Seismic and Power Generation Performance of U-Shaped Steel Connected PV-Shear Wall under Lateral Cyclic Loading

BIPV is now widely used in office and residential buildings, but its seismic performance still remained vague especially when the photovoltaic (PV) modules are installed on high-rise building facades. A new form of reinforced concrete shear wall integrated with photovoltaic module is proposed in this paper, aiming to apply PV module to the facades of high-rise buildings. In this new form, the PV module is integrated with the reinforced concrete wall by U-shaped steel connectors through embedded steel plates. The lateral cyclic loading test is executed to investigate the seismic behavior and the electric and thermal performance with different drift angles. The seismic behavior, including failure pattern, lateral force-top displacement relationship, and deformation capacity, was investigated. The power generation and temperature variation on the back of the PV module and both sides of the shear wall were also tested. Two main results are demonstrated through the experiment: (1) the U-shaped steel connectors provide enough deformation capacity for the compatibility of the PV module to the shear wall during the whole cyclic test; (2) the electricity generation capacity is effective and stable during this seismic simulation test

Characteristics Analysis of High Mechanical Strength Gymnastic Leather and Its Producing Process Optimization

Content: With the development of China sports, researches related to sports leather should be paid attention because they usually required higher strength than commonly used leather. In this paper, we focus on the production of gymnastics leather. In gymnastics, the athlete's hand will have high intensity contact with the balance bar, so the gymnastics leather is required to have high intensity performance. At the same time, in order to comply with the ornamental function, gymnastics leather is required to be light color. In this research, glutaraldehyde was used as the main tanning agent, while acrylic polymer and synthetic were used for retanning, in order to obtain high strength, environmentally friendly white gym leather. The shrinkage temperature and mechanical properties of tanned leather were determined and analyzed to determine the suitable tanning agent. Besides, other properties including softness, gas permeability, water permeability, flexing resistance and yellowing-resistance were also measured for selecting proper production process. Therefore, gymnastics leather with ideal performance can be prepared by this method, and the leather conforms to the practical application standard. In addition, the research has guiding significance and application prospect for high strength chrome-free tanned leather. Take-Away: Aldehyde tanning agents and retanning agents, which can be used for gymnastics leather making, were evaluated and selected to achieve ideal effect of finish leather. This research is meaningful to produce not only gymnastics leather but also other sporty leather which require high strength

Characteristics Analysis of High Mechanical Strength Gymnastic Leather and Its Producing Process Optimization

Content: With the development of China sports, researches related to sports leather should be paid attention because they usually required higher strength than commonly used leather. In this paper, we focus on the production of gymnastics leather. In gymnastics, the athlete's hand will have high intensity contact with the balance bar, so the gymnastics leather is required to have high intensity performance. At the same time, in order to comply with the ornamental function, gymnastics leather is required to be light color. In this research, glutaraldehyde was used as the main tanning agent, while acrylic polymer and synthetic were used for retanning, in order to obtain high strength, environmentally friendly white gym leather. The shrinkage temperature and mechanical properties of tanned leather were determined and analyzed to determine the suitable tanning agent. Besides, other properties including softness, gas permeability, water permeability, flexing resistance and yellowing-resistance were also measured for selecting proper production process. Therefore, gymnastics leather with ideal performance can be prepared by this method, and the leather conforms to the practical application standard. In addition, the research has guiding significance and application prospect for high strength chrome-free tanned leather. Take-Away: Aldehyde tanning agents and retanning agents, which can be used for gymnastics leather making, were evaluated and selected to achieve ideal effect of finish leather. This research is meaningful to produce not only gymnastics leather but also other sporty leather which require high strength

EffLiFe: Efficient Light Field Generation via Hierarchical Sparse Gradient Descent

