Search Results (221)

Microbially influenced corrosion (MIC) poses a significant threat to buried metallic infrastructure, yet assessing MIC risks in complex, vertically stratified soil environments remains challenging. Unlike traditional models that focus on single canonical corrosion-related species, localized MIC is increasingly recognized as a community-driven process mediated by biofilm formation and stress adaptation. This study investigated the spatial and vertical distribution (0–2.5 m) of microbiomes and corrosion-associated functional genes along a transmission line in Guangxi, China, using shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Taxonomic profiling revealed pronounced site-specific divergence. Site C was enriched in Sphingomonas and nitrifying taxa that promote biofilm-mediated corrosion, whereas Site E was dominated by the iron-reducing Anaeromyxobacter, suggesting anaerobic corrosion susceptibility. Along all investigated sites, surface horizons were dominated by aerobic biofilm formers. Intermediate depths were enriched in dissimilatory iron reducers and nitrite oxidizers, while the deepest layers were dominated by acid-producing Streptomyces. Similarly, the corrosion-related functional genes exhibited a shared vertical stratification across all sites. Functional annotation identified a persistent baseline of corrosion-relevant functions—including oxidative-stress sigma factors (e.g., K03088), nickel-transport systems for hydrogenase assembly (e.g., K02035/K02033/K02034), biofilm-regulatory kinases (e.g., K12132), and ATP-binding cassette (e.g., K06147). These functional markers exhibited clear vertical stratification, with nickel-transport and stress-response genes peaking at intermediate depths. Correlation analyses suggested that K03088 was associated with high resistivity and oxidation-reduction potential, whereas the nickel-transport cluster K02035/K02033/K02034 was correlated with lower pH and reduced salinity. These findings suggest that MIC risk in soils is potentially driven by complex ecological networks, and provide candidate genetic biomarkers for the early warning and risk assessment of buried infrastructure corrosion. Full article

Bioinspired superhydrophobic surfaces (SHS) have been proven to afford high corrosion inhibition to the underlying metal. Targeting brass metal, this paper presents a biomimetic mineralization route for obtaining SHS. Calcium carbonate is first synthesized in an ethanol solution containing an organic curing agent through CO₂ gas introduction, resulting in colloidal material. Subsequent modification with stearic acid yields the SHS. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) experiments reveal that the biomimetic calcium carbonate cluster coating significantly improves the corrosion inhibition performance. After the coverage of the CaCO₃ SHS, the low-frequency impedance modulus value increases to 4.6 × 10⁵ Ω cm², which is enhanced compared with the bare brass with 3.2 × 10³ Ω cm². Meanwhile, the corrosion current density value decreases substantially from 2.31 × 10⁻⁶ mA/cm² for bare metal to 1.30 × 10⁻⁸ mA/cm² for the SHS surface. This demonstrates its high anti-corrosion properties. Acid-base corrosion tests further confirm the good resistance of the coating to an alkaline environment. Moreover, the coating exhibits anti-freezing adhesion and self-cleaning properties, surpassing the bare brass. The combined characteristics of the biomimetic calcium carbonate SHS coating highlight the promising potential in corrosion protection applications. Full article

Unidirectional glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite insulators are widely used in extra-high voltage (EHV) and ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission lines due to their outstanding electrical and mechanical performance. However, the accurate prediction of the critical buckling load is crucial to satisfy the high reliability requirement under complex operations. In this paper, an improved Perry–Robertson theory to predict the critical buckling loads of GFRP composite insulators with different slenderness is proposed. Firstly, initial imperfection is expressed as a function of the insulator strut length, which enables the critical load to be formulated as a function of slenderness explicitly. It also allows for convenient comparisons with other theories, such as Euler and Johnson’s, and easy calibration with the magnitude of initial imperfections. Secondly, the nonlinear material behavior of the GFRP composite insulator strut, resulting from changes in glass fiber orientation in relation to the loading direction during buckling, is considered to further enhance the prediction accuracy. The predicted results with current theory were validated through compression tests of GFRP composite insulators with solid and hollow struts and different slenderness and boundary conditions, which shows an accuracy of over 85%. Thus, the proposed improved Perry–Robertson theory can be also applied in other fiber-reinforced composite buckling analyses. Full article

