A Study on Crowd Evacuation Model Considering Squeezing Equilibrium in Crowded Areas

A new crowd evacuation model is established to solve the stagnation problem of traditional social force models in a complex and dense scene. In the proposed model the acting forces between pedestrians, and between pedestrians and obstacles in the traditional social force model, are improved to find out the relationship in the two cases which are within the influence range and are not intersected, and those which are intersected and not greater than the maximum degree of squeezing, and to solve it for parameter optimization. The simulation platform built is used to compare the performance of the traditional social force model and the improved model, and to deeply analyze the relationship between the evacuation time and the degree of squeezing. The results show that as the evacuation time increases, the crowd in the emergency exit area is getting denser, the optimized model is distributed more evenly, and the probability of squeezing is lower. The optimized model has better stability in terms of the ability to control the intersection without exceeding the maximum degree of squeezing. Due to less squeezing, the optimized model can reduce the time of passing through the exit to a large extent. Therefore, the way to resolve the disorderly evacuation of pedestrians caused by excessive crowd density in the evacuation process is to solve optimization parameters

Enhanced electrocatalytic nitrate reduction to ammonia using plasma‐induced oxygen vacancies in CoTiO3 − x nanofiber

Abstract Electrochemical nitrate (NO3−) reduction is a green and economic route for ammonia (NH3) synthesis. However, this conversion suffers from low NH3 selectivity due to strong competition from other NO3− reduction pathways. Here, we report that a plasma‐induced defective CoTiO3 − x nanofiber with oxygen vacancies acts as an efficient electrocatalyst for NO3− reduction to NH3. In 0.1 M NaOH solution containing 0.1 M NO3−, it is capable of achieving a remarkable NH3 yield of 30.4 mg h–1 mgcat.–1 and a high Faradaic efficiency of 92.6%. The catalyst also shows strong electrochemical stability for a 20‐h electrolysis test. Additionally, a Zn‐NO3− battery using CoTiO3 − x as the cathode catalyst offers a peak power density of 5.04 mW cm−2 and a large NH3 yield of 3.08 mg h−1 mgcat.−1. The catalytic mechanism is further discussed by density functional theory calculations