and the latter by climbing. We propose that the misfit strain relaxation in this film system basically results from the formation of dislocations and the residual misfit strain is relaxed via the formation of 90° ac domains.

The control of cutoffs is of great interest in designs of circular waveguides. In this paper, this topic is investigated for pure transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) modes by taking advantage of anisotropic reactance lining loadings. It is found that the cutoffs of TE and TM modes are determined by the reactance in the azimuthal and axial directions, respectively. When the reactance values are positive, the cutoff frequencies are lower than those of a normal conducting waveguide with the same cross-section. However, in contrast to the claim made in the previous literature that the negative reactance values caused the same reducing effect on the cutoffs as the positive values did, the cutoffs are found to be increased by the negative reactances. The theoretical results are validated by the simulations using commercial software, where a delicate model with an approximate curved anisotropic impedance boundary is proposed for the first time. By lowering the TE cutoffs and raising the TM ones, some intriguing applications, such as single-mode bandwidth extension and degenerate mode avoidance, are predicted, which would pave a way for designs of novel waveguide devices.

The overuse of antibiotics and the rapid emergence of antibiotic resistance prompted the launch of an antimicrobial stewardship programme in 2011. This study aimed to investigate the trends and correlations between antibiotic consumption and resistance of Staphylococcus aureus in a tertiary hospital of northwest China from 2010 to 2016. Trends were analysed by linear regression, and correlations were assessed by an autoregressive integrated moving average model. The total consumption of antibiotics halved during the 7-year study period, while the rates of resistance of S. aureus decreased significantly or remained stable; methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) declined markedly, from 73.3% at the beginning of the study to 41.4% by the end. This latter decrease was significantly correlated with the consumption of several classes of antibiotics. In conclusion, reduction in antibiotic use impacted significantly on resistance rates and contributed to a decline in MRSA prevalence.

For instrumented spherical indentation, the presence of equibiaxial residual stress in a material will lead the indentation load–depth curve to shift upward or downward. The load differences between the stressed and stress-free curves were used to estimate the equibiaxial residual stress. Using dimensional analysis and finite element simulations, the equibiaxial residual stress was related to the elastic–plastic parameters and the relative load difference at a fixed normalized indentation depth (h/R = 0.1). Based on these expressions, and together with the method for determining elastic–plastic parameters established in our previous work, an integrated method was proposed to estimate the equibiaxial residual stress and elastic–plastic parameters of metals simultaneously via instrumented spherical indentation. This method avoids preknowledge of the yield strength and measuring the contact area. Applications were illustrated on Al 2024, Al 7075, and Ti Grade 5 with introduced stresses. By comparing the results determined by this integrated method with the reference values, the maximum relative error is generally within ±10% for the yield strength, within ±15% for the elastic modulus, and within ±20% for the equibiaxial residual stress.

To investigate the effects of heat stress on broiler metabolism, we assigned 144 broilers to normal control (NC), heat stress (HS) or pair-fed (PF) groups and then monitored the effects using growth performance, carcass characteristics, biochemical assays and GC-MS-based metabolomics. The up-regulation of cloacal temperature confirmed that our experiment was successful in inducing chronic heat stress. The average daily gain and average daily feed intake of the HS group were significantly lower than those of the NC group, by 28·76 and 18·42 %, respectively (P<0·001), whereas the feed:gain ratio was significantly higher, by 14·49 % (P=0·003), and heat stress also increased leg proportion (P=0·027) and intramuscular fat proportion (P<0·001) and decreased breast proportion (P=0·009). When comparing the HS and NC groups and HS and PF groups, our metabolomics approach identified seventy-eight and thirty-four metabolites, respectively, with significantly different levels (variable importance in the projection values >1 and P<0·05). The greater feed:gain ratio of the HS group was significantly positively correlated with the leg, abdominal fat, subcutaneous fat and intramuscular fat proportions and levels of some free amino acids (proline, l-cysteine, methionine and threonine) but was negatively correlated with breast proportion and levels of some NEFA (stearic acid, arachidonic acid, palmitic acid and oleic acid). These findings indicated that the heat-stressed broilers were in negative energy balance and unable to effectively mobilise fat, thereby resulting in protein decomposition, which subsequently affected growth performance and carcass characteristics.

An investigation of symmetry breaking and naturally occurring instabilities over thin slender delta wings with sharp leading edges was carried out in a water tunnel using particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements. Time-averaged location, strength and core radius of conical vortices vary almost linearly with chordwise distance for three delta wings with $75^{\circ }$ , $80^{\circ }$ and $85^{\circ }$ sweep angles over a wide range of angles of attack. Properties of the time-averaged vortex pairs depend only on the similarity parameter, which is a function of the angle of attack and the sweep angle. It is shown that time-averaged vortex pairs develop asymmetry gradually with increasing values of the similarity parameter. Vortex asymmetry can develop in the absence of vortex breakdown on the wing. Instantaneous PIV snapshots were analysed using proper orthogonal decomposition and dynamic mode decomposition, revealing the shear layer and vortex instabilities. The shear layer mode is the most periodic and more dominant for lower values of the similarity parameter. The Strouhal number based on the free stream velocity component in the cross-flow plane is a function of only the similarity parameter. The dominant frequency of the shear layer mode decreases with the increasing similarity parameter. The vortex modes reveal the fluctuations of the vorticity magnitude and helical displacement of the cores, but with little periodicity. There is little correlation between the fluctuations in the cores of the vortices.

