Search Results (3,842)

The development of simulated-solar-light photocatalysts for methyl orange (MO) removal is limited by insufficient light utilization, rapid photogenerated charge recombination, and restricted interfacial reaction sites. Here, vertically aligned ZnO nanorods on a conductive nanoporous Cu (NPCu) scaffold were modified with low-abundance RE-containing surface species (RE = Ce, Sm, Er, Tm, and Yb). The notation RE(OH)₃@ZnO/NPCu is retained solely as an operational sample identifier and does not constitute a crystallographic or stoichiometric phase assignment. XRD resolves the ZnO/NPCu framework, EDS confirms the local presence of RE, and XPS identifies RE-dependent oxidation state and surface oxygen environments; collectively, these measurements do not uniquely establish RE(OH)₃ or distinguish hydroxide from oxide, oxyhydroxide, and other hydroxylated/adsorbed surface configurations. The distinguishing feature is a controlled five-RE comparison on one common ZnO/NPCu architecture, together with separate evaluation of NPCu under H₂O₂-free and H₂O₂-assisted conditions. Across three independent H₂O₂-free runs, the Er-modified sample achieved 96.61 ± 0.30% MO degradation within 9 min with k_obs = 0.3930 ± 0.0071 min⁻¹. Dosage screening identified 20 μL of 40 wt% H₂O₂ in 20 mL MO solution (approximately 13.5 mM) as a practical plateau dosage. Photolysis, dark, NPCu/H₂O₂, and catalyst-removal controls support an additional solid-catalyst-dependent Cu-associated peroxide contribution while not excluding trace homogeneous reactions. Three independent cycling experiments and post-cycle SEM/XRD/EDS support operational durability, although quantitative metal leaching was not measured. Tauc, Mott–Schottky, EIS, temperature-dependent kinetic, and scavenger results are interpreted as comparative descriptors or indirect evidence rather than direct proof of intrinsic band gaps, atom-specific carrier densities, or a unique microscopic mechanism. The AI-assisted component is restricted to exploratory contextualization because reference-grouped validation shows poor out-of-reference generalization. The conclusions are confined to the tested MO system. Full article

Coal gasification generates fine slag with high residual carbon, but its porous structure hinders efficient separation. This study investigates carbon–ash separation of gasification fine slag using a spiral chute. Particle size and pore structure jointly determine separation outcomes. Effective separation was achieved for +0.125 mm and 0.125–0.045 mm fractions, which exhibit developed porous carbon skeletons, yielding concentrate ash of 20.22% and 39.50%, respectively. Conversely, the −0.045 mm fraction (41.16% of feed) consists predominantly of mineral microspheres with poorly developed pores, leading to high feed ash (80.73%) and poor separation (concentrate ash 76.35%). Pore structure governs separation by reducing effective density through water absorption: high-porosity particles behave as light products and report to concentrate. Optimal conditions (10% concentration, 1.96 m³/h) achieved 64.67% carbon recovery and 52.92% concentrate ash. A Bagnold-based model reveals that radial particle position is co-determined by effective density and particle size, with fine particle entrainment limiting separation precision. Full article

Text-based person search (TPS) suffers from cross-modal informational skewness: pedestrian images are high-dimensional and redundancy-prone, while textual descriptions are sparse, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate. To address the low alignment accuracy and poor robustness caused by the inherent uneven information distribution of visual and textual modalities in TPS, this paper proposes a unified Partition-based Information Rebalancing (PaIR) framework to realize balanced optimization and precise alignment of cross-modal information from both global content and local part dimensions. The framework adopts the CLIP dual-modal encoder for basic feature extraction and constructs a parallel global–local dual representation system to compensate for the lack of fine-grained spatial information in single global features. To eliminate modal redundancy and noise interference, a dual-modal noise suppression module is designed to filter invalid redundant information through visual foreground–background separation and textual token weight screening, while introducing adversarial constraints and orthogonal constraints to purify effective features. On this basis, a part balance alignment module is built to complete human semantic part decomposition and soft matching alignment for dual-modal features. Aiming at the common part semantic missing problem in textual descriptions, a visual part correlation affinity matrix is utilized for semantic associative completion to balance the information density of dual modalities. Finally, a global–local joint alignment strategy integrates hierarchical features and bidirectional cross-modal attention interaction to eliminate global–local semantic discontinuity and enhance fine-grained cross-modal matching capability. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that PaIR consistently improves multiple baselines. Full article

