Search Results (2,831)

Inter-basin water transfer source areas must sustain local habitat quality while ensuring downstream water security, yet the spatial differentiation mechanisms, driving mechanisms, and scenario-dependent responses of their ecosystem services have not been statistically tested. This study aimed to assess historical changes and future trajectories of ecosystem services in the core water source area of the Middle Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, and established a historical assessment–spatial statistics–driver attribution–scenario projection analytical framework. Five ecosystem services—water yield, soil conservation, nitrogen export, carbon storage, and habitat quality—were quantified using InVEST from 2005 to 2020 and projected to 2050 under SSP126, SSP245, and SSP585 via the PLUS–InVEST coupled model. Spatial patterns were analyzed using Getis–Ord Gi* hot–cold spot analysis, hexagon-based spatial statistics (4.5 km bins), Mantel tests, and the optimal-parameter-based geographical detector. Results show that slope was the dominant spatial driver, exhibiting highly significant Mantel correlations with all five services (p < 0.001), and two-factor interactions consistently exceeded individual factor effects (e.g., population density × temperature: q = 0.527 for habitat quality; slope × temperature: q = 0.516 for soil conservation). Hexagon-based statistics revealed that carbon storage declined substantially from 2005 to 2020 (−3.23%, from 98.75 t/ha to 95.56 t/ha), while water yield and soil conservation showed no pronounced temporal trends. Scenario projections revealed divergent trajectories: relative to the 2020 baseline (267.84 mm), water yield increased by 20.1% under SSP126 (321.86 mm) but declined by 56.3% under SSP585 (117.13 mm); nitrogen export increased under all scenarios; and habitat quality declined continuously to 0.557, 0.546, and 0.539 under SSP126, SSP245, and SSP585, respectively. Within this scenario framework, SSP126 and SSP245 may better support the maintenance of water source ecosystem functions, whereas SSP585 may be associated with greater potential ecological pressures, reflected in lower water yield, higher nitrogen export, and lower habitat quality. Full article

Under high-Mach-number flight conditions, the combustion chambers of hypersonic vehicles encounter extreme thermal environments marked by unilateral heating, high-heat-flux density, and supercritical pressure. Traditional hydrocarbon fuel cooling often suffers from insufficient heat sinks, high-temperature cracking and coking blockages, making it difficult to meet long-endurance thermal protection requirements. Liquid metal, due to its extremely high thermal conductivity, wide liquid phase temperature range, low Prandtl number and electromagnetic pump driving capability, has become a key technology for breaking through the bottleneck of high-heat-flux thermal protection. Apart from the magnitude of heat flux, the heat-transfer time scale (such as the characteristic thermal response time of the wall and the fluid) is also crucial. During hypersonic flight, transient thermal loads can change within milliseconds, requiring rapid thermal response. Liquid metals, due to their high thermal diffusivity, have a shorter thermal diffusion time compared to hydrocarbon fuels. This review employs a systematic literature review of approaches using gallium-indium-tin alloy, GaInSn, focusing on three core directions: the flow and heat-transfer characteristics of liquid metals, the optimization of cooling micro-channels, and the application of thermal protection systems. It summarizes the research progress at home and abroad, compares and analyzes the performance differences and applicable scenarios of typical liquid-metal working fluids, and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of existing models, structural designs, and system schemes. The research shows that liquid metals can significantly alleviate thermal stratification and eliminate coking, and deep, narrow, tree-shaped, and biomimetic micro-channels can effectively enhance heat transfer. The liquid-metal-fuel dual-channel waste heat recovery and thermoelectric power generation system has demonstrated engineering application potential. Currently, the field still faces key challenges, such as unclear heat-transfer mechanisms under extreme conditions, the lack of general heat-transfer correlation formulas, insufficient compatibility with high-temperature materials, poor miniaturization and vibration resistance of electromagnetic pumps, and low system integration. In the future, efforts should be focused on developing multi-field coupled heat-transfer models under extreme thermal environments using engineered micro-channel structures, corrosion-resistant materials, and lightweight electromagnetic pumps, promoting the research and development of integrated thermal protection, heating and power generation systems, and providing support for the development of advanced thermal management systems for hypersonic aircraft and aviation engines. Full article

