Research on forming method of additive manufacturing of frozen sand mold.

In order to promote the green and sustainable development of the foundry industry, it is necessary to further explore new methods and technologies for green foundry. This paper innovatively proposes a method of additive manufacturing of frozen sand mold, using water as the binder instead of resin binders for additive manufacturing in low-temperature environments, which effectively solves the problems of harmful gas emissions during the pouring process and the difficulty of direct recycling of molding sand, and realizes high-performance green casting of complex castings. In this paper, the liquid-solid phase transition mechanism of the binder for additive manufacturing of frozen sand mold and the change law of the normal temperature field and phase transition field of the pre-cooled powder bed porous medium at different temperatures are studied, and the process window of additive manufacturing of frozen sand mold is obtained, which provides a new green casting method for the foundry field.

Two-Dimensional Hole-Array Grating-Coupling-Based Excitation of Bloch Surface Waves for Highly Sensitive Biosensing.

In this study, a surface diffraction two-dimensional (2D) grating structure was placed on the topmost layer of distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) for biosensing. Bloch surface wave (BSW) resonance was realized by coupling a 2D subwavelength hole-array grating and could be excited at different locations: the surface of 2D-grating layer or the inter-face between the DBR and bio-solution. Material losses in the multilayer dielectric were measured to test the robustness of this scheme. Both the surface diffraction-grating BSW (DG-BSW) and the alternative guided grating-coupled BSW (GC-BSW) configuration showed markedly enhanced angular sensitivity compared to conventional prism-coupled schematics. Exciting these modes using a grating-coupling technique appears to yield different extreme sensitivity modes with a maximum of 1190°/RIU for DG-BSW and 2255°/RIU for GC-BSW. Refractive index sensors with a high figure of merit may be realized via such compact configurations.

Optical Fano resonance sensing of bilayer asymmetric photonic crystal slabs as biosensors.

A bilayer asymmetric photonic crystal slab made of porous Si3N4/SiO2 is designed as a biosensor by considering the optical performance of this photonic crystal slab with a square lattice based on rigorous coupled-wave analysis theory and wavelength interrogation methods. The results show that this bilayer asymmetric photonic crystal can be used as a biosensor according to its excellent linearity relationship between the guided resonance peak shift and refractive index of aqueous solution with or without glycerol. The theoretical sensitivity value of the bilayer asymmetric photonic crystal biosensor is achieved as (S>286 nm/RIU) in the wavelength range from 1400 nm to 1600 nm. These results also indicate that the asymmetry bilayer structure has an important influence on its optical characteristic and sensitivity of the bilayer photonic crystal biosensor, and hence, it can be modified by changing the lattice constant and slab thickness. This research paper is very useful for understanding the application and design of biosensors based on porous structures.