Fine-scale identification of Spartina alterniflora (S. alterniflora) is essential for coastal wetland conservation. However, in tidal-flat environments, lodged S. alterniflora often occurs together with upright S. alterniflora and native vegetation. The two-dimensional spectral features of S. alterniflora are easily affected by senescence, canopy posture, tidal stage and mixed pixels, leading to unstable classification. The integration of UAV multispectral imagery and LiDAR data can effectively address this problem. The study focused on Shangsha Island within Jiuduansha Wetland in the Yangtze Estuary and constructed multidimensional spectral–structural features by integrating the two data sources. The separability of upright S. alterniflora, lodged S. alterniflora, Phragmites australis (P. australis) and Scirpus mariqueter (S. mariqueter) was characterized using point-cloud elevation distributions, vertical organization and canopy density. The results showed that P. australis had a multilayered point-cloud structure with broad vertical extent, S. mariqueter showed a compact and sparse structure, and S. alterniflora was characterized by a continuous and dense single-layer point-cloud structure. Lodged S. alterniflora further showed a more concentrated, single-layered point-cloud structure and stronger grass-layer continuity. Multisource classification achieved an overall accuracy of 98.15% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.97. In the lodging-area comparison experiment, point-cloud fusion increased overall accuracy from 95.18% to 97.99% and Kappa from 0.89 to 0.95, improving boundary continuity and discrimination stability. Experimental results demonstrate that the fusion of UAV multispectral imagery and LiDAR data can improve the identification of lodged S. alterniflora in complex tidal-flat environments. Accurate identification and spatial delineation of S. alterniflora can help reduce field-survey effort and associated costs while supporting more targeted and efficient removal operations. Full article

Medium-resolution building-footprint mapping is limited by two coupled problems: 10 m optical pixels mix roofs with roads and bare surfaces, and SAR observations are degraded by speckle and viewing geometry. We present ACBDT, a Sentinel-1/2 framework that encodes each modality separately, learns a diffusion-inspired time-step-conditioned fused teacher representation, transforms it through a Cross-Modal Distillation Bridge (CMDB), and refines the output with a Student Refinement Decoder. The time-step variable is used only as a stochastic conditioning index; ACBDT does not implement a forward noising schedule, reverse diffusion, or iterative diffusion sampling. Training and evaluation used 2680 paired 256 × 256 patches over eight Yangtze River Delta cities with a spatially disjoint block partition. In three independent runs on the held-out test partition, ACBDT achieved 85.61 ± 0.32% building IoU, 92.24 ± 0.19% F1, and 83.74 ± 0.34% dataset-level boundary F1, compared with 83.21 ± 0.24% IoU for the strongest baseline, FTransUNet. Repeated-seed ablation showed 79.01 ± 0.42% IoU without CMDB and 84.53 ± 0.20% IoU without time-step conditioning. The separate density diagnostic retained a positive full-minus-optical IoU difference across all five building-density strata. Conclusions are limited to this Yangtze River Delta evaluation; city-held-out and cross-season transfer were not tested. Full article