With the rise of Extended Reality (XR) technology, there is a growing need for real-time light field generation from sparse view inputs. Existing methods can be classified into offline techniques, which can generate high-quality novel views but at the cost of long inference/training time, and online methods, which either lack generalizability or produce unsatisfactory results. However, we have observed that the intrinsic sparse manifold of Multi-plane Images (MPI) enables a significant acceleration of light field generation while maintaining rendering quality. Based on this insight, we introduce EffLiFe, a novel light field optimization method, which leverages the proposed Hierarchical Sparse Gradient Descent (HSGD) to produce high-quality light fields from sparse view images in real time. Technically, the coarse MPI of a scene is first generated using a 3D CNN, and it is further sparsely optimized by focusing only on important MPI gradients in a few iterations. Nevertheless, relying solely on optimization can lead to artifacts at occlusion boundaries. Therefore, we propose an occlusion-aware iterative refinement module that removes visual artifacts in occluded regions by iteratively filtering the input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable visual quality while being 100x faster on average than state-of-the-art offline methods and delivering better performance (about 2 dB higher in PSNR) compared to other online approaches.Comment: Submitted to IEEE TPAM

OmniSeg3D: Omniversal 3D Segmentation via Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

Towards holistic understanding of 3D scenes, a general 3D segmentation method is needed that can segment diverse objects without restrictions on object quantity or categories, while also reflecting the inherent hierarchical structure. To achieve this, we propose OmniSeg3D, an omniversal segmentation method aims for segmenting anything in 3D all at once. The key insight is to lift multi-view inconsistent 2D segmentations into a consistent 3D feature field through a hierarchical contrastive learning framework, which is accomplished by two steps. Firstly, we design a novel hierarchical representation based on category-agnostic 2D segmentations to model the multi-level relationship among pixels. Secondly, image features rendered from the 3D feature field are clustered at different levels, which can be further drawn closer or pushed apart according to the hierarchical relationship between different levels. In tackling the challenges posed by inconsistent 2D segmentations, this framework yields a global consistent 3D feature field, which further enables hierarchical segmentation, multi-object selection, and global discretization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on high-quality 3D segmentation and accurate hierarchical structure understanding. A graphical user interface further facilitates flexible interaction for omniversal 3D segmentation

Identification of the osteoarthritis signature gene PDK1 by machine learning and its regulatory mechanisms on chondrocyte autophagy and apoptosis

BackgroundOsteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease frequently diagnosed in the elderly and middle-aged population. However, its specific pathogenesis has not been clarified. This study aimed to identify biomarkers for OA diagnosis and elucidate their potential mechanisms for restoring OA-dysregulated autophagy and inhibiting chondrocyte apoptosis in vitro.Material and methodsTwo publicly available transcriptomic mRNA OA-related datasets (GSE10575 and GSE51588) were explored for biomarker identification by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), and support vector machine recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE). We applied the GSE32317 and GSE55457 cohorts to validate the markers’ efficacy for diagnosis. The connections of markers to chondrocyte autophagy and apoptosis in OA were also comprehensively explored in vitro using molecular biology approaches, including qRT-PCR and Western blot.ResultsWe identified 286 differentially expressed genes (DEGs). These DEGs were enriched in the ECM-receptor interaction and PI3K/AKT signaling pathway. After external cohort validation and protein-protein interaction (PPI) network construction, PDK1 was finally identified as a diagnostic marker for OA. The pharmacological properties of BX795-downregulated PDK1 expression inhibited LPS-induced chondrocyte inflammation and apoptosis and rescued OA-dysregulated autophagy. Additionally, the phosphorylation of the mediators associated with the MAPK and PI3K/AKT pathways was significantly downregulated, indicating the regulatory function of PDK1 in apoptosis and autophagy via MAPK and PI3K/AKT-associated signaling pathways in chondrocytes. A significantly positive association between the PDK1 expression and Neutrophils, Eosinophils, Plasma cells, and activated CD4 memory T cells, as well as an evident negative correlation between T cells follicular helper and CD4 naive T cells, were detected in the immune cell infiltration analysis.ConclusionsPDK1 can be used as a diagnostic marker for OA. Inhibition of its expression can rescue OA-dysregulated autophagy and inhibit apoptosis by reducing the phosphorylation of PI3K/AKT and MAPK signaling pathways