The use of limiters may impact both accuracy and resolution of a solution. And the accuracy and resolution are highly dependent on the amount of numerical dissipation in a scheme, so the ability of limiters to control numerical dissipation should be improved. In this view, based on the examination of several classical limiters to control dissipation, a class of general piecewise-linear flux limiters (termed GPL limiters) are presented in this paper for Multi-step time-space-separated unsteady schemes. The GPL limiters can satisfy the second-order TVD criterion and contain some existing limiters such as Superbee and Minmod. Using the decrement of discrete total entropy to represent the amount of numerical dissipation, an entropy dissipation function of GPL limiters is defined with three parameter variables. By proving the monotonicity of this function, a new GPL type limiter (named MDF individually), which can minimize the numerical dissipation and improve the calculation accuracy, is proposed. A high resolution entropy-consistent scheme is obtained by MDF limiter, which will be proved to satisfy entropy stability and entropy consistency. Computational results of this scheme for several 1-D and 2-D Euler test cases are presented, demonstrating the accuracy, monotonicity and robustness of MDF limiter.

This research was designed for the first time to investigate the photocatalytic activities of MoO3/g-C3N4 composite in converting CO2 to fuels under simulated sunlight irradiation. The composite was synthesized using a simple impregnation-heating method and MoO3 nanoparticles was in situ decorated on the g-C3N4 sheet. Characterization results indicated that the introduction of MoO3 nanoparticles into g-C3N4 fabricated a direct Z-scheme heterojunction structure. The effective interfacial charge-transfer across the heterojunction significantly promoted the separation efficiency of charge carriers. The optimal CO2 conversion rate of the composite reached 25.6 μmol/(h gcat), which was 2.7 times higher than that of g-C3N4. Additionally, the synthesized MoO3/g-C3N4 also presented excellent photoactivity in RhB degradation under visible-light irradiation.

Improving technical efficiency in agriculture can play an important role in meeting present and future demands for agricultural products, at the same time enhancing the long-term sustainability of land and water use. This paper examines the impact of household perceptions of land tenure security on technical efficiency using detailed household-level data collected in Minle County in northwest China. The authors find that the (perceived) tenure security provided by land certificates encourages part-time farming with relatively low technical efficiency. The renting out of land by households with migrant members can only partly make up for this negative effect, because land rental markets are thin and highly fragmented. Therefore, the provision of land certificates to rural households has a negative impact on technical efficiency. For tenure security provided by the expected absence of land reallocations in the near future, on the other hand, the authors find that it reduces temporary migration and thereby contributes to higher technical efficiency.

The object of the present investigations was to evaluate the effect of flash butt welding parameters on microstructures and mechanical properties of HSLA 590CL welded joints in wheel rims by adjusting welding parameters separately. The amount of Widmanstatten ferrites and bainite in the weld metal, and grain size were observed with the adjustment of welding parameters. The tensile strength of welded joints met the strength requirement of wheel rims steels, but the tensile strength and tensile fracture were different in different welding parameters. Micro-hardness distributions of welded joints in different welding parameters were similar, that is the maximum micro-hardness occurred in the weld and micro-hardness decreased from the weld to base metal. A certain degree of softening phenomenon was found in the heat affected zone (HAZ), which should result from the heat input in the flash butt welding. Two failure mechanisms of wheel rims in the expanding process were investigated. The first type fractured at the HAZ and showed ductile fracture characteristics, the crack initiation located at the thinning location. The second type fractured at the weld and showed brittle fracture characteristics.

Creative conceptual design requires significant previous design knowledge. Case-based reasoning enables learning from previous design experience and has a great potential in supporting creative conceptual design by means of seeking to retrieve, reuse, and revise most appropriate cases to generate inspired solutions. However, traditional case-based reasoning based creative conceptual design models focus on design strategies research, pay little attention to defining a consistent knowledge representation model, and neglect the research to make various types of knowledge retrieval tractable. Faced with such drawbacks, the expected design knowledge cannot be retrieved properly, especially in cases where multidisciplinary knowledge is concerned or exact query terms are absent. In order to solve these issues, this paper presents a combined approach to support creative conceptual design process. First, function–behavior–structure knowledge cell is introduced as a unified consistent design knowledge representation model. Second, a hybrid similarity measure is proposed to increase the overall possibility of obtaining useful design knowledge by considering semantic understanding ability. Third, an intelligent creative conceptual design system has been developed with a case study of a novel insulin pump design to demonstrate its usage, and two experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms other case-based reasoning based creative conceptual design models.

A novel generalised successive overrelaxation (GSOR) method for solving generalised saddle point problems is proposed, based on splitting the coefficient matrix. The proposed method is shown to converge under suitable restrictions on the iteration parameters, and we present some illustrative numerical results.