The Mao-1 Member of the Middle Permian Maokou Formation in the Yongchuan area contains distinctive eyelid–eyeball limestones developed in an outer-ramp to intraplatform-basin transitional setting. The two components alternate as mud-rich laminae and carbonate-rich nodules or layers. Eyelid limestone contains 10–45% micritic carbonate mud and a mean total-grain content of 69.11%, whereas eyeball limestone contains <10% carbonate mud and 30.89% total grains. In the exploratory geochemical subset (five samples per facies), eyelid limestone has higher mean V, Mn, Fe, and Ba contents, but only Ba differs significantly between facies (Welch p = 0.036; exact Mann–Whitney p = 0.032). Bulk-rock rare-earth-element data are PAAS-normalized and used descriptively because concentrations are low and neither weak-acid leaching nor detrital correction was performed. The observations support a preferred interpretation involving primary depositional differentiation followed by localized early diagenesis, differential compaction, and pressure solution. Relative sea-level change may have modulated the alternation, but the available data do not resolve a unique cyclic driver. Core-scale pore data demonstrate facies-dependent heterogeneity rather than field-scale deliverability. Full article

Accurate weed detection is essential for site-specific weed management because uncontrolled weeds compete with crops for water, nutrients, light, and growing space, while uniform herbicide application increases production costs and environmental pressure. Existing UAV-based weed detection methods remain limited by three core gaps: inadequate representation of heterogeneous and imbalanced UAV-derived agricultural records, insufficient joint modeling of crop–weed visual similarity and weed-scale variation, and evaluation protocols that rarely assess complete multi-label agreement together with field perturbations and cross-dataset transfer. To address these gaps, this study proposes AgroWeed-MCANet, a multi-scale convolutional attention network for UAV-based multi-label weed detection. Robust feature refinement and compact feature-map arrangement stabilize heterogeneous inputs; convolutional patch encoding, multi-scale ConvNeXt extraction, dilated context aggregation, channel–spatial attention, and cross-scale fusion address local ambiguity, scale variation, and noisy sensing conditions; and the Multi-Label Agreement Score (MLAS), robustness analysis, and cross-dataset evaluation provide field-oriented performance validation. Experiments were conducted on the UAV-UndesirablePlant-UK dataset containing 209,600 labeled field observations with naturally imbalanced crop and weed categories. AgroWeed-MCANet achieved 96.9% accuracy, 95.8% precision, 95.2% recall, 95.5% F1-score, and a 0.912 multi-label agreement score, outperforming twelve recent UAV-based weed detection baselines. Robustness analysis showed stable performance under missing observations, illumination shifts, altitude variations, and 20% noise, with the model maintaining 95.3% accuracy and 93.8% F1-score. Cross-dataset evaluation on DeepWeeds and CWFID further confirmed its transferability, with accuracies of 91.8% and 90.9%, respectively. These findings demonstrate that AgroWeed-MCANet supports reliable UAV-assisted weed monitoring and contributes to sustainable, site-specific weed management in precision agriculture. Full article

To evaluate the damage evolution of prestressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP) with broken wires and the effectiveness of internal steel-cylinder repair, a three-dimensional finite element model was established using ABAQUS and calibrated with a full-scale hydrostatic-pressure test. Test-calibrated parametric simulations considered three nominal wire breakage levels (5%, 15%, and 25%) and two damage locations: the pipe midspan and pipe-end socket region. Concrete-core damage, original steel-cylinder strain, strengthening-cylinder response, and grouting-layer load transfer were compared before and after repair. The unrepaired pipe-end socket region showed a lower numerical nonlinear-transition pressure and stronger damage propagation because of geometric discontinuity. Increasing wire breakage reduced the nonlinear-transition pressure of the concrete core and increased the original steel-cylinder strain. After internal steel-cylinder repair, the structural responses converged across the investigated damage cases. At 1.2 MPa, the calculated strain reductions between corresponding unrepaired and repaired numerical configurations were 77.2–91.0% for the original steel cylinder. At the maximum applied pressure of 1.6 MPa, the modeled maximum original steel-cylinder strain was 459.11 $\mathsf{\mu }\mathsf{\epsilon }$. The repaired configurations exhibited reduced strain demand and coordinated load sharing over the investigated monotonic internal-pressure range. The test program ended at 1.6 MPa without an ultimate-failure loading stage. Full article

