ALBERT

Description: Over the past years, new urbanization in China has accelerated steadily and led to a continuous increase in ecological-environmental (eco-environmental) stress. A deep understanding of the coupling relationship between new urbanization and ecological-environmental stress is essential to benefiting the urban management in making decisions. How to realize the coordinated development of urbanization and the eco-environment is not only the key issue in world economic and social development, but has also been a hot topic of research in recent years. However, the quantitative relationship and the interaction mechanism between the new urbanization and ecological-environmental stress are still unclear. To fill this gap, this study constructed comprehensive assessment indicators for evaluating new urbanization and eco-environmental stress systems to accomplish the following objectives. We aimed to identify the spatial and temporal pattern of coupling and coordinating degree between new urbanization and eco-environmental stress in China during the period of 2005–2016. The degrees of coupling and coordination of new urbanization and eco-environmental stress systems in China in 2005, 2010, and 2016 were calculated at the provincial level. The degrees of coupling and coordination have achieved stable and continuous improvement from 0.389 to 0.484. We further aimed to evaluate the regional coupling and estimate the stage of urbanization at which an optimal outcome could be achieved in order to ensure high-quality urbanization in China. According to the model of coupling and coordination degree, this paper divided the Chinese territory into four area types: well coordination, middle coordination, primary coordination, and reluctance coordination, and about 35% of the provinces belonged to the well and middle coordination types. Lastly, this paper analyzed the spatial pattern and cluster mode of the coupling coordination of new urbanization and eco-environmental stress systems by using ArcGIS and GeoDa. The analysis implied that coupling coordination existed with obvious regional disparity. Moreover, the degrees of coupling coordination of the developed east coastal and middle area were generally higher than those of the undeveloped west area. The findings indicate that for different regions, the reluctance coordination and primary coordination subclass regions should accelerate to realize green transformation, improve the industrial structure, and strengthen the environmental law-enforcing supervision. However, we could not conduct an internal structural analysis. Future research will focus on conducting an internal structural analysis and an element system metrics analysis.

Description: At present, as growing importance continues to be attached to atmospheric environmental problems, the demand for real-time monitoring of these problems is constantly increasing. This article describes the development and application of an embedded system for monitoring of atmospheric pollutant concentrations based on LoRa (Long Range) wireless communication technology, which is widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT). The proposed system is realized using a combination of software and hardware and is designed using the concept of modularization. Separation of each function into independent modules allows the system to be developed more quickly and to be applied more stably. In addition, by combining the requirements of the remote atmospheric pollutant concentration monitoring platform with the specific requirements for the intended application environment, the system demonstrates its significance for practical applications. In addition, the actual application data also verifies the sound application prospects of the proposed system.

Description: Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reflected signals can be used to remotely sense the Earth’s surface, known as GNSS reflectometry (GNSS-R). The GNSS-R technique has been applied to numerous areas, such as the retrieval of wind speed, and the detection of Earth surface objects. This work proposes a new application of GNSS-R, namely to detect objects above the Earth’s surface, such as low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. To discuss its feasibility, 14 delay Doppler maps (DDMs) are first presented which contain unusually bright reflected signals as delays shorter than the specular reflection point over the Earth’s surface. Then, seven possible causes of these anomalies are analysed, reaching the conclusion that the anomalies are likely due to the signals being reflected from objects above the Earth’s surface. Next, the positions of the objects are calculated using the delay and Doppler information, and an appropriate geometry assumption. After that, suspect satellite objects are searched in the satellite database from Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Finally, three objects have been found to match the delay and Doppler conditions. In the absence of other reasons for these anomalies, GNSS-R could potentially be used to detect some objects above the Earth’s surface.

Description: The n-SiC (nanometer SiC) is added to be the additive in order to improve the mechanical performance of Si3N4 ceramics. A microwave sintered the ceramics at different temperature and holding times. The results shows that the Si3N4/n-SiC ceramics (85 wt% Si3N4 + 5 wt% n-SiC + 5 wt% Al2O3 + 5 wt% Y2O3) have the best mechanical properties at 1600 °C, which is beneficial to the densification and β-Si3N4 phase formation for 10 min: the density, hardness, and fracture toughness were 97.1%, 14.44 GPa, and 7.77 MPa·m1/2, which increased by 2.8%, 7.0%, and 13.1%, respectively, when compared with the ceramics (90 wt% Si3N4 + 5 wt% Al2O3 + 5 wt% Y2O3).