Ultrathin Few-Layer GeP Nanosheets via Lithiation-Assisted Chemical Exfoliation and Their Application in Sodium Storage

2020 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim Ultrathin few-layer materials have attracted intensive research attention because of their distinctive and unique properties. Few-layer GeP (FL-GP) is potentially interesting for application in electronics and optoelectronics because of its appropriate band gap and good stability under ambient conditions. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to achieve ultrathin few-layer or single layer GeP from exfoliation of bulk crystals. Here, a lithiation-assisted chemical exfoliation technique is employed to achieve FL-GP, in which the interlayer spacing can be efficiently enlarged after a preliminary lithium ion intercalation, allowing the bulk crystal to be readily exfoliated in a following ultrasonication. As a result, ultrathin FL-GP is obtained. In a demonstration, the FL-GP/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) demonstrates remarkable sodium storage performance. The FL-GP with a two-dimensional structure shortens the ion transport pathways and alleviates the volume variation during sodiation. Meanwhile, the rGO in the composite improves the conductivity of the whole electrode. The as-prepared FL-GP/rGO electrode exhibits a high capacity of 504.2 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1, remarkable rate performance, and superior cycling stability in the half cells. FL-GP/rGO//Na3V2(PO4)3 full cells are also assembled and demonstrated satisfactory electrochemical performance, indicating potential application of the as-prepared anode materials

Prediction of the Reference Evapotranspiration Using a Chaotic Approach

Evapotranspiration is one of the most important hydrological variables in the context of water resources management. An attempt was made to understand and predict the dynamics of reference evapotranspiration from a nonlinear dynamical perspective in this study. The reference evapotranspiration data was calculated using the FAO Penman-Monteith equation with the observed daily meteorological data for the period 1966–2005 at four meteorological stations (i.e., Baotou, Zhangbei, Kaifeng, and Shaoguan) representing a wide range of climatic conditions of China. The correlation dimension method was employed to investigate the chaotic behavior of the reference evapotranspiration series. The existence of chaos in the reference evapotranspiration series at the four different locations was proved by the finite and low correlation dimension. A local approximation approach was employed to forecast the daily reference evapotranspiration series. Low root mean square error (RSME) and mean absolute error (MAE) (for all locations lower than 0.31 and 0.24, resp.), high correlation coefficient (CC), and modified coefficient of efficiency (for all locations larger than 0.97 and 0.8, resp.) indicate that the predicted reference evapotranspiration agrees well with the observed one. The encouraging results indicate the suitableness of chaotic approach for understanding and predicting the dynamics of the reference evapotranspiration

Twofold Structured Features-Based Siamese Network for Infrared Target Tracking

Nowadays, infrared target tracking has been a critical technology in the field of computer vision and has many applications, such as motion analysis, pedestrian surveillance, intelligent detection, and so forth. Unfortunately, due to the lack of color, texture and other detailed information, tracking drift often occurs when the tracker encounters infrared targets that vary in size or shape. To address this issue, we present a twofold structured features-based Siamese network for infrared target tracking. First of all, in order to improve the discriminative capacity for infrared targets, a novel feature fusion network is proposed to fuse both shallow spatial information and deep semantic information into the extracted features in a comprehensive manner. Then, a multi-template update module based on template update mechanism is designed to effectively deal with interferences from target appearance changes which are prone to cause early tracking failures. Finally, both qualitative and quantitative experiments are carried out on VOT-TIR 2016 dataset, which demonstrates that our method achieves the balance of promising tracking performance and real-time tracking speed against other out-of-the-art trackers.Comment: 13 pages,9 figures,references adde