Hydrogen storage and separation remain major technical challenges limiting the broader implementation of hydrogen-based energy systems. Metal–hydride alloys offer a promising solution because they enable reversible hydrogen storage within their crystal structure and can selectively absorb hydrogen from multicomponent gas mixtures. However, the practical application of metal–hydride systems requires storage vessels that combine sufficient mechanical strength with effective heat removal, as hydrogen absorption is accompanied by significant heat generation that can reduce the reaction rate and usable storage capacity. This study addresses hydrogen storage within the crystal structure of metal alloys and introduces the potential of metal–hydride (MH) alloys for hydrogen separation from gas mixtures. It subsequently presents the structural design and strength assessment of a low-pressure, double-walled, tubular steel MH storage vessel intended for hydrogen storage in a MnTiVFeZr-based alloy. Structural simulations were performed in ANSYS 2025 R2 Static Structural at three operating pressures: 3, 5, and 7 MPa. For all three simulated pressure conditions, the gravimetric hydrogen storage capacity of the alloy was 0.992 ± 0.016 wt.%. Following the selection of the most suitable design with an operating pressure of 3 MPa, an analytical calculation was performed to verify the results obtained from the numerical analysis. The storage vessel was subsequently manufactured and subjected to experimental strength validation using the test procedures specified in the STN EN 13322-2 standard. The design of the low-pressure tubular steel MH storage vessel also incorporates an efficient thermal management system based on a combination of active and passive cooling modules. The passive cooling module takes the form of an internal heat-transfer enhancement element, which is inserted into the primary storage vessel together with the MH alloy. The active cooling module uses a coolant flowing around the outer wall of the primary vessel. The optimal design of the aluminium passive cooling module was selected from four variants based on a steady-state temperature-field analysis conducted in ANSYS CFX. The selected module was subsequently manufactured and integrated into the proposed storage vessel. The vessel equipped with the passive cooling element was then subjected to experimental temperature measurements during hydrogen absorption by the MH alloy. The experimentally obtained data were compared with the numerical simulation results to evaluate the temperature fields within the vessel and the heat dissipation from the core of the MH storage system during hydrogen absorption. The main contribution of this work is the development of a mechanically validated and thermally managed tubular metal–hydride vessel that integrates structural design, numerical optimisation, manufacturing, and full-scale experimental testing within a single methodology. The proposed approach provides a practical basis for the further development and scaling of low-pressure metal–hydride systems for hydrogen storage, purification, and separation applications. Full article

