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Stainless-clad bimetallic steels (SCBS) are widely investigated in some extremely environmental applications areas, such as polar sailing area and tropical oil and gas platforms areas, because of their excellent anticorrosion performance and relatively lower production costs. However, the properties of SCBS, including the mechanical strength, weldability and the anticorrosion behavior, have a direct relation with the manufacturing process and can affect their practical applications. This paper aims to review the application and the properties requirements of SCBS in marine environments to promote the application of this new material in more fields.

In this paper, the manufacturing process, welding and corrosion-resistant properties of SCBS were introduced systematically by reviewing the related literatures, and some results of the authors’ research group were also introduced briefly.

Different preparation methods, such as rolling composite, casting rolling composite, explosive composite, laser cladding and plasma arc cladding, as well as the process parameters, including the vacuum degree, rolling temperature, rolling reduction ratio, volume ratios of liquid to solid, explosive ratio and the heat treatment, influenced a lot on the properties of the SCBS through changing the interface microstructures. Otherwise, the variations in rolling temperature, pass, reduction and the grain size of clad steel also brought the dissimilarities of the mechanical properties, microhardness, bonding strength and toughness. Another two new processes, clad teeming method and interlayer explosive welding, deserve more attention because of their excellent microstructure control ability. The superior corrosion resistance of SCBS can alleviate the corrosion problem in the marine environment and prolong the service life of the equipment, but the phenomenon of galvanic corrosion should be noted as much as possible. The high dilution rate, welding process specifications and heat treatment can weaken the intergranular corrosion resistance in the weld area.

This paper summarizes the application of SCBS in marine environments and provides an overview and reference for the research of stainless-clad bimetallic steel.

Qualitative methods are not suitable to process high volumes of policy texts for exploring policy evolution. Therefore, it is hard to use qualitative methods to systematically analyze the characteristics of complex policy networks. So the authors propose a bibliometric research study for exploring policy evolution from time–agency–theme perspectives to excavate the rules and existing problems of China's medical informatization policy and to provide suggestions for formulating and improving the future medical informatization policies.

Initially, 615 valid samples are obtained by retrieving related China's medical informatization policy documents, and the joint policy-making agency network and the co-occurrence network models of medical informatization policies are defined, and then the authors research China's medical informatization policies from single-dimension and multi-dimension view.

The analysis results reveal that China's medical informatization policy process can be divided into four stages; the policy-making agencies are divided into four subgroups by community detection analysis according to the fast unfolding algorithm; the core policy theme keywords are identified based on the eigenvector centrality of the nodes in those networks; the focuses of theme terms are varied in different stages and the correlations between agencies and themes are gradually decentralized.

These findings provide experience and evidence on leveraging informatics in the medical and healthcare field of China. Also, they can help scholars and practitioners better understand the current status and future directions of medical and healthcare informatics development in China and provide a reference to formulate and improve China's future medical informatization policies.

This study proposes a quantitative bibliometric-based research framework to describe transitions and trends of China's medical informatization policy.

Energy groups are cargo owners with large amounts of energy sources (such as coal) to transport. To achieve a satisfactory tradeoff between the reliability requirements of the sea transportation process and the need to control the investment cost, they usually set up a self-owned fleet supplemented by a chartered fleet. This paper aims to investigate the best fleet structure and to evaluate the investment scheme under volatile circumstances in the shipping market.

The authors construct a mathematical model to determine the ratio of the self-owned fleet to the total fleet to minimize fleet operating costs. The volatility of both freight rates and oil prices is taken into consideration. The CPLEX solver is used to empirically analyze real data from an energy group in China, and the ship investment plan is evaluated considering the technical and economic feasibility.

If the ratio of the self-owned fleet to the total fleet is increased to the optimal of 90.40%, the total operating cost is reduced by 33.98%. Thus, the energy group should increase its capacity with a Panamax vessel of approximately 82,000 DWT. Purchasing a 5-year-old secondhand ship and building a new ship both have good investment return indicators.

For cargo owners engaging in transporting bulk cargo domestically in China, the suggested fleet ratio can provide a reference with a universal application scale, given the boundary economic conditions (including the volatility of freight rates and oil prices in the shipping market) in the paper.

