Tensile Bond Between Substrate Concrete and Normal Repairing Mortar under Freeze–Thaw Cycles

Concrete patch repair has long been used to repair the damaged concrete structures. In cold regions, freeze– thaw cycle is one of the major damage factors. Not only the material itself is damaged by freeze–thaw cycles, but also the adhesive interface, which is regarded as the weakest part of composite system, degrades under freeze–thaw cycles. Air entraining agent has long been used to increase the freeze–thaw resistance of concrete materials. However, the effect of air entraining agent on the adhesive interface under freeze–thaw cycles has not been explored. The degradation mechanism and failure mode of concrete repair system have not been studied, either. In this study, to investigate the effects of water–cement ratio of substrate concrete and air entraining agent in substrate concrete and repairing mortars, three kinds of substrate concrete were casted and repaired by two kinds of ordinary Portland cement mortar. With certain number of freeze–thaw cycles up to 150 cycles, through splitting prism test, the splitting tensile strength and failure mode of composite specimens were experimented. The relative dynamic elastic modulus and splitting tensile strength of substrate concretes and repairing mortars were obtained as well. Results showed that air entraining agent in the repairing mortar greatly influenced the adhesive tensile strength under freeze–thaw cycles. The water–cement ratio and air entraining agent of substrate concrete insignificantly affected the adhesive interface, but affected the splitting tensile strength and the freeze– thaw resistance of substrate concrete, and thus affected the failure mode of composite specimens

Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models

Language model (LM) distillation is a trending area that aims to distil the knowledge resided in a large teacher LM to a small student one. While various methods have been proposed to push the distillation to its limits, it is still a pain distilling LMs when a large capacity gap is exhibited between the teacher and the student LMs. The pain is mainly resulted by the curse of capacity gap, which describes that a larger teacher LM cannot always lead to a better student LM than one distilled from a smaller teacher LM due to the affect of capacity gap increment. That is, there is likely an optimal point yielding the best student LM along the scaling course of the teacher LM. Even worse, the curse of capacity gap can be only partly yet not fully lifted as indicated in previous studies. However, the tale is not ever one-sided. Although a larger teacher LM has better performance than a smaller teacher LM, it is much more resource-demanding especially in the context of recent large LMs (LLMs). Consequently, instead of sticking to lifting the curse, leaving the curse as is should be arguably fine. Even better, in this paper, we reveal that the optimal capacity gap is almost consistent across different student scales and architectures, fortunately turning the curse into the law of capacity gap. The law later guides us to distil a 3B student LM (termed MiniMA) from a 7B teacher LM (adapted LLaMA2-7B). MiniMA is demonstrated to yield a new compute-performance pareto frontier among existing 3B LMs on commonly used benchmarks, and its instruction-tuned version (termed MiniChat) outperforms a wide range of 3B competitors in GPT4 evaluation and could even compete with several 7B chat models.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, 12 tables, work in progress. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/GeneZC/MiniM

A Study of Collection-Based Features for Adapting the Balance Parameter in Pseudo Relevance Feedback.

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) is an effective technique to improve the ad-hoc retrieval performance. For PRF methods, how to optimize the balance parameter between the original query model and feedback model is an important but difficult problem. Traditionally, the balance parameter is often manually tested and set to a fixed value across collections and queries. However, due to the difference among collections and individual queries, this parameter should be tuned differently. Recent research has studied various query based and feedback documents based features to predict the optimal balance parameter for each query on a specific collection, through a learning approach based on logistic regression. In this paper, we hypothesize that characteristics of collections are also important for the prediction. We propose and systematically investigate a series of collection- based features for queries, feedback documents and candidate expansion terms. The experiments show that our method is competitive in improving retrieval performance and particularly for cross-collection prediction, in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches

Influence of Cutter Errors on Forming Accurate Variable Hyperbolic Circular Arc Tooth Trace Cylindrical Gears

The cutter error is an important factor in the accurate forming of the variable hyperbolic circular arc tooth trace (VH-CATT) cylindrical gears. Also, the study of the relationship between the cutter error and the forming of accurate teeth is beneficial for the gear modification design and the improvement in contact performance. Firstly, based on the principle of forming VH-CATT cylindrical gears, the sources of error in the tooth forming related to accuracy were analysed, including the errors in the cutter position and the cutter geometry, such as the error of rotation around the x-axis g, the error of rotation around the y-axis b, the error of translation along the x-axis Δx, the error of translation along the y-axis Δy, the error of translation along the z-axis Δz, the pressure angle error Δa and the tooth line radius error ΔRT. Next, based on the meshing theory and processing, an ideal tooth surface equation and a tooth surface equation with cutter errors were derived, and the tooth surface reconstruction was done. Then, the gear tooth thickness error was defined to characterize the accuracy of gear forming. Finally, the influences of the cutter error on the tooth thickness error and gear contact were investigated. The study shows that all cutter errors have certain influence on the tooth thickness error, contact area and load distribution; Δx has basically no effect on the gear tooth thickness error; Δx and g make the actual meshing point deviate from the middle section. The study content and the applied methods are helpful in the tooth surface error traceability, the counter-adjustment of the tooth surface processing and the modification design. This study provides also a basis for gear design and load-bearing contact analysis