High-altitude, low-pressure environments significantly reduce the insulation strength of air gaps, posing severe risks to live-line working on Ultra High Voltage and Extra High Voltage (UHV/EHV) transmission lines. To address this challenge and ensure operational safety, this paper proposes a predictive gap discharge voltage calculation model based on the dynamic coupling of time-varying electric fields and space charge. Unlike existing approaches that rely on static, geometry-dependent empirical corrections, the proposed model achieves high predictive capability by intrinsically mapping air relative density and absolute humidity to dynamically modify key microscopic discharge parameters, including the effective ionization coefficient, attachment coefficient, and streamer internal electric field strength. This physical framework enables the successful simulation of the complete progression from streamer inception to leader development and final breakdown, thereby calculating the 50% breakdown voltage under varying altitudes and gap distances. To rigorously validate the proposed model, breakdown tests were conducted using simplified sphere–plane gaps and full-scale simulated gaps between a human worker and a tower window at altitudes of 23 m and 2100 m. Additionally, third-party experimental datasets were utilized for comprehensive comparative analysis. The results demonstrate that the model’s predictive values align excellently with multi-source experimental data, establishing its high accuracy and practical engineering value for complex electrode configurations under diverse high-altitude conditions. Full article

Animal infectious diseases impose severe economic burdens on livestock industries, threaten wildlife populations, and compromise food security. Although vaccination remains the cornerstone of disease prevention, conventional vaccine platforms are often constrained by safety, efficacy, or manufacturing scalability. This narrative review provides a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art in herpesvirus-vectored vaccines for veterinary applications, focusing on five well-characterized alphaherpesviruses: Bovine herpesvirus type 1 (BoHV-1), Pseudorabies virus (PRV), Marek’s disease virus (MDV), Equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1), and Duck enteritis virus (DEV). The intrinsic characteristics of herpesviruses, including large, stable genomes; the capacity for foreign gene insertion; broad host tropism; and the ability to elicit robust humoral and cellular immunity, are examined, and their performance is compared with that of traditional vaccine platforms. Key advances in vectored vaccine development are highlighted, from proof-of-concept studies to the creation of advanced multivalent constructs. These approaches demonstrate protective efficacy against a range of significant animal pathogens, including foot-and-mouth disease virus, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, avian influenza virus, infectious bursal disease virus, and West Nile virus. The literature was identified through systematic searches of PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science (1990–2026), followed by title/abstract screening and reference chaining. Future directions in vector engineering, mucosal delivery, and synthetic biology approaches are considered. Herpesvirus-vectored vaccines represent a versatile platform for enhancing animal health, supporting sustainable agriculture, and mitigating zoonotic risks. Full article

In high-penetration wind power systems, outage loss uncertainty analysis is fundamental to maintenance scheduling, and its accuracy critically depends on real-time wind power generation, which is dominated by ultra-short-term wind speed fluctuations. Accurate wind speed prediction is therefore essential for reliable outage loss evaluation and subsequent maintenance decision-making. Dense turbine layouts in wind farms lead to strong wake effects, resulting in complex physical attenuation and spatiotemporal correlations in wind speed between upstream and downstream turbines. Leveraging upstream turbine information can therefore enhance the accuracy of downstream wind speed forecasting. However, existing approaches that incorporate neighboring information, such as graph neural networks, rely primarily on data-driven learning and do not explicitly account for the physical mechanisms of wake attenuation, which limits their predictive performance. To address these challenges, a physics-informed ultra-short-term wind speed forecasting method is proposed which integrates an LSTM network for temporal feature extraction with the Jensen wake model through a weighted loss function within a PINN framework. Wake relationships are first identified based on wind direction and turbine layout, and the Jensen wake model is employed to characterize downstream wind speed attenuation. The weighted loss jointly optimizes data-driven and physics-based objectives, enabling the model to coordinate temporal pattern learning with wake-related physical interactions while adhering to wake decay physics. Moreover, the proposed approach accounts for topology-sensitive power flow variations under high-penetration renewable systems, where outage losses are strongly influenced by real-time wind power and wake-effect uncertainties. Case studies demonstrate that, compared with a conventional LSTM model, the proposed method reduces the normalized mean absolute error and the normalized root mean square error by 14.3% and 13.5%, respectively, indicating improved forecasting accuracy and potential for more reliable system outage analysis. Full article

As the scale of ultra-high-voltage (UHV) and extra-high-voltage (EHV) transmission networks continues to expand, the operational reliability of surge arresters has become increasingly important for power-system security. Based on equivalent degradation experiments conducted on a 1000 kV class UHV surge arrester, this study proposes a multi-source information fusion approach for degradation-state assessment. Leakage-current, UHF partial-discharge, voltage, and temperature-field data were jointly used to construct a hybrid framework integrating a multi-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. To improve model performance, the sparrow search algorithm (SSA) was introduced for hyperparameter optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved accuracies of 97.47% and 94.23% on the training and test sets, respectively, and was able to distinguish the normal condition from different degraded-section conditions under the laboratory-emulated equivalent degradation scenario considered in this study. These results indicate that multi-source information fusion combined with data-driven hyperparameter optimization is a feasible approach for laboratory-scale degradation assessment of surge arresters and provides a basis for further validation under more realistic service conditions. Full article