As urban renewal shifts from expansion-led development toward quality improvement of existing urban areas, the restorative quality of urban village public spaces has become an important concern in high-density human settlements. Existing restorative environment research has focused mainly on parks, green spaces, waterfronts, and other settings with strong natural attributes, while audio–visual studies have often examined environmental perception, restorative appraisal, or physiological response as separate analytical components. Limited evidence therefore exists on how scene-level visual and acoustic characteristics, subjective sensory appraisal, perceived restoration, and short-term physiological responses are related within the same analytical framework in high-density urban village public spaces. This study investigated six selected public spaces in Shenzhen urban villages using a VR-based repeated-measures experiment involving 33 participants and 198 participant–scene observations, together with computer vision indicators, psychoacoustic analysis, subjective evaluation, EDA and HRV monitoring, linear mixed-effects models, and multilevel models of statistical indirect associations. Green view index (B = 0.322, p < 0.001) and color complexity (B = 0.422, p < 0.001) were positively associated with perceived restoration, whereas building enclosure (B = −0.271, p < 0.001) and sound roughness (B = −0.328, p < 0.001) were negatively associated with perceived restoration. Green view index showed a positive indirect association with perceived restoration through visual perception (ab = 0.386, 95% CI [0.304, 0.484]), whereas roughness showed a negative indirect association through soundscape perception (ab = −0.277, 95% CI [−0.385, −0.176]). In the full six-scene models, negative objective interaction estimates were compatible with acoustic constraints on favorable visual associations, but several interaction coefficients were sensitive to scene omission and should be regarded as exploratory; at the subjective level, soundscape perception and visual perception showed a positive interaction (B = 0.095, p = 0.028). Leave-one-scene-out analysis showed that several scene-level main-effect and objective interaction estimates were sensitive to the omission of S5 or S2, whereas the directions of the green-view-index and roughness indirect associations were retained. Perceived restoration was positively correlated with the reversed EDA recovery score (r = 0.416, p < 0.001), whereas HRV showed a negative association with LAeq (B = −0.150, p = 0.008), suggesting different short-term response patterns across subjective and physiological measures. The findings suggest that restorative responses in the examined urban village scenes were associated with both subjective sensory appraisal and audio–visual interactions. The study contributes by integrating scene-level visual and acoustic characteristics, subjective sensory appraisal, perceived restoration, and short-term physiological responses within a high-density urban village context. For renewal practice, the results support the coordinated consideration of adverse sound sources, visible greenness, and visual order; however, the observed relationships should be interpreted as context-specific associations rather than as universal causal mechanisms or validated design thresholds. Full article

Coupling-coordination degree (CCD) indices are often interpreted as evidence that urban systems are developing in a mutually supportive manner. The standard formula, however, combines similarity between subsystem scores with their average level. This article evaluates those two components against the following external outcome: municipal environmental services. A city panel for China in 2002–2024 combines broadband and mobile adoption, urban road provision, licensed internet data-center records, and seven indicators of water, gas, drainage, sewage, waste, and urban greening. The preferred sample contains 6094 observations for 275 cities in 28 provinces. We estimate city fixed-effect models with province-by-year fixed effects and report province-clustered, two-way-clustered, and 9999-repetition wild-cluster-bootstrap inference. In the baseline rank-based construction, a one-standard-deviation increase in relative digital-transport alignment is associated with a 0.046-standard-deviation increase in the environmental-service index (wild-bootstrap p = 0.042), whereas the portfolio-level coefficient is 0.191 (p < 0.001). The alignment estimate is concentrated in water and gas access and is not robust to complete-component outcomes, PCA or entropy weighting, logarithmic standardization, road density, or lags beyond one year. Portfolio level remains positive across these tests, although lead and reverse-direction estimates preclude causal interpretation. The findings show why infrastructure scale, relative configuration, and realized service outcomes should be monitored separately. For SDGs 9 and 11, city governments should target documented service bottlenecks and operating capacity rather than maximize a composite coordination score. Full article

Size-dependent efficiency degradation remains a major challenge for deeply scaled GaN-based micro-light-emitting diodes (micro-LEDs) because etched sidewalls increasingly influence carrier recombination. Here, square micro-LEDs with lateral dimensions of 5–50 μm were fabricated from the same plasma-assisted molecular-beam-epitaxy-grown wafer containing a five-period InGaN quantum-well/1 nm Al_0.1Ga_0.9N interlayer/InGaN quantum-dot-like (QW–QD) composite active region. Contrary to the conventional size effect, the light output power density and external quantum efficiency (EQE) increased as the mesa size decreased. The peak EQEs were 3.66%, 4.53%, 5.63%, 7.04%, and 7.27% for the 50, 40, 30, 10, and 5 μm devices, respectively, corresponding to an approximately 98.6% increase from 50 to 5 μm. The favorable scaling is consistent with localization-mediated suppression of lateral carrier loss combined with size-dependent light extraction. The present measurements do not quantitatively separate injection, internal efficiency, and extraction contributions. These results demonstrate the potential of ultrathin-interlayer QW–QD active-region engineering for scaled GaN micro-LEDs. Full article

