Employing Synergetic Effect of Doping and Thin Film Coating to Boost the Performance of Lithium-Ion Battery Cathode Particles

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) has evolved as an important technique to coat conformal protective thin films on cathode and anode particles of lithium ion batteries to enhance their electrochemical performance. Coating a conformal, conductive and optimal ultrathin film on cathode particles has significantly increased the capacity retention and cycle life as demonstrated in our previous work. In this work, we have unearthed the synergetic effect of electrochemically active iron oxide films coating and partial doping of iron on LiMn1.5 Ni0.5O4 (LMNO) particles. The ionic Fe penetrates into the lattice structure of LMNO during the ALD process. After the structural defects were saturated, the iron started participating in formation of ultrathin oxide films on LMNO particle surface. Owing to the conductive nature of iron oxide films, with an optimal film thickness of ~0.6 nm, the initial capacity improved by ~25% at room temperature and by ~26% at an elevated temperature of 55 °C at a 1C cycling rate. The synergy of doping of LMNO with iron combined with the conductive and protective nature of the optimal iron oxide film led to a high capacity retention (~93% at room temperature and ~91% at 55 °C) even after 1,000 cycles at a 1C cycling rate

The influence of network platform interaction on corporate total factor productivity: evidence from China stock exchange investor interactive platforms

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of the questions and answers (Q&A) between investors and enterprises from the China stock exchange investor interactive platforms on the total factor productivity (TFP) of enterprises. To show how the interaction influences the TFP of enterprises, the authors select Q&A records from the interactive platforms related to production, R&D and technology through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and choose A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2019 in China as a sample. To treat the data and test the proposed hypothesis, the authors applied OLS regression and endogeneity testing methods, such as the entropy balance test, Heckman two-stage model and the two-stage least squares regression. This paper finds that interaction between investors and enterprises is positively correlated with TFP, and that improvements in content length and the timeliness of response can promote TFP. Interactive behavior mainly improves the TFP of enterprises by alleviating financing constraints and encouraging enterprises to increase R&D investment. This positive effect is more pronounced in companies with higher agency costs, non-high-tech companies and companies not supported by industrial policy. The novelty of the research stands in the application of Python's LDA topic model to screen out Q&A records that are directly related to TFP, such as production, R&D, technology, etc., and measures the degree of information interaction between investors and enterprises from multiple dimensions, such as interaction frequency, content length and the timeliness of response

An Intuitive User Interface for Teleoperated Robotic Neuro-Intervention

The objective of this project is to prove that an intuitive user interface for a teleoperated robotic catheterization system is realizable. Robotic catheterization enables interventionalists to remotely manipulate the guidewire using a control platform outside the interventional radiology suite. This reduces radiation exposure and enhanced accuracy, stability, and dexterity. This newly proposed system mimics the traditional over-the-wire operation with realistic tactile sensation on the wires and catheters. The system includes a control side and a remote side; this project focused on the prototype for the control side. The team was able to utilize mechanical, electrical, and systems engineering techniques to provide haptic feedback to the interventionalists when operating. This project’s results were collected and evaluated to verify that a teleoperated robotic system was possible

Partial Discharge Data Matching Method for GIS Case-Based Reasoning

With the accumulation of partial discharge (PD) detection data from substation, case-based reasoning (CBR), which computes the match degree between detected PD data and historical case data provides new ideas for the interpretation and evaluation of partial discharge data. Aiming at the problem of partial discharge data matching, this paper proposes a data matching method based on a variational autoencoder (VAE). A VAE network model for partial discharge data is constructed to extract the deep eigenvalues. Cosine distance is then used to calculate the match degree between different partial discharge data. To verify the advantages of the proposed method, a partial discharge dataset was established through a partial discharge experiment and live detections on substation site. The proposed method was compared with other feature extraction methods and matching methods including statistical features, deep belief networks (DBN), deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), Euclidean distances, and correlation coefficients. The experimental results show that the cosine distance match degree based on the VAE feature vector can effectively detect similar partial discharge data compared with other data matching methods

Functional Characterization of Aluminum (Al)-Responsive Membrane-Bound NAC Transcription Factors in Soybean Roots

The membrane-bound NAC transcription (NTL) factors have been demonstrated to participate in the regulation of plant development and the responses to multiple environmental stresses. This study is aimed to functionally characterize soybean NTL transcription factors in response to Al-toxicity, which is largely uncharacterized. The qRT-PCR assays in the present study found that thirteen out of fifteen GmNTL genes in the soybean genome were up-regulated by Al toxicity. However, among the Al-up-regulated GmNTLs selected from six duplicate gene pairs, only overexpressing GmNTL1, GmNTL4, and GmNTL10 could confer Arabidopsis Al resistance. Further comprehensive functional characterization of GmNTL4 showed that the expression of this gene in response to Al stress depended on root tissues, as well as the Al concentration and period of Al treatment. Overexpression of GmNTL4 conferred Al tolerance of transgenic Arabidopsis in long-term (48 and 72 h) Al treatments. Moreover, RNA-seq assay identified 517 DEGs regulated by GmNTL4 in Arabidopsis responsive to Al stress, which included MATEs, ALMTs, PMEs, and XTHs. These results suggest that the function of GmNTLs in Al responses is divergent, and GmNTL4 might confer Al resistance partially by regulating the expression of genes involved in organic acid efflux and cell wall modification

The Spatiotemporal Variations of Runoff in the Yangtze River Basin under Climate Change

A better understanding of the runoff variations contributes to a better utilization of water resources and water conservancy planning. In this paper, we analyzed the runoff changes in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) including the spatiotemporal characteristics of intra-annual variation, the trend, the mutation point, and the period of annual runoff using various statistical methods. We also investigated how changes in the precipitation and temperature could impact on runoff. We found that the intra-annual runoff shows a decreasing trend from 1954 to 2008 and from upper stream to lower stream. On the annual runoff sequence, the upstream runoff has a high consistency and shows an increasing diversity from upper stream to lower stream. The mutation points of the annual runoff in the YRB are years 1961 and 2004. Annual runoff presents multitime scales for dry and abundance changes. Hurst values show that the runoffs at the main control stations all have Hurst phenomenon (the persistence of annual runoff). The sensitivity analyses of runoff variation to precipitation and temperature were also conducted. Our results show that the response of runoff to precipitation is more sensitive than that to temperature. The response of runoff to temperature is only one-third of the response to precipitation. A decrease in temperature may offset the impact of decreasing rainfall on runoff, while an increase in both rainfall and temperature leads to strongest runoff variations in the YRB