No abstract

The nature theory of Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) is the core theory of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Cold-hot nature is an important part of CHM nature. It is found that the material basis of cold-hot nature is CHM ingredients. To test the scientific hypothesis that “CHMs with similar cold-hot nature should have similar material basis,” we explored an intelligent method for cold-hot nature identification of CHMs based on the feature similarity of CHM ingredients in this work. Sixty one CHMs were selected for cold-hot nature identification. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used to separate the chemical ingredients of CHMs and extract the feature information of CHM ingredients. A distance metric learning algorithm was then learned to measure the similarity of HPLC fingerprints. With the learned distance metric, cold-hot nature identification scheme (CHNIS) was proposed to build an identification model to evaluate the cold-hot nature of CHMs. A number of experiments were designed to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed CHNIS model. The total identification accuracy rate of 61 CHMs is 80.3%. The performance of the proposed CHNIS algorithm outperformed that of the compared classical algorithms. The experimental results confirmed our inference that CHMs with similar cold-hot nature had similar composition of substances. The CHNIS model was proved to be effective and feasible.

Thermoplastic composites have recently attracted broad attention in aerospace, transportation, shipping, and other fields for their excellent mechanical properties and high recyclability. However, the properties of thermoplastic composites are unstable because of the problems such as microstructural differences and residual thermal stress after molding processing. Therefore, heat treatment, as a common method to modulate the microstructure and improve the properties of materials, is used to solve the problems. In this paper, the effects of different heat treatment methods were reviewed, including oven heating, microwave heating, and electric heating on the properties of various types of thermoplastic composites. The changes in material properties i.e., phase transformation, residual stress, interface bonding properties, etc. were discussed. Based on these investigations, electric heating experiments were carried out on the damaged samples of short carbon fiber reinforced polyethylene (SCFRPE) composites, and the mechanical properties of the samples before and after electric heating were analyzed. The results showed that the toughness increased, while the strength decreased after electric heating. These phenomena may be related to the changes of crystallinity and interfacial shear strength of the composites. This study can provide a reference for the manufacturing of SCFRPE based structures.

No abstract