To address cathode passivation, performance deterioration, and toxic stress during the removal of hexavalent chromium [Cr(VI)] in biocathode microbial fuel cells (MFCs), this study constructed nanomaterial-hybridized biocathodes to improve electricity generation and Cr(VI) removal in MFCs. Reduced graphene oxide (rGO), nano-iron sulfide (nano-FeS), and rGO/nano-FeS were separately hybridized with biocathodes to systematically investigate the effects of different hybridized biocathodes on the performance of MFCs for Cr(VI)-containing wastewater treatment. The results showed that the FeS group exhibited the best Cr(VI) removal capability, with a maximum removal kinetic constant of 0.184 h⁻¹, which was 3.60 times that of the Control group, and showed the smallest performance decline after three consecutive cycles. Mechanistic analysis indicated that nano-FeS promoted the transformation of Cr(VI) into Cr(III) and Cr(0) through its strong adsorption and reducing capacities; it also enhanced biofilm cell activity and the protein/polysaccharide ratio in extracellular polymeric substances; furthermore, it shaped a multi-taxon-dominated microbial community capable of Cr(VI) tolerance and reduction and enhanced the associated metabolic functions, thereby improving resistance to Cr(VI) stress and effectively alleviating cathode passivation. In contrast, rGO tended to enhance biocathode conductivity and electricity generation in MFCs, with the rGO + FeS group achieving the highest power density output of 51.54 ± 3.62 mW/m², which was 1.22 times that of the Control group, as well as the smallest decline in power density after three consecutive cycles. Overall, nanomaterial hybridization reshaped interfacial electron transfer and microbial stress resistance in biocathodes, enabling efficient Cr(VI) removal and stable electricity generation, and providing a new strategy to construct long-term stable bioelectrochemical systems for heavy metal-containing wastewater treatment. Full article

Ceramic balls are utilized as grinding media for regrinding of titanomagnetite rougher, owing to its low liberation degree and intricate intergrowth with gangue minerals. Process mineralogy, regrinding experiments and EDEM simulations were adopted to investigate the influencing mechanism of ceramic balls on the regrinding performance of titanomagnetite rougher. The Dv(90) of titanomagnetite rougher is 198.19 μm, and the titanomagnetite is closely intergrown with gangue minerals, including chlorite, serpentine and ilmenite, in the forms of inclusions, interlocks and solid solutions with a liberation degree of 75.54%. The Dv(90) reduces to 39.86 μm, and the liberation degree of titanomagnetite increases to 92.86% after regrinding with ceramic balls. The grade was improved from 53.01% to 58.83% with a recovery of 96.19% after magnetic separation. EDEM simulation results reveal that raising stirrer speed elevated collision energy, increasing pulp density enhanced viscous coupling and particle capture, and improving media filling ratio boosted collision frequency. These findings demonstrate that ceramic balls could effectively refine product size, facilitate mineral liberation and improve concentrate grade, offering a viable pathway toward efficient utilization of titanomagnetite. Full article

