Corrosion of steel and rebar in concrete structures is one of the most frequent reasons for civil infrastructure failures. Thus, improving the effective corrosion sensor technology can greatly reduce cost and provide safe structures with long service lives. However, assessing the corrosion condition of rebars is not simple because they are buried in concrete. In this paper, using fiber Bragg grating (FBG), a corrosion sensor for monitoring steel rebars embedded in a concrete structure is developed and validated by experiments. Based on the fact that the volume and diameter of a rebar embedded in concrete will enlarge due to corrosion, an FBG packaged with fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) is wrapped on the steel bar. During corrosion, the increase in the bar diameter leads to the increase in fiber strain, which can be measured by the shift of the wavelength of FBG. Performances of the corrosion sensor are validated by accelerating corrosion in lab experiments. The corrosion sensor is embedded in a concrete specimen put in a 5% sodium chloride solution with a constant current. Experimental results show that the corrosion sensor can monitor the concurrence of corrosion of rebars in concrete. The corrosion extent can be quantitatively evaluated through the change in the wavelength of FBG. Therefore, the corrosion sensor developed in this paper is feasible for monitoring the early corrosion of rebars in concrete.

The skid resistance performance of pavement is closely related to the micro-texture of pavement aggregate, while there is very few research on the relationship between micro-texture and the skid resistance. In this paper, the optical microscope is used to acquire the surface morphology of three types of aggregates including basalt, limestone and red sandstone respectively, where a total of 12 indicators are developed based on the surface texture information. The polishing effect on aggregate is simulated by Wehner/Schulze (W/S) device, during the polishing procedure, the skid resistance are measured by British Pendulum Tester (BPT). Based on the results of independent T-test and the polishing resistance analysis, it shows that the surface texture of basalt is significantly different between limestone and red sandstone. Three indicators including the average roughness ( ), the kurtosis of the surface ( ) and the mean summit curvature ( ) are selected to describe the characteristics of aggregate micro-texture based on the correlation analysis. The contribution of micro-texture to the skid resistance can be described with the secondary polynomial regression model by these indicators.

The Lewis acid-catalyzed addition of trimethylsilyl cyanide to -chlorobenzaldehyde in a microchannel reactor was investigated. The microchannel was integrated to promote both reaction and separation of the biphase system. FeF and Cu(triflate) were used as water-stable Lewis acid catalysts. Sodium dodecyl sulfate was incorporated in the organic-aqueous system to enhance the reactivity and to manipulate the multiphase flow inside the microchannel. It was found that the dynamics and the kinetics of the multiphase reaction were affected by the new micellar system. Parallel multiphase flow inside the microchannel was obtained, allowing for continuous and acceptable phase separation. Enhanced selectivity was achieved by operating at lower conversion values.

A floor isolation system installed in a single floor or room in a fixed base structure is designed to protect equipment. With this configuration, the input motions to the floor isolation from the ground motions are filtered by the structure, leaving the majority of the frequency content of the input motion lower than the predominant frequency of the structure. The floor isolation system should minimize the acceleration to protect equipment; however, displacement must also be limited to save floor space, especially with long period motion. Semi-active control with an control was adopted for the floor isolation system and a new input shaping filter was developed to account for the input motion characteristics and enhance the effectiveness of the control. A series of shake table tests for a semi-active floor isolation system using rolling pendulum isolators and a magnetic-rheological damper were performed to validate the control. Passive control using an oil damper was also tested for comparison. The test results show that the control effectively reduced acceleration for short period motions with frequencies close to the predominant frequency of the structure, as well as effectively reduced displacement for long period motions with frequencies close to the natural frequency of the floor isolation system. The control algorithm proved to be more advantageous than passive control because of its capacity to adjust control strategies according to the different motion frequency characteristics.

In this paper, a novel accelerated test method was proposed to analyze the durability of MEA, considering the actual operation of the fuel cell vehicle. The proposed method includes 7 working conditions: open circuit voltage (OCV), idling, rated output, overload, idling-rated cycle, idling-overload cycle, and OCV-idling cycle. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively destroy the MEA in a short time (165 h). Moreover, the degradation mechanism of MEA was analyzed by measuring the polarization curve, CV, SEM and TEM. This paper may provide a new research direction for improving the durability of fuel cell.