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) in-situ alloying is a recently developed technology that provides a facile approach to optimizing the microstructural and compositional characteristics of the components for high performance goals. However, the complex mass and heat transfer behavior of the molten pool results in an inhomogeneous composition distribution within the samples fabricated by LPBF in-situ alloying. The study aims to investigate the heat and mass transfer behavior of an in-situ alloyed molten pool by developing a three-dimensional transient thermal-flow model that couples the metallurgical behavior of the alloy, thereby revealing the formation mechanism of composition inhomogeneity.

A multispecies multiphase computational fluid dynamic model was developed with thermodynamic factors derived from the phase diagram of the selected alloy system. The characteristics of the Al/Cu powder bed in-situ alloying process were investigated as a benchmark. The metallurgical behaviors including powder melting, thermal-flow, element transfer and solidification were investigated.

The Peclet number indicates that the mass transfer in the molten pool is dominated by convection. The large variation in material properties and temperature results in the presence of partially melted Cu-powder and pre-solidified particles in the molten pool, which further hinder the convection mixing. The study of simulation and experiment indicates that optimizing the laser energy input is beneficial for element homogenization. The effective time and driving force of the convection stirring can be improved by increasing the volume energy density.

This study provides an in-depth understanding of the formation mechanism of composition inhomogeneity in alloy fabricated by LPBF in-situ alloying.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of positive-framed and negative-framed green advertising on pro-environmental WTP. This study also explores the impacts of regulatory focus, environmental concern and pleasant level on green advertising effectiveness.

Data are collected from a within-participant between-group online experiment in China. The generalized estimating equation (GEE) is employed to investigate the impact of green advertising on WTP. Grouped regression and mediation analyses are conducted to explore the influences of regulatory focus, environmental concern and pleasure on advertising efficacy.

The experimental outcomes indicate that green advertising significantly increases participants’ pro-environmental WTP, and negative-framed advertising is more effective than its positive-framed counterpart. Prevention focus heightens receptivity to green advertising, and the relation of environmental concern to advertising effectiveness is inverted U-shaped. Pleasure mediates the effect of green advertising on the WTP, and this mediating role is influenced by emotional intensity when advertising is negatively framed.

Evidence suggests that green advertising may propel pro-environmental WTP by raising environmental awareness, but such a relationship remains severely understudied. As such, this study pioneers in exploring the impact of different-framed green advertising on pro-environmental WTP, extending the concept of green advertising to environmental management. By considering the influences of regulatory focus, environmental concern and pleasure, this study raises practical implications for designing green advertisements, such as increasing the usage of visual elements.

Regular cable trench inspection is crucial, and robotics automation provides an efficient and safer alternative to manual labor. However, existing robots have limited capabilities in traversing obstacles and lack a mechanical arm for detecting cables and equipment. This study aims to develop an intelligent robot for cable trench inspection, enhancing obstacle-crossing abilities and incorporating a mechanical arm for inspection tasks.

This study presents an intelligent robot for cable trench inspection, featuring a six-degree-of-freedom mechanical arm mounted on a six-track chassis with four flippers. The robot's climbing and obstacle-crossing stability, as well as the motion range of the mechanical arm, are analyzed. The positioning, navigation and remote monitoring systems are developed. Experiments, including climbing and obstacle-crossing performance tests, along with navigation and positioning system tests, are conducted. Finally, the robot's practicability is verified through field testing.

Equipped with flipper tracks, the cable trench inspection robot can traverse obstacles up to 30 cm high and maintain stable locomotion on 30° slopes. Its navigation system enables autonomous operation, while the mechanical arm performs cable current detection tasks. The remote monitoring system provides comprehensive control of the robot and environmental parameter monitoring in cable trenches.

The front and rear flipper tracks enhance the robot's ability to traverse obstacles in cable trenches. The mechanical arm addresses cable current and equipment contact detection issues. The navigation and remote monitoring systems improve the robot's autonomous operation and environmental monitoring capabilities. Implementing this robot can advance the automation and intelligence of cable trench inspections.