Abnormally overpressured helium-rich natural gas occurs in dolomite reservoirs beneath gypsum-bearing strata of the Middle Triassic Zhouchongcun Formation in WWY1 Well, Wuwei Depression. Resolving the vertical arrangement of dolomite, gypsum, and shale is therefore critical for evaluating reservoir–seal coupling in this structurally complex setting. Here, we develop a support vector machine (SVM) workflow using acoustic transit time (AC), bulk density (DEN), compensated neutron log (CNL), gamma ray (GR), and spontaneous potential (SP) to refine lithology classification and support lithology-based screening of potential favorable intervals. The reference lithology column integrates mud-logging descriptions, conventional log responses, and stratigraphic information. An RBF-SVM was optimized by grid-search cross-validation, and formation-specific constraints were introduced to suppress lithologies incompatible with the local stratigraphic association. The unconstrained and formation-constrained models yielded matching rates of 89.16% and 90.23%, respectively. Although the numerical increase is modest, the constrained model reduces cross-formation confusion, improves boundary continuity, and produces a more geologically coherent representation of the gypsum–dolomite–shale succession. The model also delineates several thin sublayers supported by synchronous multiparameter anomalies. Independently, epsilon-SVR reconstruction of U, Th, and K logs achieved R² values of 0.979–0.998 and restored continuous element-specific radioactivity information across the interval lacking spectral gamma-ray measurements. Together, these results establish a high-resolution lithological framework for characterizing reservoir–seal architecture and screening dolomite-dominant intervals beneath effective evaporite seals as potential exploration targets. The workflow is designed for single-well geological refinement rather than universal model benchmarking; final evaluation of reservoir quality requires integration with porosity, fracture, core, image-log, pressure, and production-test data. Full article

Transforming traditional membrane bioreactors (MBRs) into forward osmosis membrane bioreactors (OMBRs) is a highly challenging yet promising technological upgrade. Although both combine biological treatment and membrane separation, their core driving forces and operating mechanisms are completely different (an MBR is pressure-driven, while an OMBR is osmosis-driven). In this paper, a novel OMBR with an integrated fixed biofilm (BF-OMBR) was tested for the treatment of synthetic rural wastewater using fertilizer potassium chloride (KCl) as the draw solution (DS) and a commercial aquaporin Inside^TM forward osmosis (FO) membrane. A bench-scale investigation was conducted to compare the BF-OMBR with traditional OMBRs and MBRs. The experimental data suggested that the reactor with aquaporin membranes contributed to a higher water flux than traditional TFC membranes, while immobilized biofilms improved the total nitrogen removal rate compared to normal OMBRs. The integration of these two technologies in the BF-OMBR system appears to leverage these individual benefits. Its TOC and ammonia nitrogen removal efficiencies were also better than those of the other two bioreactors. Meanwhile, the BF-OMBR successfully controlled the salinity build-up to a level not exceeding 2.5 mS/cm over 90 days of operation. This novel osmotic bioreactor may represent a possible alternative approach to overcoming the challenges of low-temperature and low-C/N-ratio rural sewage treatment. Full article

This paper synthesises the available evidence on the evolution of statutory minimum and average wages across European Union Member States over the period 2019–2024. It examines patterns of wage convergence and wage adequacy, the implementation of Directive (EU) 2022/2041 on adequate minimum wages, and their implications for broader labour market developments. The core period of analysis is 2019–2024. Earlier years are used only as historical or institutional background, while selected 2025 references are used for contextual policy updates and not as part of the main comparative period. The analysis draws upon peer-reviewed academic literature alongside official institutional and statistical data from Eurofound, Eurostat, the European Commission, the OECD, the ECB, and national authorities. The central research question asks whether recent increases in statutory minimum wages and average wages have contributed to upward wage convergence and wage adequacy across EU Member States, and under which institutional and macroeconomic conditions these developments have affected inequality, employment, inflationary pressures, and competitiveness. Its theoretical framework is grounded in the concepts of wage spillover and wage compression effects, the wage–price spiral debate, and institutional approaches to collective bargaining and wage setting. Evidence indicates substantial nominal increases in statutory minimum wages in most EU countries, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, where upward wage convergence has reduced the gap with Western European countries. Despite concerns about inflationary pressures, the evidence does not support the existence of a generalised wage–price spiral. Instead, wage increases largely represent compensatory responses to externally driven inflation, producing moderate spillover effects on neighbouring wage levels and contributing to a partial compression of wage inequality at the lower end of the wage distribution. The study also identifies continuing challenges, including youth unemployment, precarious forms of employment, regional wage disparities and uneven collective bargaining coverage. It concludes that sustainable and adequate wage floors are best supported by transparent adjustment criteria, productivity growth, effective labour inspection, investment in skills and training, and inclusive collective bargaining institutions. Full article