The generation of aerosols with narrow droplet-size distributions remains a key challenge in liquid atomization technologies used in agricultural, chemical-processing, and environmental applications. This study presents an experimental investigation of spray characteristics produced by an inertial rotary atomizer equipped with an internal hydrodynamic flow-conditioning system. The experiments were conducted using a Box–Behnken experimental design and Response Surface Methodology (RSM). Fifteen experimental runs, including three center-point replicates, were performed to evaluate the combined effects of the operating parameters. Liquid flow rate, rotor rotational speed, and spraying height were selected as independent variables. The response variables included the characteristic droplet diameters (d₁₀, d₅₀ and d₉₀), the Span coefficient, and droplet deposition density (N). Quadratic regression models were fitted to the experimental data to explore the influence of the operating parameters on spray characteristics; however, statistical diagnostics indicated limited predictive capability, and the models were therefore used primarily for exploratory interpretation of response trends within the investigated design space. The experimental results indicated that rotor speed exhibited the strongest tendency to influence droplet-size characteristics within the investigated operating range, while increasing liquid flow rate was associated with larger droplet diameters, consistent with the expected effect of increased liquid-film thickness. Within the investigated atomizer configuration, relatively narrow droplet-size distributions were experimentally observed under selected operating conditions. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that internal hydrodynamic flow conditioning may contribute to liquid-film destabilization and subsequent breakup. However, its independent contribution cannot be isolated from the present experiments because an otherwise identical baseline atomizer without the flow-conditioning element was not tested. Within the model-predicted favorable operating region (liquid flow rate of 1.0 × 10⁻⁶ m³·s⁻¹, rotor rotational speed of 4600–5100 min⁻¹, and spraying height of 30 cm), the fitted response-surface model predicted a volume median droplet diameter of approximately 64 μm. Separately, the minimum experimentally observed Span coefficient was approximately 0.58, indicating a relatively narrow deposited-droplet-size distribution within the investigated operating range. This model-predicted region was not independently verified by a dedicated confirmation experiment and therefore should not be interpreted as an experimentally validated optimum. The proposed physical interpretation considers hydrodynamic flow conditioning as a plausible additional mechanism contributing to spray uniformity, although its quantitative validation requires dedicated flow diagnostics and CFD analysis. The obtained results characterize the spray behavior of the developed atomizer within the investigated operating domain and provide an experimental basis for future comparative studies aimed at quantifying the independent contribution of the internal flow-conditioning system. These findings provide experimental evidence supporting further investigation of this concept and may contribute to the development of rotary atomizers for precision agricultural spraying and other engineering applications requiring controlled droplet-size distributions. Full article

Photosystem II (PSII) contains several cofactors involved in light harvesting, charge separation, electron transfer, and catalysis. The initial charge separation in the reaction center of PSII creates the strongest known redox-cofactor oxidant in biology, a cationic radical distributed over a “special pair” of chlorophyll molecules (P680^•+). Two redox-active tyrosines, Y_Z and Y_D, located at opposite sides of the special pair, are the principal residues that reduce this cationic radical. Y_Z, in turn, oxidizes the manganese cluster of the oxygen-evolving complex to drive water oxidation, whereas Y_D forms a stable radical facilitated by local water translocation. The details of this asymmetry and the role of nearby protein residues in mediating branch-specific electron/hole-transfer pathways remain incompletely understood. Here, we investigate pathways for electron transfer (ET) from Y_Z and Y_D to P680^•+ and identify specific residues that are likely responsible for mediating ET. Graph-based analysis predicts aromatic residue-assisted pathways on both branches but also reveals a distinct tryptophan (D2-Trp191) that connects Y_D with P680^•+, whereas the corresponding D1-side position is occupied by a non-aromatic D2-Ile192. This suggests a possible role of this tryptophan as an ET mediator, thereby differentiating the nature of electronic connectivity between Y_Z/Y_D and the reaction center. Residue conservation analysis indicates retention of D2-Trp191 across various organisms. Molecular dynamics show that the predicted donor–mediator and mediator–acceptor contacts remain structurally persistent over the simulation, while QM/MM calculations show appreciable spin-density localization capacity, providing strong computational support for an ET mediator role of D2-Trp191. Together, these results suggest that ET between the redox-active tyrosines and the reaction-center chlorophylls occurs via distinct mechanisms—direct vs. mediated—with D2-Trp191 being a D2-specific mediator for the branch-selective electron/hole-transfer connectivity in PSII. Full article