Drawing upon the theory of information culture from information science and prior research on Chinese information practices. The purpose of this paper is to posit that instead of over-relying on Hofstede’s national cultural values, the IS field should develop theories on national information culture to bridge the theoretical gaps found in explaining the differences in individuals’ IT perceptions and behaviors across cultures.

To achieve the objectives of this study, two quantitative studies were conducted. The first study is exploratory in nature and focuses on the development and calibration of an instrument to measure the Chinese information culture (CIC). The second study takes a confirmatory approach to investigate the impact of the CIC on IT perceptions of manager.

The study develops and validates an instrument for measuring the CIC that comprises information source and format preference, information ownership and analysis style, and centralized decision-making and information control. The CIC is found to influence IT perceptions of managers including perceived performance improvement resulted from IT use, attitude toward using work technologies and attitude on the value of IT in general.

This study is one of the first studies to theorize national information culture to understand IT perceptions at the individual level. The development of the CIC measure provides the much needed methodological support for contextualizing cross-cultural research.

This paper aims to use the Monodepth method to improve the prediction speed of identifying the obstacles and proposes a Probability Dueling DQN algorithm to optimize the path of the agent, which can reach the destination more quickly than the Dueling DQN algorithm. Then the path planning algorithm based on Probability Dueling DQN is combined with FastSLAM to accomplish the autonomous navigation and map the environment.

This paper proposes an active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework for autonomous navigation under an indoor environment with static and dynamic obstacles. It integrates a path planning algorithm with visual SLAM to decrease navigation uncertainty and build an environment map.

The result shows that the proposed method offers good performance over existing Dueling DQN for navigation uncertainty under the indoor environment with different numbers and shapes of the static and dynamic obstacles in the real world field.

This paper proposes a novel active SLAM framework composed of Probability Dueling DQN that is the improved path planning algorithm based on Dueling DQN and FastSLAM. This framework is used with the Monodepth depth image prediction method with faster prediction speed to realize autonomous navigation in the indoor environment with different numbers and shapes of the static and dynamic obstacles.

The purpose of this study is to predict the thermal protective performance (TPP) of flame-retardant fabric more economically using machine learning and analyze the factors affecting the TPP using model visualization.

A total of 13 machine learning models were trained by collecting 414 datasets of typical flame-retardant fabric from current literature. The optimal performance model was used for feature importance ranking and correlation variable analysis through model visualization.

Five models with better performance were screened, all of which showed R2 greater than 0.96 and root mean squared error less than 3.0. Heat map results revealed that the TPP of fabrics differed significantly under different types of thermal exposure. The effect of fabric weight was more apparent in the flame or low thermal radiation environment. The increase in fabric weight, fabric thickness, air gap width and relative humidity of the air gap improved the TPP of the fabric.

The findings suggested that the visual analysis method of machine learning can intuitively understand the change trend and range of second-degree burn time under the influence of multiple variables. The established models can be used to predict the TPP of fabrics, providing a reference for researchers to carry out relevant research.

The findings of this study contribute directional insights for optimizing the structure of thermal protective clothing, and introduce innovative perspectives and methodologies for advancing heat transfer modeling in thermal protective clothing.

In general, the existing compressor design methods require abundant knowledge and inspiration. The purpose of this study is to identify an intellectual design optimization method that enables a machine to learn how to design it.

The airfoil design process was solved using the reinforcement learning (RL) method. An intellectual method based on a modified deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm was implemented. The new method was applied to agents to learn the design policy under dynamic constraints. The agents explored the design space with the help of a surrogate model and airfoil parameterization.

The agents successfully learned to design the airfoils. The loss coefficients of a controlled diffusion airfoil improved by 1.25% and 3.23% in the two- and four-dimensional design spaces, respectively. The agents successfully learned to design under various constraints. Additionally, the modified DDPG method was compared with a genetic algorithm optimizer, verifying that the former was one to two orders of magnitude faster in policy searching. The NACA65 airfoil was redesigned to verify the generalization.

It is feasible to consider the compressor design as an RL problem. Trained agents can determine and record the design policy and adapt it to different initiations and dynamic constraints. More intelligence is demonstrated than when traditional optimization methods are used. This methodology represents a new, small step toward the intelligent design of compressors.