Effects of water mist addition on kerosene pool fire

The use of water mist to extinguish fire is a problem of particular interest since the banning of halogen-based agents for environmental reasons. This interest is reflected in the large number of researches performed on the main fire-extinguishing mechanisms of water mist： heat extraction, oxygen displacement and attenuation of heat fluxes. In contrast, there are still little known about the chemical and some other aspects of water mist addition on the pool fire. In this paper, a phenomenological study was conducted of the effect of water mist addition on the kerosene pool fire through the measurement of the heat release rate, CO, CO2 and O2 species concentration in combustion. The experimental results show that there is a significant enhancement effect at the beginning stage of water mist addition. Then, the flame size was decreased abruptly. By physical suppression effect combined with chemical effect, the experiments＇ results are explained especially. The study of effects of water mist on pool fire will be useful for optimizing designation of water mist fire-suppression system, improving the fire suppression efficiency and extending their application field.     

Transmission of oxygen isotope signals of precipitation-soil water-drip water and its implications in Liangfeng Cave of Guizhou,China

According to systemically monitoring results of oxygen （hydrogen） isotope compositions of precipitation, soil waters, soil CO2, cave drip waters and their corresponding speleothems in Liangfeng Cave （LFC） in Guizhou Province, Southwest China, it is found that local precipitation is the main source of soil waters and drip waters, and that the amplitudes of those δ18O values of three waters （precipitation, soil water and drip water） decrease in turn in the observed year, which are 0‰ to -10‰, -2‰ to -9‰ and -6‰ to -8‰, respectively. Moreover, the δ18O values for three waters show a roughly simultaneous variation, namely, that those values are lighter in the rainy seasons, weightier in the dry seasons, and that the average δ18O value of drip waters is about 0.3‰ weightier than that of precipitation, which is modified by surface evaporation processes. We also find that oxygen isotope equilibrium is reached or neared in the formation processes of speleothems in LFC system, and that it is feasible to reconstruct paleotemperature and paleoprecipitation by using δ18O values of speleothems. However, it should be noted that surface evaporation would affect the oxygen isotope values in the study area.     

Flow characteristics and reaction properties of carbon dioxide in microtubules and porous media

Carbon dioxide reacts with porous media while flowing through them enhancing their permeability. Its flow behavior as well as the permeability enhancement effects were studied in synthetic cores, natural cores and microtubes with an inner diameter of 5 μm. The results show that the permeability of H2O-saturated cores （containing carbonate ingredients） was enhanced by increasing the injection volume of a CO2-H2O solution. This enhancement is attributable to carbon dioxide＇s corrosion, which is justified by SEM scanning. The same phenomenon occurs with a CO2-H2O solution in microtubes, but for a different reason. The gas flow velocity of carbon dioxide in microtubes was approximately 100% faster than that of nitrogen because of the scale and the squeezing effects. Carbon dioxide molecules dissolved in water accelerate the diffusion rate of water molecules within the boundary layer, which in turn diminishes the thickness of the water film and enlarges the effective pore size. This flow behavior facilitates the injection of carbon dioxide into low-permeability reservoirs for oil-displacement and formation energy buildup purposes. This behavior also increases the potential for carbon dioxide channeling or release from the formation.     

Solvent effects on photophysical properties of copper and zinc porphyrins

The photophysics of Zn（tetraphenylporphyrin,TPP）, Zn（tetra-2,4,6-trimethylphenyl porphyrin, TMP）, Zn （tetra-（o-dichlorophenyl） porphyrin, TPPCI8）, Cu（tetraphenylporphyrin,TPP）, Cu（tetra-2,4,6-trimethyl- phenyl porphyrin,TMP）, and Cu（tetra-（o-dichlorophenyl） porphyrin, TPPCIE, TPPCI8） in several solvents have been investigated on steady state and time-resolved spectroscopy. The Cu（TPPCI8 ） is normal and shows no evidence of CT transition in the visible or near UV regions in nonpolar solvent. However, Cu（TPPCI8）shows a blue shift in the absorption spectrum and intramolecular CT bands at absorption spectra in polar solvent, which shows a fluorescence maximum emission at 650 nm and 8.4 ns lifetime. The reason can be attributed to two points. Firstly, the increase of solvent polarity can enlarge outer reorganisational energy, which is favorable to reduce the activation free energy of charger-transfer transition based on Marcus theory of electron transfer. Moreover, the internal heavy-atom effect on Cu（TPPCIE） is encouraging to stabilize the 2T1 state also, which increases the possibility of population to CT band from 2T1 state. This result is in accord with an earlier estimate of a 10 ns lifetime and CT absorption at 640 nm bands for the CT state of Cu （11） octethylporphyrins. Other possible reasons arousing unusual fluorescence like H-bonding, axial ligands, molecular aggregation are excluded.     

