Investigation of the Petrological and Geochemical Characteristics of Siderite in the Early Cretaceous Sandstone of Lacustrine Sedimentary Sequence in the Erlian Basin from Northeastern China

Siderite is a prevalent authigenic mineral in siliciclastic rocks, which usually occurred in eodiagensis period and could be used as an indicator of sedimentary environment. Some siderite precipitated in burial depth with geochemical information of basin fluid evolution. The crystal morphology, geochemical composition, and isotope values are influenced by physical and geochemical environment of precipitation. In this study, samples from the Early Cretaceous of Erlian basin in the northwestern China were collected, and mineralogy, bulk and in-situ geochemistry, C and O isotopes were analyzed to comprehensively investigate the sedimentary and diagenetic environment that the sediments experienced. Six lithofaices with three types of crystal habits were recognized in the siderite-rich sandstone, bundle crystal in spherical forms, blocky rhombs in intergranular pore and cleavage of muscovite, and micro bundle and mosaic crystals aggregates in nodular. The siderite growth proceeds through micro bundle and mosaic crystals to bundle siderite aggregates and then into blocky rhombs. The crystal evolution is also reflected by geochemical composition. The micro bundle and mosaic crystals are Casiderite. The spheritic shaped bundle aggregates are Ca-Mn-siderite. The blocky rhomb siderite shows gray part and bight part with Ca, Mg and Mn varies. Increase of Ca in block rhomb siderite suggests burial and mesodiagenesis, the high content of Mn may have linkage with eogenetic effects. The relatively positive and slightly negative δ13C value indicates meteoric water domination and influence of organic matter evolution in shallow buried time. The narrow ranges negative δ18O value suggest a small span of temperature of siderite formation.

STRENGTH ANALYSIS OF CLAMPING IN MICRO/NANO SCALE EXPERIMENTS

Two kinds of clamping in micro/nano scale experiments are investigated in this paper, one based on electron-beam-induced deposition, and the other on the van der Waals interaction. The clamping strength and mechanism are analyzed both theoretically and experimentally. The influence of relative humidity on the micro/nano clamping and the method of electrostatic clamping are discussed. The clamping strength and performance of different clamping methods are compared considering the size and material of the clamped objects, and the application environments.

A BRIEF REVIEW AND PROSPECT OF EXPERIMENTAL SOLID MECHANICS IN CHINA

In this review, acritical look at the research progress ofexperimentalsolid mechanics in China for the past years is presented. Issues are discussed of the discovery and development of new fundamental methods and techniques versus performance benchmarking for many of their applications. Included herein are photoelasticity and various forms of modern photomechanics, acoustical techniques, image processing and videometrics, radial and spectrum techniques, and experimental mechanics on micro/nano scale. It is also noticed that both the ever developed instrumentation and specialized synthetical techniques have played important roles in advancing experimental mechanics in scientific researches and industrial applications. Finally, an attempt is made to look into the future of experimental solid mechanics with personal opinions offered on what the future trends will be for the researches in the field.

Tensile properties of individual multicellular Bacillus subtilis fibers

Microfibers formed by Bacillus subtilis(B. subtilis) have attracted interest because of their potential for use as biodegradable fibers. In this work, an efficient method based on the micro-liquid bridge method(LBM) is proposed to investigate the mechanical properties and the deformation evolution in individual fibers. For the first time, tensile testing of fibers of this type containing several cells is conducted in a scanning electron microscope(SEM) chamber and the in situ deformation evolution of the fibers and the septa is observed. Experimental results show that these fibers are almost broken at the positions of the septa at low humidity, but also show that their fracture morphologies are different. At high humidity, local necking deformation occurs at the septum position. To explore the deformation mechanism of an individual bacterial fiber with a diameter of several hundred nanometers under different humidity conditions, we use the finite element method(FEM) to analyze the tensile deformation behavior of these fibers when their septa are at various separation levels. The numerical results indicate that weak interactions among the septa lead to the dispersion of both the fibrous tensile strength and the modulus. These results may be helpful in understanding the deformation mechanism, thus leading to further improvements in the mechanical performance of these fibers.