Efficient evaluation of crop phenotypes is a prerequisite for breeding, cultivar adoption, genomics and phenomics study. Plant genotyping is developing rapidly through the use of high-throughput sequencing techniques, while plant phenotyping has lagged far behind and it has become the rate-limiting factor in genetics, large-scale breeding and development of new cultivars. In this paper, we consider crop phenotyping technology under three categories. The first is high-throughput phenotyping techniques in controlled environments such as greenhouses or specifically designed platforms. The second is a phenotypic strengthening test in semi-controlled environments, especially for traits that are difficult to be tested in multi-environment trials (MET), such as lodging, drought and disease resistance. The third is MET in uncontrolled environments, in which crop plants are managed according to farmer’s cultural practices. Research and application of these phenotyping techniques are reviewed and methods for MET improvement proposed.

Tests of interface between compacted clay and concrete were conducted systematically using interface simple shear test apparatus. The samples, having same dry density with different water content ratio, were prepared. Two types of concrete with different surface roughness, i.e., relatively smooth and relatively rough surface roughness, were also prepared. The main objectives of this paper are to show the effect of water content, normal stress and rough surface on the shear stress-shear displacement relationship of clay-concrete interface. The following were concluded in this study: 1) the interface shear sliding dominates the interface shear displacement behavior for both cases of relatively rough and smooth concrete surface except when the clay water content is greater than 16% for the case of rough concrete surface where the shear failure occurs in the body of the clay sample; 2) the results of interface shear strength obtained by direct shear test were different from that of simple shear test for the case of rough concrete surface; 3) two types of interface failure mechanism may change each other with different water content ratio; 4) the interface shear strength increases with increasing water content ratio especially for the case of clay-rough concrete surface interface.

An experiment was carried out on a set of full-scale specimens of a non-conventional connection between a concrete column and a composite steel and concrete beam defined on the basis of a number of requirements. The proposed connection, conceived in the ambit of semi-rigid joints, is aimed at combining general ease of construction with a highly simplified assembly procedure with a satisfying transmission of hogging moment at supports in continuous beams. For this purpose, the traditional shear studs used at the interface between the steel beam and the upper concrete slab, are also employed at the ends of the steel profiles welded horizontally to the end plates. The test is aimed at investigating the hogging moment response of the connection under incremental loads until failure.

Flutter derivatives are essential for flutter analysis of long-span bridges, and they are generally identified from the vibration testing data of a sectional model suspended in a wind tunnel. Making use of the forced vibration testing data of three sectional models, namely, a thin-plate model, a nearly streamlined model, and a bluff-body model, a comparative study was made to identify the flutter derivatives of each model by using a time-domain method and a frequency-domain method. It was shown that all the flutter derivatives of the thin-plate model identified with the frequency-domain method and time-domain method, respectively, agree very well. Moreover, some of the flutter derivatives of each of the other two models identified with the two methods deviate to some extent. More precisely, the frequency-domain method usually results in smooth curves of the flutter derivatives. The formulation of time-domain method makes the identification results of flutter derivatives relatively sensitive to the signal phase lag between vibration state vector and aerodynamic forces and also prone to be disturbed by noise and nonlinearity.

In this paper, a nonlinear elastic model was developed to simulate the behavior of compacted clay concrete interface (CCCI) based on the principle of transition mechanism failure (TMF). A number of simple shear tests were conducted on CCCI to demonstrate different failure mechanisms; i.e., sliding failure and deformation failure. The clay soil used in the test was collected from the “Shuang Jang Kou” earth rockfill dam project. It was found that the behavior of the interface depends on the critical water contents by which two failure mechanisms can be recognized. Mathematical relations were proposed between the shear at failure and water content in addition to the transition mechanism indicator. The mathematical relations were then incorporated into the interface model. The performance of the model is verified with the experimental results. The verification shows that the proposed model is capable of predicting the interface shear stress versus the total shear displacement very well.