Design of a Load Torque Based Control Strategy for Improving Electric Tractor Motor Energy Conversion Efficiency

In order to improve the electrical conversion efficiency of an electric tractor motor, a load torque based control strategy (LTCS) is designed in this paper by using a particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO). By mathematically modeling electric-mechanical performance and theoretical energy waste of the electric motor, as well as the transmission characteristics of the drivetrain, the objective function, control relationship, and analytical platform are established. Torque and rotation speed of the motor’s output shaft are defined as manipulated variables. LTCS searches the working points corresponding to the best energy conversion efficiency via PSO to control the running status of the electric motor and uses logic and fuzzy rules to fit the search initialization for load torque fluctuation. After using different plowing forces to imitate all the common tillage forces, the simulation of traction experiment is conducted, which proves that LTCS can make the tractor use electrical power efficiently and maintain agricultural applicability on farmland conditions. It provides a novel method of fabricating a more efficient electric motor used in the traction of an off-road vehicle

Integrated Sensing and Communication based Outdoor Multi-Target Detection, Tracking and Localization in Practical 5G Networks

The 6th generation (6G) wireless networks will likely to support a variety of capabilities beyond communication, such as sensing and localization, through the use of communication networks empowered by advanced technologies. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been recognized as a critical technology as well as an usage scenario for 6G, as widely agreed by leading global standardization bodies. ISAC utilizes communication infrastructure and devices to provide the capability of sensing the environment with high resolution, as well as tracking and localizing moving objects nearby. Meeting both the requirements for communication and sensing simultaneously, ISAC based approaches celebrate the advantages of higher spectral and energy efficiency compared to two separate systems to serve two purposes, and potentially lower costs and easy deployment. A key step towards the standardization and commercialization of ISAC is to carry out comprehensive field trials in practical networks, such as the 5th generation (5G) network, to demonstrate its true capacities in practical scenarios. In this paper, an ISAC based outdoor multi-target detection, tracking and localization approach is proposed and validated in 5G networks. The proposed system comprises of 5G base stations (BSs) which serve nearby mobile users normally, while accomplishing the task of detecting, tracking and localizing drones, vehicles and pedestrians simultaneously. Comprehensive trial results demonstrate the relatively high accuracy of the proposed method in practical outdoor environment when tracking and localizing single targets and multiple targets.Comment: Accepted by an open access journal (appearing on IEEEXplore soon

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS IN CONSTRUCTION SAFETY MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF CLIMATIC HEAT STRESS ON SITE

Although climatic heat stress can be fully brought under control and prevented from causing short-term or long-term damage to the human body in laboratory experiments, the expected effect of interventions are however often lost in the practice on construction site as frontline personnel are driven by conflicting institutional logics in their specific institutional environment. The paper presents a comparative study between Hong Kong and Mainland China in the case of climatic heat stress management on construction sites. Specifically, we look into how societal culture as institutional logics leads workers and managers to their pragmatic or normative behaviours that deviate from the expected outcome of safety management. Two competing institutional logics in construction safety management are identified and discussed, i.e., production logic and prevention logic. Comparative analysis of the Chinese samples under two different institutional environments identifies two distinct society-level cultural logics that shape personal strategies of reconciling safety and production goals, i.e., Confucianism logic and Chinese pragmatism logic. Their implications on construction safety management are further discussed

Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study

The flourishing blossom of deep learning has witnessed the rapid development of text recognition in recent years. However, the existing text recognition methods are mainly proposed for English texts. As another widely-spoken language, Chinese text recognition (CTR) in all ways has extensive application markets. Based on our observations, we attribute the scarce attention on CTR to the lack of reasonable dataset construction standards, unified evaluation protocols, and results of the existing baselines. To fill this gap, we manually collect CTR datasets from publicly available competitions, projects, and papers. According to application scenarios, we divide the collected datasets into four categories including scene, web, document, and handwriting datasets. Besides, we standardize the evaluation protocols in CTR. With unified evaluation protocols, we evaluate a series of representative text recognition methods on the collected datasets to provide baselines. The experimental results indicate that the performance of baselines on CTR datasets is not as good as that on English datasets due to the characteristics of Chinese texts that are quite different from the Latin alphabet. Moreover, we observe that by introducing radical-level supervision as an auxiliary task, the performance of baselines can be further boosted. The code and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/FudanVI/benchmarking-chinese-text-recognitionComment: Code is available at https://github.com/FudanVI/benchmarking-chinese-text-recognitio

Modification of the Predicted Heat Strain (PHS) model in predicting human thermal responses for Chinese workers in hot environments

The Predicted Heat Strain (PHS) model predicts physiological responses of European people to heat stress; while its performance for Chinese population remains underexplored. The study conducted a heat exposure experiment (temperature: 35 °C/38 °C/40 °C, relative humidity (RH): 25%/40%/60%) in a well-controlled climate chamber. 10 male Chinese workers were recruited to perform exercises on the treadmill at a speed of 0.5m/s for 120min, to simulate moderate metabolic rate. Rectal temperature(Tre), skin temperature(Tsk), sweat rate(SR) and heart rate(HR) were monitored continuously; the corresponding predicted values were obtained by the PHS model. The results showed that the measured Tre, Tsk, SR increased significantly with increased temperature and humidity. The PHS model overestimated the maximum allowable exposure time of subjects but underestimated the final Tre and Tsk. Bland–Altman analysis showed that the differences and 95%CI between the observed and predicted values increased with increasing temperature and RH and exposure time, indicating the significant prediction deviation of the PHS model. Through adjusting the initial Tre from 36.8 °C to 37 °C, the protection efficacy was improved from original 24.7% to 57.1% for the PHS model. The protection efficacies were further improved to 71.2% through adjusting the maximum HR based on ages, and to 68.2% through adopting the real-time HR to predict metabolic rates. The proposed three methods improve the heat strain prediction in the PHS model for Chinese workers and are more applicable in practical hot working place. This benefits to policy decisions and occupational safety protection for Chinese workers with heat exposure risks

