This paper reports the effects of γ-Al2O3 and α-Al2O3 on the properties of lightweight insulation materials. The phase compositions, microstructure and mechanical properties of lightweight insulation materials are separately investigated by XRD, SEM and tabulate thermal conductivity apparatus methods. The results indicate that the increasing of the amount of γ-Al2O3 is beneficial to improving the bulk density, compressive strength and acid resistance of the fired specimens. The fact negatively impacts on the increasing of the apparent porosity; however, it has no significant effect on the thermal conductivity of specimens. Meanwhile, the studies highlight that when the content of γ-Al2O3 increases, the nucleation and growth of mullite is accelerated at high calcination temperature, which has positive effect on improving the physicochemical properties of lightweight insulation materials. And the γ-Al2O3-free SiO2 glass phase system is guided by theoretical analysis of reaction conditions for non-catalytic system with Factsage modelling.

In this study, we obtained a batch of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) from the transcriptome data of Asian moon scallop Amusium pleuronectes and analyzed the distribution and frequency of these SSRs. A total of 7,315 SSRs were obtained from 159,521 unigenes. Bioinformatics tools were employed to design appropriate primers. A total of 4,038 SSR loci had flanking sequences suitable for polymerase chain reaction primer design. One hundred SSR primers were validated and the rate of successful amplification was 78.0%. Fourteen randomly chosen primer pairs were amplified in Beibu Bay population (BP) and Hainan Baimajing population (HP). The number of alleles at each locus ranged from 2 to 3 in two populations, with mean values of 2.214 and 2.143, respectively. The observed heterozygosity, expected heterozygosity and polymorphism information content of BP were 0.463, 0.646 and 0.281, respectively, while those of HP were 0.309, 0.320 and 0.259, respectively. The developed SSR markers will be helpful for further studies on population genetics, genetic linkage construction and chromosome linkage mapping in the species.

The spalling and corrosion during the thermal cycles are the main causes of the damages observed in mullite based castable composites which are used in molten iron system. Using the toughening agents of carbon fibers and the anti-oxidant of silicon, mullite based castable composites were prepared by sintering in air atmosphere. The effect of the anti-oxidant of silicon on the various physical, microstructures and mechanical properties were studied. The addition of silicon has significantly improved the cold modules of rupture and the cold crushing strength after firing at 1100 °C, but has little effect on the samples fired at 1450 °C. The cold modules of rupture and the cold crushing strength can be increased by above 20% and 30% respectively when the samples were fired at 1100 °C. After being heated in the air, the most of carbon fibers still can be found in the samples fired at 1450 °C, but can not be found in the samples fired at 1100 °C.