• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.411-429
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• 2017

A Spectral Element Method for 3D seismic wave propagation simulation is derived based on the three-dimensional fluctuating elastic dynamic equation. Considering the 3D real terrain and the attenuation characteristics of the medium, the topographic effect of Wenchuan earthquake is simulated by using the Spectral Element Method (SEM) algorithm and the ASTER DEM model. Results show that the high PGA (peak ground acceleration) region was distributed along the peak and the slope side away from the epicenter in the epicenter area. The overall distribution direction of high PGA and high PGV (peak ground velocity) region is parallel to the direction of the seismogenic fault. In the epicenter of the earthquake, the ground motion is to some extent amplified under the influence of the terrain. The amplification effect of the terrain on PGA is complicated. It does not exactly lead to amplification of PGA at the ridge and the summit or attenuation of PGA in the valley.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.380-393
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• 2019

Traditional boost converters have difficulty realizing high efficiency and high voltage gain conversion due to 1) extremely large duty cycles, 2) high voltage and current stresses on devices, and 3) low conversion efficiency. Therefore, a function decoupling high voltage gain DC/DC converter composed of a DC transformer (DCX) and an auxiliary converter is proposed. The role of DCX is to realize fixed gain conversion with high efficiency, whereas the role of the auxiliary converter is to regulate the output voltage. In this study, different forms of combined high voltage gain converters are compared and analyzed, and a structure is selected for the function decoupling high voltage gain converter. Then, topologies and control strategies for the DCX and auxiliary converter are discussed. On the basis of the discussion, an optimal design method for circuit parameters is proposed, and design procedures for the DCX are described in detail. Finally, a 400 W experimental prototype based on the proposed optimal design method is built to verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis. The measured maximum conversion efficiency at rated power is 95.56%.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.67-79
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• 2021

The influence of ground motions on the seismic response of utility tunnels was investigated. A series of small-scale shaking table model tests were carried out under uniform excitation in the transverse direction. Different peak accelerations of EL-Centro and Taft earthquake waves were applied. The acceleration responses, earth pressure, seismic strain, bending moment and structure deformations were measured and discussed. The results showed that the types of earthquake waves had significant influences on the soil-structure acceleration responses. However, the amplitude of the soil acceleration along the depth showed consistent variation regardless of the types of earthquake waves and tunnels. The horizontal soil pressure near the top and bottom slabs showed obviously larger values than those at other depths. In general, the strain response in the outer surface was more significant than that on the inner surface, and the peak strain in the end section of the model was larger than that in the middle section. Moreover, the bending moment at the corner points was much larger than that at middle point, and the bending moment was greatly affected by both input accelerations and seismic wave types. The opposite direction of shear deformation on the top and bottom slabs presented a rotation trend of the model structure.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.575-586
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• 2022

Uneven light in real-world causes visual degradation for underexposed regions. For these regions, insufficient consideration during enhancement procedure will result in over-/under-exposure, loss of details and color distortion. Confronting such challenges, an unsupervised low-light image enhancement network is proposed in this paper based on the guidance of the unpaired low-/normal-light images. The key components in our network include super-resolution module (SRM), a GAN-based low-light image enhancement network (LLIEN), and denoising-scaling module (DSM). The SRM improves the resolution of the low-light input images before illumination enhancement. Such design philosophy improves the effectiveness of texture details preservation by operating in high-resolution space. Subsequently, local lightness attention module in LLIEN effectively distinguishes unevenly illuminated areas and puts emphasis on low-light areas, ensuring the spatial consistency of illumination for locally underexposed images. Then, multiple discriminators, i.e., global discriminator, local region discriminator, and color discriminator performs assessment from different perspectives to avoid over-/under-exposure and color distortion, which guides the network to generate images that in line with human aesthetic perception. Finally, the DSM performs noise removal and obtains high-quality enhanced images. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves favorable results, which indicates its superior capacity on illumination and texture details restoration.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.641-652
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• 2022

Fluid-conveying tubes are widely used to transport oil and natural gas in industries. As an advanced composite material, functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composites (FG-CNTRC) have great potential to empower the industry. However, nonlinear free vibration of the FG-CNTRC fluid-conveying pipe has not been attempted in thermal environment. In this paper, the nonlinear free vibration characteristic of functionally graded nanocomposite fluid-conveying pipe reinforced by single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in thermal environment is investigated. The SWCNTs gradient distributed in the thickness direction of the pipe forms different reinforcement patterns. The material properties of the FG-CNTRC are estimated by rule of mixture. A higher-order shear deformation theory and Hamilton's variational principle are employed to derive the motion equations incorporating the thermal and fluid effects. A two-step perturbation method is implemented to obtain the closed-form asymptotic solutions for these nonlinear partial differential equations. The nonlinear frequencies under several reinforcement patterns are presented and discussed. We conduct a series of studies aimed at revealing the effects of the flow velocity, the environment temperature, the inner-outer diameter ratio, and the carbon nanotube volume fraction on the nature frequency.