An organic junction between the vein and membrane of the dragonfly wing

A dragonfly wing consists of membranes and both longitudinal and cross veins. We observed the microstructure cross-section at several locations in the dragonfly wing using environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM). The organic nature of the junction between the vein and the membrane was clearly identifiable. The membrane was divided into two layers, the upper epidermis and the lower epidermis. These layers extend around the sandwich structure vein, and combine with the adjacent membrane at a symmetrical location along the vein. Thus, we defined this as an organic junction between the vein and the membranes. The organic junction is able to form a tight corrugation angle, which dramatically increases both the warping rigidity and the strength of the wing, but not the torsional rigidity. The torsional deformation is primarily controlled by the microstructure of the longitudinal veins, and is based on the relative rotation angle between the epidermal layer and the inner layer of the vein that forms the zigzag section.     

Vegetation effects on mean daily maximum and minimum surface air temperatures over China

Changes in the daily maximum (Tmax) and minimum (Tmin) surface air temperatures and the associated temperature extremes have severe consequences on human society and the natural environment. In this study, we assess vegetation effects on mean Tmax and Tmin over China by computing a vegetation feedback parameter using the satellite-sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and observed temperatures for the period 1982–2002. In all seasons, vegetation exerts a much stronger forcing on Tmax than on Tmin, and thus has a substantial effect on the diurnal temperature range (DTR) over China. Significant positive feedbacks on Tmax and the DTR occupy many areas of China with the feedback parameters exceeding 1°C (0.1 NDVI)–1, while significant negative effects only appear over the summertime climatic and ecological transition zone of northern China and some other isolated areas. Also, the vegetation feedbacks are found to vary with season. In areas where significant feedbacks occur, vegetation contributes to typically 10%–30% of the total variances in Tmax, Tmin, and the DTR. These findings suggest that vegetation memory offers the potential for improving monthly-to-seasonal forecasting of Tmax and Tmin, and the associated temperature extremes over China. Meanwhile, the limitations and uncertainties of the study should be recognized.     

Multiple feature fusion in convolutional neural networks for action recognition

Action recognition is important for understanding the human behaviors in the video, and the video representation is the basis for action recognition. This paper provides a new video representation based on convolution neural networks (CNN). For capturing human motion information in one CNN, we take both the optical flow maps and gray images as input, and combine multiple convolutional features by max pooling across frames. In another CNN, we input single color frame to capture context information. Finally, we take the top full connected layer vectors as video representation and train the classifiers by linear support vector machine. The experimental results show that the representation which integrates the optical flow maps and gray images obtains more discriminative properties than those which depend on only one element. On the most challenging data sets HMDB51 and UCF101, this video representation obtains competitive performance.     

Fluid/melt inclusions in Cenozoic mantle xenoliths from Linqu,Shandong Province,eastern China: Implications for asthenosphere-lithosphere interactions

Fluid and melt inclusions in mantle xenoliths are thought as direct samples to study mantle liquids. Here we apply Raman mi- crospectroscopy and microthermometry to fluid/melt inclusions in lherzolite xenoliths in Qiaoshan basalts, a Miocene volcano in Linqu, Shandong Province, eastern China. These inclusions include (1) early CO2 fluid inclusions, (2) early carbonate melt inclu-sions, (3) late CO2 fluid inclusions, and (4) late silicate melt inclusions. Among the early CO2 fluid inclusions, most consist of...     

Density and structure of undercooled liquid titanium

For liquid Ti, it is difficult to achieve high undercooling because of its chemical reactivity; as a result, there is little information available on its properties and structure in the undercooled state. In this study, we investigate the density and structure, using molecular dynamics method, for the undercooling and superheating ranges 0-743 K and 0-457 K. The density increases quadratically for undercooling. At the melting temperature, the density is 4.14 g/cm3, and first and second temperature coefficients are obtained. The pair correlation functions and coordination numbers indicate that the short range degree of order becomes increasingly significant with increasing undercooling.     

Generalized ridge estimation of a semiparametric regression model

We considered the following semiparametric regres-sion model yi = X iT β+ s ( t i ) + ei (i =1,2,,n). First,the general-ized ridge estimators of both parameters and non-parameters are given without a restrained design matrix. Second,the generalized ridge estimator will be compared with the penalized least squares estimator under a mean squares error,and some conditions in which the former excels the latter are given. Finally,the validity and feasibility of the method is illustrated by a simulation example.