The planning and design of Extra-High Voltage (EHV) overhead power lines require strict adherence to electromagnetic field exposure limits to ensure public safety. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the minimum ground clearance required for standard 400 kV transmission towers to comply with international safety guidelines. A review of legislative frameworks across 37 countries indicates a widespread consensus on limiting values of 5 kV/m for the electric field and 100 $\mathsf{\mu }$T for magnetic flux density. Using analytical methods, the electric and magnetic fields were calculated for four common tower geometries (Cat, Portal, Danube, and Barrel) under varying ground clearances and phase configurations. The results demonstrate that the magnetic flux density is not a limiting factor, as it remains well below safety thresholds even at standard technical clearances. Conversely, the electric field intensity proves to be the critical design constraint, often requiring clearances significantly higher than those dictated by insulation coordination. The study identifies that optimizing the phase sequence in double-circuit towers can reduce the required ground clearance by up to 28%, offering a cost-effective mitigation strategy. These findings provide power line designers with essential decision-making data for the preliminary design phase, enabling the optimization of tower geometry and phase arrangement without the need for computationally intensive simulations. Full article

To investigate the inevitable aging of composite insulators under the coupled effects of electrical, thermal, ice, and fog stresses, as well as to explore their aging mechanisms and residual strength prediction methods, this study collected operational insulator samples from four environmental regions: Tibet, Yunnan, Hunan Xuefeng Mountain, and Anhui/Chongqing. Mechanical properties, including tensile strength, elongation at break, and shear resistance, were tested. The results indicate that the degradation of mechanical performance in composite insulation components can be attributed to the synergistic interaction of operational environments and material characteristics, with the aging behavior of high-temperature vulcanized (HTV) silicone rubber exhibiting significant non-linearity. Based on existing research, molecular dynamics simulations were employed to construct microstructural models at different aging stages, and it was verified that main chain scission, reduced system density, and changes in the elemental chemical environment during aging are closely related to the degradation of material mechanical properties. Based on hyper-elastic constitutive theory and fracture mechanics, a quantitative method for assessing the comprehensive aging degree was proposed, with “service years” and “operational altitude” as the core dimensions. A negative exponential model was established to describe the strength degradation of silicone rubber materials. This model enables the non-destructive estimation of the residual mechanical strength of in-service insulators in complex regions without power interruption, providing a decision-making framework for grid operation and maintenance. Full article

High-precision localization is essential for autonomous navigation and environment perception of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex power inspection scenarios. To overcome the limited accuracy and accumulated drift of conventional GPS-based single-sensor localization, this paper proposes a LiDAR–IMU–GPS-aided navigation method that combines a tightly coupled front-end and a loosely coupled back-end. The front-end employs an improved Lie-group-based UKF-SLAM framework to explicitly handle the nonlinearities of rotational motion, thereby improving the stability of local pose estimation. The back-end integrates GPS absolute constraints, loop closure detection, and point cloud registration via pose graph optimization, which effectively suppresses long-term accumulated drift. The framework achieves accurate and robust localization for UAV power inspection. Experiments on public benchmark datasets and real-world power inspection scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. On the MH_02_easy sequence, the absolute trajectory error is reduced from 0.521 m to 0.170 m compared with ROVIO, while in a real inspection sequence the cumulative error is reduced by more than 99% after back-end optimization. Moreover, the system maintains stable navigation under GPS-degraded conditions, indicating strong robustness and practical applicability. Full article

The reliable operation of transmission lines is essential for grid stability. Growing electricity demand pushes existing lines to full capacity, while new construction is constrained by resources and the environment. Dynamic capacity increase technology addresses this by boosting transmission capacity without physical upgrades, with the identification of weak points along the line being central to its application. This study integrates correlation analysis and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to develop an evaluation method for transmission line segments, with a supporting software implementation also developed. A system of characteristic quantities was first established using operation and maintenance guidelines combined with correlation analysis. The Analytic Hierarchy Process was applied to score features and derive weights after consistency validation. Preprocessed line data were then weighted to calculate segment weakness levels, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation was used for both qualitative and quantitative condition analysis. The model was validated through a case study, and its software implementation streamlines and enhances the assessment process. Full article

