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Copyright of Journal of Intelligent Agriculture Mechanization is the property of Nanjing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Salt accumulation in topsoil is a widespread restricting factor that limits agricultural production and threatens food security in arid and semi-arid regions. However, whether this upward enrichment was suppressed by macropores was less documented. Therefore, artificial macropores with sandy fillings (AMSF) method was proposed in this study. Soil column experiments showed a significant improvement of saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) by more than 260% under artificial macropore treatment. Freshwater irrigation was conducted to monitor the short-term water and salt movement. This research aimed at evaluating the potential benefit of AMSF method on soil desalinization in coastal farmland of northern China. The results demonstrated that downward movement of soil water was stimulated in AMSF method, accordingly, washing more salt ions out of top rooting zone. Particularly, 10 cm or more macropore depth treatments of AMSF method enhanced total desalinization by 52.1% to 176.6% in 0–30 cm soil layer, in comparison to the control group without macropore. Subsequent observations for alfalfa showed higher biomass by 20.8% under 15 cm macropore depth. The results here provided an exploration demonstration to pursue these studies with the ultimate goal of optimizing application strategies for amendment in coastal salt-affected lands of northern China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enormous amounts of vegetable residues are wasted annually, causing many environmental problems due to their high moisture and organic contents. In this study, the methane production potential of 20 kinds of typical leafy vegetable residues in China were explored using a unified method. A connection between the biochemical components and the methane yields of these vegetables was well established which could be used to predict biogas performance in practice. A high volatile solid/total solid (VS/TS) ratio and hemicellulose content exhibited a positive impact on the biogas yield while lignin had a negative impact. In addition, three kinetic models were used to describe the methane production process of these agro-wastes. The systematic comparison of the methane production potentials of these leafy vegetables shown in this study will not only serve as a reference for basic research on anaerobic digestion but also provide useful data and information for agro-industrial applications of vegetable residues in future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the multiple cropping regions of southern China, straw returning has become a widely practiced agronomic measure for rice cultivation. However, excessive straw often leads to a high proportion of stubble in topsoil, which prolongs the leveling time of the paddy field and delays the transplanting date for rice seedlings. In particular, scholars in this region have successively improved multiple paddy field levelers to realize excellent straw returning and subsequent land preparation synchronously, but the economic benefit from land preparation to crop harvest was less reported. Therefore, this study carried out a 2-year rice cultivation experiments to compare the effects of paddy field preparation methods on rice growth and economic benefits within the same growing duration. Three treatments were designed: traditional tillage (TT), double axis rotary tillage (DR) and multiple operations for paddy field preparation (DR + ML), with three repeats. The results showed that DR + ML treatment simplified the operation process while improving the quality of land preparation. Within the same growing duration, DR + ML treatment could reduce the paddy field preparation time and extend the growing time in the field by 5–6 days. Furthermore, in comparison to TT treatment, DR + ML showed advantages in stimulating plant development, increasing dry matter accumulation (DMA), and thereby increasing rice yield by more than 12%. The economic benefits were mainly reflected in saving operation cost of paddy field preparation and improving the output (grain yield), which can generally increase the total profit by 58%. The implementation of this study can provide a reference for a simplified high yield cultivation technique in rice-related multiple cropping systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electricity spot market is now being implemented in China. Demand response, as a kind of flexible resource, is also being studied and explored for the constructed power market. Among the many demand response applications, the virtual power plant (VPP) as an aggregator of distributed energy resources (DERs), receives ever-increasing attention. However, the participation manner and related impacts of the VPP to the electricity spot market are still unknown within the current power market rules. Under this background, obeying the present trading rules of China's electricity spot market, a two-stage dispatching model with optimized bidding and operating strategy in the day-ahead (DA) and real-time (RT) market for the VPP is proposed. In the designed model, the conditional risk value (CVaR) is adopted to address the risk encountered by the uncertainty of the electricity spot market price. The impact of the user-side over-deviated revenue mechanism (UORM) of the China spot market on the income of the VPP in the DA and RT market is also analyzed. For a full evaluation, different coefficients for the influence of DA and RT risk, UORM, and energy storage system (ESS) are tested to investigate their respective impacts on the revenue of the VPP. The simulation cases prove that the proposed method is helpful for the VPP to optimize DERs' output in the electricity spot market according to its own risk preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In China, with chronic wound patients increasing by 10% per year and more than 1 million stoma patients, there is an increasing demand for wound ostomy continence care. Accordingly, specialized wound care in China is developing rapidly and the gap with developed countries is narrowing., Purpose: This paper aims to describe the status of training, practice, and management of wound nurses in China., Methods: Data on the training and practice of wound specialist nurses in the Chinese Mainland were collected through literature review and hospital surveys., Results: The training system of Chinese Wound, Ostomy and Continence (WOC) specialist nurses is developing rapidly, but lacks a unified access standard, curriculum, teaching materials, and assessment system. Specialist nurses play an important role in education, clinical practice, and scientific research, but home care and independent nursing practices are still in their infancy., Conclusion: The developing momentum of wound care in China is encouraging, but it is necessary to unify and standardize WOC nurses' qualification certification, scope of practice, level-to-level administration, and other aspects to cultivate higher-quality specialized wound nurses.

China produces large amount of cotton stalk (CS) residues as agricultural biomass, which are incinerated on-site, causing air pollution. The high organic content of CS could be utilized for biogas production, but the direct digestion without pretreatment always leads to a low methane yield and biodegradability, due to the complicated structure of lignocellulose. In order to search best fitting pretreatment methods in effective anaerobic digestion (AD) of CS, effects of various pretreatments including KOH, NaOH, Ca(OH) 2 , alkali hydrogen peroxide (AHP), H 2 SO 4 , H 3 PO 4 and steam explosion (SE) were studied. It was seen that all treatments resulted in varying methane yields. Among all the pretreatments, acid pretreatment is not suitable for AD of CS. The results showed that the highest cumulative methane yield (CMY) of 192.4 mL·gVS -1 was obtained after 3% AHP pretreatment of CS, and the methane yield improved by 254.3% than the untreated CS. Therefore, AHP treatment was proven to be an efficient pretreatment technique. XRD and FTIR analyses had shown that pretreated CS had favorable structural changes. This research is beneficial in developing environment friendly and cost-effective pretreatment technologies to utilize CS for methane production in future application.