• Journal of Electrochemical Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.194-204
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• 2023

Models based on diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) have been extensively used to explore the mechanisms of dendritic particle aggregation phenomena. The physical and chemical properties of systems in which DLA aggregates emerge are given in their fractal. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the growth of electrodeposited copper dendrites in flat plate electrochemical cells from a fractal perspective. The effects of growth time, applied voltage, copper ion concentration, and electrolyte acidity on the morphology and fractal dimension of deposited copper were examined. 'Phase diagram' set out the variety of electrodeposited copper fractal morphology analysed by metallographic microscopy. The box counting method confirms that the electrodeposited dendritic structures manifestly exhibit fractal character. It was found that with the increase of the voltage and copper ion concentration. The fractal copper size becomes larger and its morphology shifts towards a dendritic structure, with the fractal dimension fluctuating around 1.60-1.70. In addition, the morphology of the deposited copper is significantly affected by the acidity of the electrolyte. The increase in acidity from 0.01 to 1.00 mol/L intensifies the hydrogen precipitation side reactions and the overflow path of hydrogen bubbles affects the fractal growth of copper dendrites.

• Membrane and Water Treatment
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.97-104
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• 2022

With a small particle size, specific surface area and chemical nature, Pd/Cu-Fe nanocomposites can efficiently remove the organic compounds. In order to understand the applicability for in situ remediation of contaminated groundwater, the degradation of p-nitrophenol by Pd/Cu-Fe nanoparticles was investigated. The degradation results demonstrated that these nanoparticles could effectively degrade p-nitrophenol and near 90% of degradation efficiency was achieved by Pd/Cu-Fe nanocomposites for 120 min treatment. The efficiency of degradation increased significantly when the Pd content increased from 0.05 wt.% and 0.10 wt.% to 0.20 wt.%. Meanwhile, the removal percentage of p-nitrophenol increased from 75.4% and 81.7% to 89.2% within 120 min. Studies on the kinetics of p-nitrophenol that reacts with Pd/Cu-Fe nanocomposites implied that their behaviors followed the pseudo-first-order kinetics. Furthermore, the batch experiment data suggested that some factors, including Pd/Cu-Fe availability, temperature, pH, different ions (SO42-, PO43-, NO3-) and humic acid content in water, also have significant impacts on p-nitrophenol degradation efficiency. The recyclability of the material was evaluated. The results showed that the Pd/Cu-Fe nanoparticles have good recycle performance, and after three cycles, the removal rate of p-nitrophenol is still more than 83%.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.87-102
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• 2023

The cover plate and the building loads often make the semi-covered deep excavations with existing buildings bearing asymmetric load, presenting different deformation characteristics with normal excavations, which is not absolutely clear in current studies. Based on a typical engineering, the building storeys, the basement storeys, the pile length, the existence of the cover plate (CP) and the depth of the diaphragm walls (DW) were selected as variables, and 44 groups of simulation were designed to study the influence of existing buildings and the semi-covered supporting system on the deformation of the excavations. The results showed that the maximum lateral displacement of DW, δ_hm, and the depth of δ_hm, H_m, are affected seriously by the building storeys and the basement storeys. Asymmetric structures and loading lead to certain lateral displacement of DW at the beginning of excavation, resulting in different relationships between δ_hm and excavation depth, H. The maximum surface settlement outside the pit, δ_vm, increases significantly and the location, d_m, moves away from the pit with the building storeys increases. δ_vm has a quadratic correlation with H due to the existing buildings. CP and building load will affect the style of the lateral displacement curve of DW seriously in different aspects.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.201-209
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• 2017

Facade structure system plays an important role in modern architecture and design. Many contractors start using Building Information Modeling (BIM) to help design and lay-out façade walls in recent years. However, there are still some users refuse to accept BIM on façade construction. Therefore, we employed Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to assess the users acceptable of BIM work flow, with using a practical case of facade construction in Chongqing Wanda City. The factors that will affect the builder's decision of whether using BIM or not when construct façade, and the relationship among them will be found via this model. Through the analysis using TAM, this research found that the direct factors influencing the completely acceptance of BIM in façade construction is the BIM quality and Result Demonstrating, and the parameter impacting the intuition engendering is the Exterior Condition. Therefore, this paper proposes a more systemic model of BIM acceptance in curtain wall to analyze the user's acceptance. The solution can also offer a reference for future research and construct on façade structure. The acceptance model has the significance that it can help to analyze the reason why users refuse to use BIM in façade construction, thus to help users accept BIM.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.791-802
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• 2023

The manual inspection of photovoltaic (PV) panels to meet the requirements of inspection work for large-scale PV power plants is challenging. We present a hot spot detection and positioning method to detect hot spots in batches and locate their latitudes and longitudes. First, a network based on the YOLOv3 architecture was utilized to identify hot spots. The innovation is to modify the RU_1 unit in the YOLOv3 model for hot spot detection in the far field of view and add a neural network residual unit for fusion. In addition, because of the misidentification problem in the infrared images of the solar PV panels, the DeepLab v3+ model was adopted to segment the PV panels to filter out the misidentification caused by bright spots on the ground. Finally, the latitude and longitude of the hot spot are calculated according to the geometric positioning method utilizing known information such as the drone's yaw angle, shooting height, and lens field-of-view. The experimental results indicate that the hot spot recognition rate accuracy is above 98%. When keeping the drone 25 m off the ground, the hot spot positioning error is at the decimeter level.