An experimental study on the rotational accuracy of variable preload spindle-bearing system

The rotational performance of the spindle-bearing system has critical influence upon the geometric shape and surface roughness of the machined parts. The effects of preload and preload method on the rotational performance of the spindle-bearing system is explored experimentally to reveal the role of preload and preload method in spindle rotational performances under different speeds. A test rig on which both the rigid preload and elastic preload can be realized, equipped with variable preload spindle-bearing system, is developed. Based on the mechanical model, the relationship of the axial preload and negative axial clearance of the spindle-bearing system is provided. Rotating sensitive radial error motion tests are conducted for evaluating synchronous and asynchronous radial errors of the variable preload spindle-bearing system under different rotating speeds and preload methods. The change regularity of synchronous and asynchronous radial errors with preloads under different rotating speeds are given. The results show that the preload plays an important role on the rotational performance of spindle-bearing system. The rigid preload is more efficient in achieving better rotational performance than elastic preload under the same rotating speed. Furthermore, this article significantly guides the preload designing and assembling of the new spindle-bearing system

Effects of fence enclosure on vegetation community characteristics and productivity of a degraded temperate meadow steppe in Northern China

Species composition and biomass are two important indicators in assessing the effects of restoration measures of degraded grasslands. In this paper, we present a field study on the temporal changes in plant community characteristics, species diversity and biomass production in a degraded temperate meadow steppe in response to an enclosure measure in Hulunbuir in Northern China. Our results showed that the plant community responded positively to the fence enclosure in terms of vegetation coverage, height, above- and belowground biomass. A year-to-year increase in aboveground biomass was observed, and this increase plateaued at the ninth year of the enclosure. Our results also showed that the existing dominant and foundation species gained predominance against other species. The sum of the biomass of these two species was more than doubled after the ninth year of the enclosure. However, belowground biomass only briefly increased until the fifth year of the enclosure and then decreased until the end of the experimental period. Plant diversity, evenness, and richness indices showed similar trends to that of belowground biomass. Overall, we found that the degraded temperate meadow steppe responded significantly positively to the enclosure treatment, but an optimal condition was only reached after approximately 5-7 years of continuous protection, providing a solid use case for grassland conservation and management at regional scales

Composition and Temperature Dependence of Structure and Piezoelectricity in (1−x)(K1−yNay)NbO3-x(Bi1/2Na1/2)ZrO3Lead-Free Ceramics

Lead-free piezoceramics with the composition (1-x)(K1-yNay)NbO3-x(Bi1/2Na1/2)ZrO3 (KNyN-xBNZ) were prepared using a conventional solid-state route. X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and dielectric measurements as a function of temperature indicated the coexistence of rhombohedral (R) and tetragonal (T) phase, typical of a morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) as the BNZ concentration increased and by adjusting the K/Na ratio. High remnant polarization (Pr = 24 μC/cm2), piezoelectric coefficient (d33 = 320 pC/N), effective piezocoefficient (d33* = 420 pm/V), coupling coefficient (kp = 48%), and high strain (S = 0.168%) were obtained at room temperature, but significant deterioration of Pr, d33*, and kp were observed by increasing from room temperature to 160°C (17.5 μC/cm2, 338 pm/V, and 32%, respectively) associated with a transition to a purely T phase. Despite these compositions showing promise for room-temperature applications, the deterioration in properties as a function of increasing temperature poses challenges for device design and remains to be resolved

Dynamic variations in the peripheral blood lymphocyte subgroups of patients with 2009 pandemic H1N1 swine-origin influenza A virus infection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Novel Influenza A (H1N1) is an acute respiratory infectious disease. Animal experiments indicated that when H1N1 virus infected early hosts, it showed strong CD4⁺, CD8⁺, and CD4⁺CD25⁺T cell reactions. The aim of this study was to investigate the dynamic fluctuations of the peripheral blood lymphocyte subgroups in patients infected with H1N1 swine-origin influenza A virus (S-OIV).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The frequency of T cells, B cells, natural killer (NK) cells, and regulatory T cells (Treg) in 36 severe H1N1 and 40 moderate H1N1 patients were detected at different periods by flow cytometry. In parallel, serum cytokines were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and C-reactive protein (CRP) was analyzed through an image-type automatic biochemical analyzer. In addition, 20 healthy volunteers, who were not infected with 2009 H1N1 virus, were selected as controls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The frequency of NK cells were decreased in all cases and CD19⁺B cells were increased in severe cases than those of the controls. At 1-2d from onset, the frequency of CD4⁺and CD4⁺CD25⁺T cells in moderate cases was higher than in the severe cases. Serum cytokines, specifically IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, and IFN-γ exhibited no significant change both in the moderate and the severe cases during the whole monitoring process. In the early stage of the disease, serum CRP levels in the severe and moderate groups were significantly higher than that in the control group.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Patients showed different lymphocyte subgroup distributions between mild and severe cases, which might affect the incidence and development of 2009 H1N1.</p