Addressing the issue of ecological vulnerability and against the backdrop of urban expansion in arid regions, this study constructs a composite urban resilience capacity index (CURCI) for the urban agglomeration on the northern slopes of the Tianshan Mountains and examines its space-time evolution together with the relative contribution of key indicators. The evaluation system was constructed from economic, social, ecological, and infrastructure dimensions. The CRITIC-entropy combined weighting method, TFPW-MK method, standard deviation ellipse, and XGBoost-SHAP model were used to analyze urban resilience capacity from 2005 to 2022. Results show that, temporally, CURCI showed a sustained overall increase. Urumqi City and Karamay City grew relatively fast as dual core cities, while peripheral and county-level cities improved gradually. Spatially, resilience was higher in the north and west and lower in the south and east. High-value areas expanded, low-value areas gradually disappeared, and the resilience centroid point remained near the boundary between Urumqi City and Changji City, with a northwest–southeast orientation. In terms of factor contributions, economic factors contributed most, followed by social and ecological factors. Based on contribution differences, cities were classified into industrial-advantage, ecological-advantage, natural-constraint, and population-pressure types. These findings provide a reference for resilience assessment and differentiated governance in arid-region urban agglomerations. Full article

With the widespread adoption of the Internet of Things and wearable technology, flexible tactile sensors—serving as core components for detecting external mechanical signals—have become a key supporting technology across numerous fields. Piezoresistive flexible tactile sensors offer advantages such as simple structure, high sensitivity, and ease of integration. Paper-based sensing materials sensitized with nanomaterials are simple to prepare and low-cost, making them suitable candidates for tactile sensor fabrication. However, paper-based tactile sensors typically cannot simultaneously achieve a wide detection range and high sensitivity. This paper presents an engineered microstructure-sensitized flexible tactile sensor based on toilet paper/silver nanowires (AgNWs). This study integrates the structural advantages of engineered polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microstructures with the synergistic effects of toilet paper/silver nanowires (AgNWs) to construct a high-performance flexible sensing system. The device exhibits a wide pressure detection range (6.85–273.96 kPa), high sensitivity (39,570 kPa⁻¹), response and recovery times on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, and stable operation over approximately 10,000 cycles. This sensor demonstrates promising application potential in wearable biosensing, health monitoring, and related fields. Full article

This study addresses the limitations of traditional chemical flooding in low-permeability reservoirs by developing a nanofluid–surfactant binary flooding system (Has5/iNanoW1.0 binary flooding system) and investigating its microscopic mechanisms and enhanced oil recovery performance. The size of the nanofluid–surfactant binary flooding system reduces from 250 nm to 72 nm compared with pure surfactant; therefore it can enhance the ability to inject smaller pores. Core adsorption tests reveal that the addition of nanofluid can decrease surfactant adsorption by over 30%. The nanoscale synergistic effect of nanofluid (iNanoW1.0) and surfactant (Has5) and lower adsorption of surfactant allows more surfactant (Has5) to enter smaller pores for oil washing, significantly increasing oil recovery performance. Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance displacement experiments show that the binary system can significantly expand microscopic sweep efficiency (up to 14.9%) compared to pure surfactant or nanofluid flooding. Core flooding tests confirm that the binary system exhibits lower injection pressure (0.377 MPa), achieving 13.12% incremental oil recovery during post-water flooding, which is significantly better than the pure surfactant system (5.11%). The results demonstrate strong laboratory-scale potential and permit further pilot-scale evaluation. Full article

