FerryBox: Using Automated Water Measurement Systems to Monitor Water Quality: Perspectives for the Yangtze River and Three Gorges Dam

The building of the Three Gorges Dam （Hubei （湖北） Province, China） has transformed a region with an economy based on sustainable agriculture for millennia into an entirely different environment within an exceptionally short time. This disrupts the natural biogeochemieal cycles of carbon, nutrients, and metals and possibly will affect the whole catchment including downstream ecosystems, such as wetlands, estuaries, deltas, and adjacent sea areas. Starting from changes that have already been documented, this article concentrates on the possible use of a ＂FerryBox＂, which is an automated water quality measurement system on board a ship or on shore, to monitor the short and long term development of the quality of the river water in the backwater area and downstream of the dam. While there are already research programmes running to monitor the water quality of the river and the backwater area, these programs are limited to ship campaigns with sampling and laboratory analysis. The spatial and temporal resolution of such measurements is not sufficient for an overall assessment of the water quality and for prognoses in the context of anthropogenic and climate change. Therefore, a concept of applying regular automated observations by a FerryBox is presented. It is shown that such systems are very well suited to give feedback for the assessment of measures to improve the water quality.

In vitro biodegradation testing of Mg-alloy EZK400 and manufacturing of implant prototypes using PM(powder metallurgy)methods

The study is focussing towards Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) of Mg-alloys for biomedical implantapplications. Especially the influence of the sintering processing necessary for the consolidation of thefinished part is in focus of this study. In doing so, the chosen high strength EZK400 Mg-alloy powdermaterial was sintered using different sintering support bottom plate materials to evaluate the possibilityof iron impurity pick up during sintering. It can be shown that iron pick up took place from the steelbottom plate into the specimen. Despite the fact that a separating boron nitrite (BN) barrier layer wasused and the Mg-Fe phase diagram is not predicting any significant solubility to each other. As a result ofthis study a new bottom plate material not harming the sintering and the biodegradation performance ofthe as sintered material, namely a carbon plate material, was found.

Enhanced tensile plasticity of a CuZr-based bulk metallic glass composite induced by ion irradiation

N^+ ion irradiation is utilized to tune the structure and mechanical properties of a Cu48Zr47.2Al4Nb0.8 bulk metallic glass composite(BMGC). Ion irradiation increases the disorder near the surface, as probed by neutron diffraction, and, moreover, causes the phase transformation from B2Cu Zr to B19’ CuZr martensitic phase in the studied BMGC. The tensile plasticity of the BMGC is dramatically improved after ion irradiation, which results from multiple shear banding on the surface and the martensitic transformation of the B2 to B19’ Cu Zr martensitic phase. The experimental results are strongly corroborated by complementary molecular dynamic simulations.