Synergistic utilization of industrial solid wastes: Extraction of valuable metals from tungsten leaching residue by photovoltaic sawing waste.

Solid waste challenges in both the tungsten and photovoltaic industries present significant barriers to achieving carbon neutrality. This study introduces an innovative strategy for the efficient extraction of valuable metals from hazardous tungsten leaching residue (W-residue) by leveraging photovoltaic silicon kerf waste (SKW) as a silicothermic reducing agent. W-residue contains 26.2% valuable metal oxides (WO3, CoO, Nb2O5, and Ta2O5) and other refractory oxides (SiO2, TiO2, etc.), while micron-sized SKW contains 91.9% Si with a surface oxide layer. The impact of SKW addition on the silicothermic reduction process for valuable metal oxides in W-residue was investigated. Incorporating SKW and Na2CO3 flux enables valuable metal oxides from W-residue to be effectively reduced and enriched as a valuable alloy phase, with unreduced refractory oxides forming a harmless slag phase during the Na2O-SiO2-TiO2 slag refining process. This process achieved an overall recovery yield of valuable metals of 91.7%, with individual recovery yields of W, Co, and Nb exceeding 90% with the addition of 8 wt.% SKW. This innovative approach not only achieves high-value recovery from W-residue and utilization of SKW but also minimizes environmental impact through an efficient and eco-friendly recycling pathway. The strategy contributes significantly to the establishment of a resource-efficient circular economy, wherein the recovered high-value alloy phase return to the tungsten supply chain, and the harmless slag phase become raw materials for microcrystalline glass production.

SECP-Net: SE-Connection Pyramid Network for Segmentation of Organs at Risk with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a kind of malignant tumor. The accurate and automatic segmentation of computed tomography (CT) images of organs at risk (OAR) is clinically significant. In recent years, deep learning models represented by U-Net have been widely applied in medical image segmentation tasks, which can help to reduce doctors' workload. In the OAR segmentation of NPC, the sizes of the OAR are variable, and some of their volumes are small. Traditional deep neural networks underperform in segmentation due to the insufficient use of global and multi-size information. Therefore, a new SE-Connection Pyramid Network (SECP-Net) is proposed. For extracting global and multi-size information, the SECP-Net designs an SE-connection module and a pyramid structure for improving the segmentation performance, especially that of small organs. SECP-Net also uses an auto-context cascaded structure to further refine the segmentation results. Comparative experiments are conducted between SECP-Net and other recent methods on a private dataset with CT images of the head and neck and a public liver dataset. Five-fold cross-validation is used to evaluate the performance based on two metrics; i.e., Dice and Jaccard similarity. The experimental results show that SECP-Net can achieve SOTA performance in these two challenging tasks.

Mixed ionic/electronic conducting nanosheet arrays for stable lithium storage.

Lithium metal batteries (LMBs) have received extensive attention and research interest as high specific energy systems. However, the issues of Li dendrites growth in LMBs restrict their practical applications. The development of lithiophilic collectors can effectively solve the issues of Li dendrites growth. This study reports excellent lithium storage performance of lithiophilic nanosheet arrays which consist of electronic conductor Ni and ionic conductor Li2O (Ni-LONSs) on Ni foil (NF) fabricated via a simple preparation method for LMBs. The ionic conductor Li2O of the Ni-LONSs layer is lithiophilic and can induce uniform Li deposition on the Ni-LONSs collector. In addition, the nanosheet array structure of the Ni-LONSs collector is beneficial to slow down the volume change of the Li plating/stripping. In comparison with the NF collector, due to the specific nanosheet array structure of Ni-LONSs collector, the Ni-LONSs collector demonstrates excellent coulombic efficiency of 97.2% after 280 cycles (95.7% after 100 cycles of NF collector) and satisfactory cycling lifespan of 340 h (about 120 h of NF collector) at 0.5 mA cm-2with 1.0 mAh cm-2. Furthermore, the Ni-LONSs collector shows superior electrochemical performance in Ni-LONS/Li∣LiFePO4full cells. The excellent lithium storage performance of Ni-LONSs collector with mixed ionic/electronic conductor is conducive to the development and practical applications of LMBs.