Effect of PFDS on the immobilization of Cs+ by metakaolin-based geopolymers in complex environments.

Metakaolin-based geopolymers are very promising materials for improving the safety of low and intermediate level radioactive waste disposal, with respect to ordinary Portland cement, due to their excellent immobilization performance for Cs+ and superior chemical stability. However, their application is limited by the fact that the leaching behavior of Cs+ is susceptible to the presence of other ions in the environment. Here, we propose a way to modify a geopolymer using perfluorodecyltriethoxysilane (PDFS), successfully reducing the leaching rate of Cs+ in the presence of multiple competitive cations due to blocking the diffusion of water. The leachability index of the modified samples in deionized water and highly concentrated saline water reached 11.0 and 8.0, respectively. The reaction mechanism between PDFS and geopolymers was systematically investigated by characterizing the microstructure and chemical bonding of the material. This work provides a facile and successful approach to improve the immobilization of Cs ions by geopolymers in real complex environments, and it could be extended to further improve the reliability of geopolymers used in a range of applications.

High-Precision Temperature Inversion Algorithm for Correlative Microwave Radiometer.

In order to achieve high precision from non-contact temperature measurement, the hardware structure of a broadband correlative microwave radiometer, calibration algorithm, and temperature inversion algorithm are innovatively designed in this paper. The correlative radiometer is much more sensitive than a full power radiometer, but its accuracy is challenging to improve due to relatively large phase error. In this study, an error correction algorithm is designed, which reduces the phase error from 69.08° to 4.02°. Based on integral calibration on the microwave temperature measuring system with a known radiation source, the linear relationship between the output voltage and the brightness temperature of the object is obtained. Since the metal aluminum plate, antenna, and transmission line will have a non-linear influence on the receiver system, their temperature characteristics and the brightness temperature of the object are used as the inputs of the neural network to obtain a higher accuracy of inversion temperature. The temperature prediction mean square error of a back propagation (BP) neural network is 0.629 °C, and its maximum error is 3.351 °C. This paper innovatively proposed the high-precision PSO-LM-BP temperature inversion algorithm. According to the global search ability of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, the initial weight of the network can be determined effectively, and the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm makes use of the second derivative information, which has higher convergence accuracy and iteration efficiency. The mean square error of the PSO-LM-BP temperature inversion algorithm is 0.002 °C, and its maximum error is 0.209 °C.

Design and Implementation of a Ku-Band High-Precision Blackbody Calibration Target.

Microwave radiometers can be used in human tissue temperature measurement scenarios due to the advantages of non-destructive and non-contact temperature measurement. However, their accuracy often cannot meet the needs of practical applications. In this paper, a Ku-Band high-precision blackbody calibration target is designed to provide calibration for microwave radiometers and meet the requirements of a high temperature-measurement accuracy and high temperature-measurement resolution. From a practical application point of view, the blackbody calibration target needs to have the characteristics of high emissivity and high temperature uniformity. However, previous studies on blackbody calibration targets often focused on the scattering characteristics or temperature uniformity of the calibration target separately, and thus lack a comprehensive consideration of the two characteristics. In this paper, the electromagnetic scattering model and the temperature-distribution model of the calibration target are established through the multi-physical simulation combined with the Finite Element Method. Then, according to the simulation results of the two characteristic models, the structural parameters and composition of the coated cone array are continuously optimized. In addition, to achieve high-precision temperature control of the blackbody calibration target, this paper studies three PID controller parameter self-tuning algorithms, namely, BP-PID, PSO-PID and Fuzzy-PID for the optimal parameter tuning problem of traditional PID algorithms and determines the optimal temperature-control algorithm by comparing the performance of heating and cooling processes. Then, the blackbody calibration target is processed and manufactured. The arch test system is used to validate the reflectance of the calibration target, the emissivity is calculated indirectly, and the temperature-distribution uniformity of the temperature-control panel of the calibration target is tested by a multi-point distribution method. Finally, the uncertainty of the brightness temperature of the blackbody calibration target is analyzed.

Design and Implementation of Multiband Noncontact Temperature-Measuring Microwave Radiometer.

In this paper, a multiband noncontact temperature-measuring microwave radiometer system is developed. The system can passively receive the microwave signal of the core temperature field of the human body without removing the clothes of the measured person. In order to accurately measure the actual temperature of multilayer tissue in human core temperature field, four frequency bands of 4-6 GHz, 8-12 GHz, 12-16 GHz, and 14-18 GHz were selected for multifrequency design according to the internal tissue depth model of human body and the relationship between skin depth and electromagnetic frequency. Used to measure the actual temperature of human epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue, a small and highly directional multiband angular horn antenna was designed for the radiometer front end. After the error analysis of the full-power microwave radiometer, a novel hardware architecture of the microwave interferometric temperature-measuring radiometer is proposed, and it is proven that the novel interferometric microwave radiometer has less error uncertainty through theoretical deduction. The experimental results show that the maximum detection sensitivity of the novel interferometric microwave temperature-measuring radiometer is 215 mV/dBm, and the temperature sensitivity is 0.047 K/mV. Compared with the scheme of the full-power radiometer, the detection sensitivity is increased 7.45-fold, and the temperature sensitivity is increased 13.89-fold.