Bottom-up ship emission inventories derived from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data are normally reported on kilometre-scale grids, which merge port waters that perform very different functions. Working with an AIS-based STEAM inventory for the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), we ask a question that gridded inventories rarely separate: are the cells where ships accumulate time the same cells where they emit? To answer it, we define the Static–Dynamic Ratio (SDR), the ratio of hotelling (auxiliary-engine) to propulsion (main-engine) emissions within a cell, and use it to classify YRD waters without recourse to external port charts. Hotelling-dominated cells occupy 17.7% of the sea area and accumulate 59.3% of all ship-hours, a ship-hour density seven times that of transit-dominated fairways, yet they carry only 22.4% of NO_x. A vessel at anchor emits about one-eighth as much NO_x per hour as one under way, and the two effects nearly cancel. The cancellation is species dependent: low-load correction factors are steeper for sulfur and particulate species than for NO_x, so hotelling zones reach relative SO₂ and PM_2.5 densities of 1.21 and 1.09 against 0.89 for NO_x. Coarsening the same activity field from 100 m to 1 km drops the share held by the busiest 1% of cells from 70% to 50%, showing how kilometre grids manufacture apparent continuity along shipping lanes. Activity hotspots are therefore not emission hotspots, and anchorage-targeted measures such as shore power are best justified by particulate and sulfur exposure near populated coasts rather than by their share of the regional NO_x burden. Full article

Existing LiDAR super-resolution methods primarily aim to increase point cloud density or improve coordinate reconstruction accuracy. However, they tend to introduce blurred edges and distorted planar surfaces during reconstruction, making it difficult to preserve the consistency of local scene geometry. To address this issue, this paper proposes a structural consistency-aware LiDAR super-resolution method that aims to preserve the local geometric relationships of the reconstructed point cloud with respect to the ground-truth point cloud in edge and planar regions. Specifically, complementary observations from adjacent frames are first fused using multi-scale dilated convolutions. An anisotropic Swin Transformer and a Coordinate-Aware Structure Enhancement (CASE) module are then employed to accommodate the horizontally dense and vertically sparse sampling pattern of LiDAR, strengthen long-range geometric modeling, and reduce the loss of critical structural information. During training, a local curvature-based structural consistency loss is designed to separately constrain edge sharpness and planar smoothness. During inference, prediction uncertainty and point cloud height are combined to adaptively remove low-confidence points, further improving the geometric reliability of the reconstructed point cloud. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed method achieves an MAE of 0.4916 and an IoU of 0.4633, outperforming the representative comparison methods on both metrics. When the reconstructed point clouds are applied to A-LOAM, the average RTE and RRE values are reduced by 34.6% and 31.2%, respectively. In addition, experiments on the self-collected CSU-SLAM dataset provide preliminary evidence of the applicability of the proposed method to indoor and outdoor scenes under a different LiDAR configuration. Full article

This study reports the synthesis and comprehensive characterization of a novel 5% cadmium-doped cerium oxide/reduced graphene oxide (5% Cd-CeO₂/rGO) nanocomposite for the enhanced visible-light-driven photocatalytic degradation of methyl orange (MO). The nanocomposite was prepared using a simple co-precipitation method followed by thermal reduction, which integrates the excellent electron-transport properties of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) with the oxygen-vacancy-rich characteristics of Cd-doped CeO₂, resulting in improved photocatalytic performance. The successful synthesis of the nanocomposite and the direct interaction between the rGO sheets and ultrafine CeO₂ nanoparticles were verified through structural and morphological analyses using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). XPS results indicated an increase in the Ce³⁺ concentration and oxygen vacancy density after Cd doping and rGO incorporation, both of which play a crucial role in enhancing photocatalytic activity. Under visible-light irradiation, the 5% Cd-CeO₂/rGO nanocomposite exhibited substantially higher photocatalytic activity and methyl orange (MO) degradation efficiency than pristine CeO₂ and reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The improved photocatalytic performance demonstrates the beneficial role of combining metal-ion doping with conductive carbon supports to facilitate charge separation and electron transport in semiconductor photocatalysts. The developed nanocomposite also shows promising potential for the design of next-generation semiconductor-based materials for photocatalytic, energy conversion, and optoelectronic applications. Full article