Bacillus velezensis SYL-3 suppresses Alternaria alternata and tobacco mosaic virus infecting Nicotiana tabacum by regulating the phyllosphere microbial community

The occurrence of plant diseases is closely associated with the imbalance of plant tissue microecological environment. The regulation of the phyllosphere microbial communities has become a new and alternative approach to the biological control of foliar diseases. In this study, Bacillus velezensis SYL-3 isolated from Luzhou exhibited an effective inhibitory effect against Alternaria alternata and tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). The analysis of phyllosphere microbiome by PacBio sequencing indicated that SYL-3 treatment significantly altered fungal and bacterial communities on the leaves of Nicotiana tabacum plants and reduced the disease index caused by A. alternata and TMV. Specifically, the abundance of P. seudomo, Sphingomonas, Massilia, and Cladosporium in the SYL-3 treatment group increased by 19.00, 9.49, 3.34, and 12.29%, respectively, while the abundances of Pantoea, Enterobacter, Sampaiozyma, and Rachicladosporium were reduced. Moreover, the abundance of beneficial bacteria, such as Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas, was negatively correlated with the disease indexes of A. alternata and TMV. The PICRUSt data also predicted the composition of functional genes, with significant differences being apparent between SYL-3 and the control treatment group. Further functional analysis of the microbiome also showed that SYL-3 may induce host disease resistance by motivating host defense-related pathways. These results collectively indicate that SYL-3 may suppress disease progression caused by A. alternata or TMV by improving the microbial community composition on tobacco leaves

Prevalence and severity of anxiety and depression in Chinese patients with breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

ContextAnxiety/depression in breast cancer (BC) is common around the world, and Chinese BC patients should not be ignored. The prevalence of anxiety and depression among BC patients are various in different regions of China, but no clear summarization has been made.PurposeThis meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the prevalence and severity of anxiety and depression among breast cancer (BC) patients in China.MethodsA literature search on PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, CINAHL, Scopus, PsycINFO, Cochrane database library, CNKI, Wanfang, and SinoMed was conducted up to 29 December 2021. The effect size (ES) or standard mean difference (SMD) and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the prevalence and severity of anxiety/depression were calculated using the STATA 12.0 software.ResultsA total of 63 identified studies were included, containing a total of 53,513 Chinese women confirmed breast cancer. The results showed a high pooled prevalence of anxiety (38%, 95% CI, 27–50%, I2 = 99.4%, p < 0.001) and depression (38%, 95% CI, 33–44%, I2 = 99.2%, p < 0.001) among Chinese BC patients. Moreover, both anxiety (SMD = 0.30, 95% CI, 0.08–0.53, I2 = 91.6%, p < 0.001) and depression (SMD = 0.25, 95% CI, −0.05–0.55, I2 = 95.3%, p < 0.001) in BC patients were more serious than those in healthy controls, but not significantly different from patients with other diseases. Specifically, among the six regions included, the prevalence of anxiety and depression were both the highest in Northeast China, obviously superior than the second-highest region.ConclusionThe study showed high levels of anxiety and depression among BC patients in China, especially those in the northeast. Clinicians and researchers should pay attention to the psychological problems of patients with breast cancer and regard it as one of the important prognostic outcomes of patients.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/index.php, PROSPERO: CRD42020151752

Transcriptomic and functional analyses reveal the molecular mechanisms underlying Fe-mediated tobacco resistance to potato virus Y infection

Potato virus Y (PVY) mainly infects Solanaceous crops, resulting in considerable losses in the yield and quality. Iron (Fe) is involved in various biological processes in plants, but its roles in resistance to PVY infection has not been reported. In this study, foliar application of Fe could effectively inhibit early infection of PVY, and a full-length transcriptome and Illumina RNA sequencing was performed to investigate its modes of action in PVY-infected Nicotiana tabacum. The results showed that 18,074 alternative splicing variants, 3,654 fusion transcripts, 3,086 long non-coding RNAs and 14,403 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified. Specifically, Fe application down-regulated the expression levels of the DEGs related to phospholipid hydrolysis, phospholipid signal, cell wall biosynthesis, transcription factors (TFs) and photosystem I composition, while those involved with photosynthetic electron transport chain (PETC) were up-regulated at 1 day post inoculation (dpi). At 3 dpi, these DEGs related to photosystem II composition, PETC, molecular chaperones, protein degradation and some TFs were up-regulated, while those associated with light-harvesting, phospholipid hydrolysis, cell wall biosynthesis were down-regulated. At 9 dpi, Fe application had little effects on resistance to PVY infection and transcript profiles. Functional analysis of these potentially critical DEGs was thereafter performed using virus-induced gene silencing approaches and the results showed that NbCat-6A positively regulates PVY infection, while the reduced expressions of NbWRKY26, NbnsLTP, NbFAD3 and NbHSP90 significantly promote PVY infection in N. benthamiana. Our results elucidated the regulatory network of Fe-mediated resistance to PVY infection in plants, and the functional candidate genes also provide important theoretical bases to further improve host resistance against PVY infection