This study examines the structural drivers of carbon emission changes across 30 Chinese sectors from 2002 to 2023, employing a nested input–output structural decomposition analysis model grounded in both producer and consumer principles. We further construct a carbon inequality-adjusted network decoupling index to eliminate the systematic carbon transfer bias inherent to the conventional Tapio decoupling indicator. The core empirical findings are as follows: declining carbon intensity has served as the primary driver of emission reductions over the past two decades; however, its effect has been persistently offset by economic expansion. Upstream sectors, such as electricity generation, transfer substantial emissions downstream through sectoral chains, leading to a systematic overestimation of their decoupling performance, whereas the emission reductions in downstream manufacturing sectors are underestimated owing to embodied carbon imports. Inter-industry carbon inequality underwent a structural transformation following the launch of supply-side structural reforms in 2015, which substantially narrowed the arbitrage space for cross-sector carbon shifting. Cluster analysis further reveals that most industries continue to face considerable emission growth pressure. This study offers novel analytical perspectives and empirical evidence for designing carbon allowance allocation and differentiated emission reduction pathways that reconcile economic growth with environmental sustainability. This study offers a new analytical perspective and empirical evidence. It focuses on differentiated emission pathways and allowance allocations. The goal is to balance growth and sustainability. The findings also highlight a key point. Carbon markets must correct for sectoral chain carbon transfers. This study focuses on carbon emissions from 30 broadly defined sectors covering agriculture, mining, manufacturing, energy production and supply, construction, transportation, and commercial services. The accounting scope does not include direct fuel combustion emissions from residential consumption. Full article

Improving the flood adaptability of urban waterfront spaces is an essential entry point for enhancing regional stormwater regulation capacity, scientifically preventing flood disasters, and stabilizing urban water security. Existing flood adaptability assessments mostly rely on single weighting methods and individual evaluation models, inevitably causing systematic bias and low result robustness. Against this limitation, this study integrates remote sensing intelligent interpretation, spatiotemporal landscape pattern analysis, and multi-criteria decision theory to construct a comprehensive flood adaptability evaluation system under the pressure–state–response (PSR) framework. Innovatively, a game-theoretic combined weighting scheme integrating the entropy weight method, CRITIC method, and standard deviation method is proposed, and three complementary models including TOPSIS, VIKOR, and EDAS are coupled for cross-verification evaluation, which effectively improves the objectivity and robustness of spatial flood adaptability quantification. Taking Anqing City as a typical case, this study adopts Sentinel-2 time-series remote sensing images from 2016 to 2023 and applies an optimized random forest algorithm to automatically classify land cover. Five underlying surface types, including water bodies, vegetation, farmland, built-up areas, and bare land, are accurately extracted with an overall classification accuracy of around 90% for most years. Core landscape metrics such as Shannon’s diversity index and patch density are selected to systematically analyze the spatiotemporal differentiation characteristics of waterfront landscape patterns during the study period. The results indicate the obvious spatial heterogeneity of flood adaptability in Anqing City. Yingjiang District and Yuexi County present high comprehensive flood adaptability, while Wangjiang County and Huaining County show relatively low performance. Urban areas gain strong flood resistance from complete disaster prevention infrastructures and economic resilience; mountainous areas possess natural advantages in flood retention and drainage due to high vegetation coverage and topographic relief; by contrast, plain districts are severely restricted by low-lying terrain and insufficient drainage systems, resulting in prominent flood vulnerability. The proposed method is helpful for providing reliable scientific support for waterfront landscape optimization, zoned flood disaster management, and resilient water space planning in riverine cities. Full article

The construction industry is inherently high-risk, with workers’ unsafe behaviors directly causing most safety incidents. As smart technologies are widely deployed on construction sites, new forms of risk-taking behavior have emerged, but their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Grounded in Human–Technology–Organization (HTO) theory, this study establishes a multi-factor coupling analytical framework and employs a mixed NCA–fsQCA method to empirically analyze data from 312 workers across two smart construction sites in Beijing. The results show that no single antecedent variable acts as a necessary condition for either type of high-risk-taking behavior, though each variable exerts distinct bottleneck constraints. Five configurations driving high-risk behaviors are identified: smart technology adaptability serves as the core condition for automation trust bias behaviors, while individual risk-taking propensity and task situational pressure are universal core factors for both behavior types. These findings uncover the multi-dimensional coupling logic of risk-taking behaviors and offer theoretical and practical insights for targeted safety management in smart construction contexts. Full article