Reconstructing provincial cropland area in eastern China during the early Yuan Dynasty(AD1271–1294)

Reconstructing historical land use and land cover change(LUCC) at the regional scale is an important component of global environmental change studies and of improving global historical land use datasets. By analyzing data in historical documents, including military-oriented cropland(hereafter M-cropland) area, the number of households engaged in M-cropland(hereafter M-household) reclamation, cropland area, and the number of households, we propose a conversion relationship between M-cropland area and cropland area reclaimed by each household. A provincial cropland area estimation method for the Yuan Dynasty is described and used to reconstruct the provincial cropland area for AD1290. Major findings are as follows.(1) Both the M-cropland and cropland areas of each household were high in the north and low in the south during the Yuan Dynasty, which resulted from different natural conditions and planting practices. Based on this observation, the government-allocated M-cropland reclamation area to each household was based on the cropland area reclaimed by each household.(2) The conversion relationship between M-cropland and cropland areas per household showed conversion coefficients of 1.23 and 0.65 for the south and north, respectively.(3) The cropland area in the entire study area in AD1290 was 535.4×106 mu(Chinese area unit, 1 mu=666.7 m^2), 57.8% in the north and 42.2% in the south. The fractional cropland areas for the entire study area, north, and south were 6.8%, 6.6%, and 7.1%, respectively and the per capita cropland areas for the whole study area, north, and south were 6.7, 15.6, and 4.1 mu, respectively.(4) Cropland was mainly distributed in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River(including the Fuli area), Huaihe River Basin(including Henan Province), and middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River(including Jiangzhe, Jiangxi, and Huguang provinces).

Thermal Magnifier and Minifier

For thermal conduction cases,one can detect the size of an object explicitly by measuring the temperature distribution around it.If the temperature is the only signature we can obtain,we will give an incorrect judgment on the shape or size of the object by disturbing the distribution of it.According to this principle,in this article,we develop a transformation method and design a dual-functional thermal device,which can create a thermal illusion that the object inside it ＂seems＂ to appear bigger or smaller than its original size.This device can functionally switch among magnifier and miniGer at will The proposed device consists of two layers：the cloak and the complementary material.A thermal cloak can make the internal region thermally ＂invisible＂ while the complementary layer offsets this effect.The combination leads to the illusion of magnification and minification.As a result of finite element simulations,the performances of the illusions are confirmed.

Analysis of transient responses in a laminated piezoelectric cylindrical shell

A hybrid numerical method is proposed for analysis of transient responses in a multilayered piezoelectric cylindrical shell.In the present method,the associated equations of the displacement field and the electro-potential field are developed using an analytical-numerical method.The piezoelectric cylindrical shell is discretized into layered annular elements along the wall thickness direction.The governing equations are determined by Hamilton's Principle considering the coupling between the elastic and electric field in each element.The modal analysis and Fourier transformation with respect to the spatial cylindrical polar coordinates in the direction of wave propagation are introduced to formulate the displacement field and electro-potential field in the wave-number domain.The results of transient responses at any location can be obtained by performing an inverse Fourier transformation.The transient responses of an actual piezoelectric cylindrical shell excited by a coupled electro-mechanical circular line load are investigated as a numerical example.The computational results demonstrate the efficiency of the present method.