The present study was conducted to evaluate the anti-parasitic activity of a pure compound from Streptomyces sp. HL-2-14 against fish parasite Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, and elucidate its chemical structure. By electron ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum (1H NMR and 13C NMR), the compound was identified as amphotericin B (AmB). The in vitro trials revealed that AmB can effectively kill the theronts and tomonts of I. multifiliis with the median lethal concentration (LC50) of 0·8 mg L−1 at 30 min for the theronts and 4·3 mg L−1 at 2 h for the tomonts, respectively. AmB at 5 mg L−1 significantly reduced I. multifiliis infectivity prevalence and intensity on grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), and consequently decreased fish mortality, from 100% in control group to 30% in treated group. The 72 h acute toxicity (LC50) of AmB on grass carp was 20·6 mg L−1, but fish mortality was occurred when exposure to 13·0 mg L−1. These results indicated that AmB was effective in the therapy of I. multifiliis infection, but the safety concentration margin is relatively narrow. Further efforts aiming to decrease the toxicity and improve the therapeutic profile remain to be needed.

While rabies is a significant public health concern in China, the epidemiology of animal rabies in the north and northwest border provinces remains unknown. From February 2013 to March 2014, seven outbreaks of domestic animal rabies caused by wild carnivores in Xinjiang (XJ) and Inner Mongolia (IM) Autonomous Regions, China were reported and diagnosed in brain samples of infected animals by the fluorescent antibody test (FAT) and RT–PCR. Ten field rabies viruses were obtained. Sequence comparison and phylogenetic analysis based on the complete N gene (1353 bp) amplified directly from the original brain tissues showed that these ten strains were steppe-type viruses, closely related to strains reported in Russia and Mongolia. None had been identified previously in China. The viruses from XJ and IM clustered separately into two lineages showing their different geographical distribution. This study emphasizes the importance of wildlife surveillance and of cross-departmental cooperation in the control of transboundary rabies transmission.

Confocal Raman microspectroscopy (CRM) has emerged as a powerful approach to visualize the compositional distribution in lignocellulosic biomass of cell walls. In this work, the applicability of CRM for imaging the topochemical correlation between lignin and hydroxycinnamic acids (HCA) in the Miscanthus sinensis internode was explored. Model compound [p-coumaric acid (PCA) and ferulic acid (FA)] analysis indicated that the band region from 1,152 to 1,197 cm−1 can be used to characterize the distribution of HCA. Raman images calculated by integrating over the area intensity of characteristic spectral regions showed heterogeneous distribution of lignin and HCA at cellular and sub-cellular level. When overlaying the Raman image of lignin and HCA distribution, it was found that these two polymers were co-located in the middle lamella and secondary wall of corresponding cells. Raman images for the band intensity ratio (1,173 cm−1/1,603 cm−1) indicated a clear association between lignin and HCA distribution within morphologically distinct cell wall layers of sclerenchyma fibers and the parenchyma. This is the first time that the spatial correlation between lignin and HCA concentration has been illustrated by a microspectroscopy imaging approach. The results are of importance in extending the current understanding of lignin and aromatics topochemistry in herbaceous biomass.

Two phases of nickel sulfide (α-NiS and β-NiS) nanoarchitectures were successfully and controllably synthesized by a facile solvothermal method with two different solvents of alcohol and water, respectively. The products were characterized by x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and UV-vis diffuse reflectance spectrophotometer. The sphere-like shape for α-NiS and cross-like shape composed of nanorods for β-NiS are uniform and well distributed as well as their size. Both α-NiS and β-NiS powders were used as counter electrodes (CEs) in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). It is found that the DSSC with an α-NiS CE performs much better than the one with a β-NiS CE. The energy conversion efficiency of the former was 5.2%, whereas the latter was 4.2%, about 20% increment.

Alkali pretreatment is a promising pretreatment technology that can effectively deconstruct plant cell walls to enhance sugar release performance. In this study, multi-scale visualization of dynamic changes in poplar cell walls during sodium hydroxide pretreatment (2% w/v, 121°C) was carried out by light microscopy (LM), confocal Raman microscopy (CRM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). LM observations indicated that swelling occurred primarily in the secondary wall (S) but alkali had little effect on the cell corner middle lamella (CCML). Correspondingly, there was a preferential delignification in the S at the beginning of pretreatment, while the level of delignification in CCML (~88%) was higher than that in the S (~83%) for the whole process revealed by Raman spectra. It also suggested that prolonging residence time to 180 min would not remove lignin completely but cause rapid loss of carbohydrates, which was further visualized by Raman spectroscopy images. Furthermore, AFM measurements illustrated that pretreatment with alkali exposed the embedded microfibrils from noncellulosic polymers clearly, enlarged the diameter of microfibrils, and decreased the surface porosity. These results suggested that there was a synergistic mechanism of lignocellulose deconstruction regarding cell wall swelling, main components dissolution, and microfibril morphological changes that occurred during alkali pretreatment.