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Ice formation and accumulation on surfaces can cause operational risks and failure to various engineering structures and systems. Liquid repellent surfaces could reduce ice accretion and improve asset integrity and safety in harsh environments. This article examines how surface wettability affects water droplet impact and freezing on a surface. It presents experimental results of water droplet impact and freezing on horizontal and inclined stainless-steel surfaces with varying wettabilities achieved through microscale texturing and coating. The water droplets are at 5 °C before impacting on the target surfaces and the diameter of the droplets ranges from 1.80 mm to 4.11 mm. The static contact angles of water droplets on the surfaces range from 77° to 145° and the surface temperatures vary from −10 °C to −13 °C. The droplet impact speed ranges from 0.77 m/s to 1.17 m/s. In addition, all experiments are conducted under approximately the same room air temperature and relative humidity of 15 °C and 30% respectively. It is found that the surface and water droplet properties, along with its impact velocity, affect the droplet dynamics after impacting on the surface, which in turn affects the heat transfer and the freezing process. The results demonstrate that water droplets spread less and oscillate longer on more hydrophobic surfaces, which leads to a delay of freezing and significantly longer total icing time due to the lower heat transfer rate caused by less contact between the liquid and the surface. A two-stage droplet freezing process is observed through high-speed imaging. A small tip forms at the top of the droplet when it is completely frozen. The contribution of droplet volume (larger droplets need a longer freezing time) is found to be more significant than the effects of droplet dynamics (larger contact areas cause a shorter freezing time). On an inclined surface, the droplet shows a gliding and stretching process. The total icing time decreases at higher inclinations due to the increased contact areas. This paper demonstrates an icing delay with water repellent surfaces on engineering metals such as stainless steels.

An extreme high temperature during grain filling is an important environmental factor that reduce the yield and quality of rice. In this study, we compared the grain appearance, composition and starch structure of four rice varieties response to high temperature during grain filling. The results obviously revealed that two indica AUS varieties Halwa and Jamir showed more tolerance to high temperature during grain filling than either the japonica Nipponbare or another AUS rice DJ24. The data showed that Halwa and Jamir presented less chalkiness, less grain weight loss, less change of endosperm components as well as starch structure than Nipponbare and DJ24 under high temperature treatment. Hence, the results implied that Halwa and Jamir might be useful targets to further identify genetic mechanism response to high temperature, at least during grain filling and endosperm development. Moreover, these AUS varieties have potential application value in further breeding of rice with good quality and heat tolerance.

A new quantitative method is introduced to analyze the collaboration among different organizations. The method defines the collaboration score based on the number of people involved in collaboration, and then the collaboration strength is obtained by summing up the collaboration scores with this method. We choose "Project 985" universities, which represent the top universities in China, as an example to study the collaboration network, strength in leading collaboration and strength in participating collaboration. Results based on Scopus show some characteristics of such collaboration and verify the feasibility of the new approach.

Peer review is a classic method in the field of quality analysis, but the effectiveness of peer reviewing has never been researched using quantity analysis indicators. A new indicator for academic journals, Effectiveness of Peer Review (EPR), is defined for evaluating the effectiveness of peer reviewing. If the assumption is valid, EPR could be a simple indicator of such effectiveness. In a sample experiment, 28 academic journals were tested, and the EPR indicator was able to reflect accurately the academic impact of those journals.

Citations are a way to show how researchers build on existing research to further evolve research. The citation count is an indication of the influence of specific articles. The importance of citations means that it is valuable to analyze the articles that are cited the most. This research investigates highly-cited articles in physics (1979–2008) using citation data from the ISI Web of Science. In this study, 1544205 articles were examined. The objective of the analysis was to identify and list the highly-productive countries, institutions, authors, and fields in physics. Based on the analysis, it was found that the USA is the world leader in physics, and Japan has maintained the highest growth rate in physics research since 1990. Furthermore, the research focus at Bell Labs and IBM has played important roles in physics. A striking fact is that the five most active authors are all Japanese, but the five most active institutions are all in the USA. In fact, only The University of Tokyo is ranked among the top 11 institutions, and only American authors have single-author articles ranked among the top 19 articles. The highest-impact articles are distributed across 25 subjects categories. Physics, Multidisciplinary has 424 articles, and is ranked at No. 1 in total articles; followed by Physics, Condensed Matter. The study can provide science policy makers with a picture of innovation capability in this field and help them make better decisions. Hopefully, this study will stimulate useful discussion among scientists and research managers about future research directions.