Background: Members of the virus family Herpesviridae are among the most successful pathogen groups in evolutionary history. They not only pose a serious public health threat to humans but also cause significant economic losses in the global livestock industry. The primary immunological challenge in developing sterilizing vaccines is the lifelong latency of herpesviruses in the nervous system or lymphoid tissues. Methods: This analysis compares the vaccine strategies designed against the five most important Alphaherpesvirinae pathogens: HSV-1/2, PRV, BHV-1, EHV-1/4, and FHV-1. The contrast between the globally licensed veterinary vaccines and the relative stagnation in the field of human HSV vaccines is stark. However, there are notable success stories regarding the implementation of ‘Marker Vaccines’ (DIVA strategies) in veterinary medicine. This review examines various vaccine modalities, assessing their potential to mitigate clinical outbreaks and their shortcomings in preventing viral shedding and establishing latency. Results: This study reveals common technical bottlenecks across species, attributed to immune evasion mechanisms such as the downregulation of MHC I, TAP inhibition, the failure to induce robust mucosal IgA, and safety concerns regarding the recombination of live vectors. Conclusions: This review highlights several promising avenues that could lead to enhanced herpesvirus vaccines and recommends the rational design of T-cell epitopes alongside innovative mucosal adjuvants. Furthermore, it bridges the gap between veterinary and human vaccinology from a One Health perspective, suggesting that lessons learned from veterinary practices could facilitate necessary breakthroughs in human medicine. Full article

The determination of the actual series and sequence impedances, including the reduction factor of a certain HV or EHV distribution cable line, as well as the resulting screening factor of its sheaths and surrounding metal installations, including its inductive influence on any of the surrounding metal installations, is not possible by calculations alone. Considering the inductive influence of surrounding metal installations on the values of these quantities is possible only by the method that includes the test measurements during a simulated ground fault in the supplied substation. However, such measurements presuppose putting at least one HV substation and its feeding line out of service. That is why electricity distribution companies rarely allow such measurements, i.e., only immediately before the commissioning of a newly built HV substation or during a periodical overhaul. In this paper, it is demonstrated that these characteristics of cable lines can also be determined based on the results of synchronous measurements performed permanently in the substations at their ends. In this way, the need to perform a simulated ground fault and corresponding test measurements in HV distribution substations practically disappears, and the necessary characteristics can be determined whenever they are required. Full article

Equine alphaherpesvirus-1 (EHV-1) is a highly contagious virus that can cause the neurological form, equine herpesvirus myeloencephalopathy (EHM). Understanding transmission-related risk factors is crucial for improving prevention strategies and guiding effective control measures. In this study, we collected data from 63 horses that had previously participated in the February 2022 winter horse show season at the Desert International Horse Park (DIHP) (26 cases and 37 controls) to identify host and management factors associated with EHV-1 infection and/or EHM development during the February 2022 outbreak at the DIHP in Thermal, California. Risk factors were evaluated using multivariable logistic regression and a random forest model with conditional permutation importance. Greater age was associated with higher odds of becoming a case (OR = 1.33; 95%CI: 1.04–1.69, p-value: 0.01). Compared with hunters, jumpers had greater odds of developing EHV-1 and/or EHM (OR = 7.37; 95%CI: 1.57–34.61, p-value: 0.01). Sharing a barn was also strongly associated with EHV-1 and/or EHM case status (OR = 7.37; 95%CI: 1.79–30.29, p-value: <0.01). The machine-learning-based rankings were concordant with the regression estimates. Age, main activity, and sharing a barn were the most influential risk factors associated with elevated odds of developing EHV-1 and/or EHM. These results highlight specific demographic and management-related risk factors that could inform targeted prevention strategies. Full article

Comparative transcriptomics offers a powerful approach to elucidate host–virus interactions across related pathogens, yet systematic evaluations across species-matched cellular systems remain limited. We performed a cross-species RNA sequencing analysis of respective species’ cells infected with three alphaherpesviruses—herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), bovine alphaherpesvirus 1 (BHV-1), and equid alphaherpesvirus 1 (EHV-1)—to dissect conserved and virus-specific transcriptional responses. We show that certain orthologous genes and orthologous pathways are differentially regulated upon infection among the three species like pathways related to translation rRNA processing and TNF-alpha signalling. We find that the earliest sampled timepoint of infection, 2 h post infection (hpi), shows the most commonly enriched pathways among the three species compared to later timepoints. At 6 h and 9 h post infection, BHV-1- and EHV-1 infections have more in common with each other in terms of enriched pathways than with HSV-1 infections. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive analysis of temporal viral gene expression for all three herpesviruses. Together, these findings provide a comparative framework for understanding alphaherpevirus–host interactions and reveal both conserved core responses and species-specific transcriptional signatures. This work establishes a foundation for identifying broadly acting antiviral targets as well as virus-specific vulnerabilities that may inform host-directed therapies and cross-species disease management. Full article