Comparison of Urban Form based on different city walls between Quanzhou and Newcastle upon Tyne

[EN] Quanzhou in south-eastern China was built in the Sui Dynasty, having more than 1,000 years of history. Its urban development led to the triple walls in a different period of time. Its unique landscape of multiple walls is a one of the Chinese ancient city patterns. However, the massive stone-built city wall pattern like Newcastle also has more than 1000, years of history in western cities .City walls maintain the preeminence as the city’s most powerful fixation line. The expansion of the wall in Quanzhou shows how the time-space changes, while Newcastle' s fringe belt is relatively stable, which forms a different urban form. This article mainly compares the following aspects: (1) The development of Quanzhou fringe belt; (2) Differences of fringe belts between the multiple walls city and the sole wall city; (3) Differences of land use in intramural zone between two cities. This paper analyzes the differences of fringe belts caused by city walls between Quanzhou, (China) and Newcastle, (England), and their influence on the urban form between the East and the West.This paper is co-funded by the Youth Program of the National Natural Science Foundation (51308232), the National Natural Science Foundation Projects (51578250), the National Science and Technology Support Program of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2015BAL01B01), the Social Development Guidance Project of Fujian Province (2015Y037), the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (2016J01238), Science and Technology Innovation Fund for Young Teachers of Huaqiao University (ZQNPY213).Subsidized Project for Cultivating Postgraduates Innovatives Ability in Scientific Research of Huaqiao UniversityWang, D.; Zheng, J. (2018). Comparison of Urban Form based on different city walls between Quanzhou and Newcastle upon Tyne. En 24th ISUF International Conference. Book of Papers. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 167-175. https://doi.org/10.4995/ISUF2017.2017.5061OCS16717

Quantum mechanical rippling of a MoS2 monolayer controlled by interlayer bilayer coupling

Physical Review Letters114606550

Non-Hermitian topological whispering gallery

In 1878, Lord Rayleigh observed the highly celebrated phenomenon of sound waves that creep around the curved gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London1,2. These whispering-gallery waves scatter efficiently with little diffraction around an enclosure and have since found applications in ultrasonic fatigue and crack testing, and in the optical sensing of nanoparticles or molecules using silica microscale toroids. Recently, intense research efforts have focused on exploring non-Hermitian systems with cleverly matched gain and loss, facilitating unidirectional invisibility and exotic characteristics of exceptional points3,4. Likewise, the surge in physics using topological insulators comprising non-trivial symmetry-protected phases has laid the groundwork in reshaping highly unconventional avenues for robust and reflection-free guiding and steering of both sound and light5,6. Here we construct a topological gallery insulator using sonic crystals made of thermoplastic rods that are decorated with carbon nanotube films, which act as a sonic gain medium by virtue of electro-thermoacoustic coupling. By engineering specific non-Hermiticity textures to the activated rods, we are able to break the chiral symmetry of the whispering-gallery modes, which enables the out-coupling of topological "audio lasing" modes with the desired handedness. We foresee that these findings will stimulate progress in non-destructive testing and acoustic sensing.This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2017YFA0303702), NSFC (12074183, 11922407, 11904035, 11834008, 11874215 and 12104226) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (020414380181). Z.Z. acknowledges the support from the China National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents (BX20200165) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M681541). L.Z. acknowledges support from the CONEX-Plus programme funded by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 801538. J.C. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) through the Starting Grant 714577 PHONOMETA and from the MINECO through a Ramón y Cajal grant (grant number RYC-2015-17156)

Improving the performance of IPMCs with a gradient in thickness

Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China [2011J05140]; Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities of Xiamen University [2011121045]An ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) is a kind of electro-active polymer. Due to the properties of low driving voltage, large deformation, flexibility and lightness, it is becoming one of the more popular from a diversity of smart materials. In this study, a novel structure of Nafion (R) film is proposed to improve the performance of an IPMC. IPMC samples with a gradient structure in thickness are fabricated and their performance is investigated to confirm the validity of the gradient structure. The deformation displacement and the blocking force are compared under AC and DC voltage by experiments. The results indicate that the structure of gradient in thickness would improve the performance both in deformation displacement and blocking force

Numerical Analysis of Flow Characteristics of Upper Swirling Liquid Film Based on the Eulerian Wall Film Model

The Upper Swirling Liquid Film (USLF) phenomenon that occurs in the upper cylinder of the Gas–Liquid Cylindrical Cyclone (GLCC) separator is the direct cause of the low separation efficiency of the liquid phase. In this study, first, the USLF formation and development were simulated by an improved Eulerian-EWF coupled simulated method. By introducing a profile-defined inlet boundary and considering entrainment droplet size distributions, the Eulerian-EWF method got reasonable results which agreed well with the experimental. Then, the flow characteristics and changing laws of the USLF including film thickness, film axial velocity, and film tangential velocity were analyzed by this method under different gas–liquid flow rates. It suggested that the liquid film thickness often reaches a maximum at the aspect ratio (z-z0)/D=(1.2–3.9) above the tangential inlet, and the film thickness appears to be more sensitive to the gas flow than to the liquid flow. For the film axial velocity, the direction of film velocity on the front and back sides seems to be generally opposite. Finally, typical distributions of the aforementioned USLF variables were presented and corresponded accordingly, and two obvious rules were found. One is that the position where the thickest liquid film is located always corresponds to the position where the axial film velocity turns from positive to negative for the first time. The other is that the tangential film velocity has a strong synchronous relationship with the film thickness. This research might provide somewhat valid information for the future LCO-prevented measurement in GLCC separators