This paper proposes a new method for indicator selection in panel data analysis and tests the method with relevant data on agricultural journals provided by the Institute of Scientific & Technical Information of China. An evaluation exercise by the TOPSIS method is conducted as a comparison. The result shows that panel data analysis is an effective method for indicator selection in scholarly journal evaluation; journals of different disciplines should not be evaluated with the same criteria; it is beneficial to publish all the evaluation indicators; unavailability of a few indicators has a limited influence on evaluation results; simplifying indicators can reduce costs and increase efficiency as well as accuracy of journal evaluation.

This paper traces the history of China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations database (CSTPC) since its founding in 1988. The fact that most Chinese scientists publish their research results in Chinese journals requires that China establish SCI counterparts dedicated to domestic S & T journals. The article describes the selection criteria for source journals, the approach used to adjust the structure of source journals, the criteria for selecting items to be included in the database, and the indexing method. Then it discusses the impact upon government R & D administration agencies and the science community in general by both CSTPC team and CSTPC database. Finally, the article analyzes the main factors that lead to the primary success of CSTPD. The authors encourages information workers in other non-English developing countries to build up similar databases.

Three major principles for the selection of indicator data normalization methods in multi-attribute evaluation are presented in this paper. Principle 1: The relative gap between the data for the same indicator should remain constant; Principle 2: The relative gap between different indicators should remain variable ; and Principle 3: The maximum values after normalization should be equal. According to these three major principles, a normalization method for positive indicators is screened out from several alternatives, and a new normalization method for negative indicators is proposed. These two methods are very good for the comparison among panel data,. The requirement for data normalization methods is different when the evaluation goals are different, Ranking-order-based evaluation is insensitive to data normalization methods.

A chronically weak area in research papers, reports, and reviews is the complete identification of background documents that formed the building blocks for these papers. A method for systematically determining these seminal references is presented. Citation-Assisted Background (CAB) is based on the assumption that seminal documents tend to be highly cited. CAB is being applied presently to three applications studies, and the results so far are much superior to those used by the first author for background development in any other study. An example of the application of CAB to the field of Nonlinear Dynamics is outlined. While CAB is a highly systematic approach for identifying seminal references, it is not a substitute for the judgement of the researchers, and serves as a supplement.

This study adopts a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assess current research trends in nanofiltration membrane technology (NFM), a new membrane separation technology widely used in various fields. It analyses scientific papers published between 1988---2011 in all journals contained in the Science Citation Index and patent data with the same time span from the Derwent patent database. The study examines developments in basic NFM research and technological innovations. Over the past 24 years, there has been a notable growth in publication outputs. Compared with other countries, China exhibited a rapid growth, particularly from 2000---2011, with its total number of papers ranking second only to the United States (US). Chinese NFM papers focus on energy and agriculture, while the US focuses on biochemistry and molecular biology. China holds the most global NFM patents, with rapid growth in patent numbers from 2005---2011. China, the US and Japan together hold 78 % of the total global NFM patents and have a strong technological advantage in water treatment and separation technology. Although there are four Chinese institutions in the top 10 patentee list, most are application patents that focus on the integrated application of existing nanofiltration membrane. In contrast the patents owned by foreign patentees are mostly research patents involving technology innovations of the nanofiltration membrane itself. Therefore, NFM research capacity in China should be further strengthened to maximize the advantages gained via research to date.