Risk factors for converting traditional wards to temporary intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from nurses' perspectives.

Background: The surge in critically ill COVID-19 patients caused a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds. Some hospitals temporarily transformed general wards into ICUs to meet this pressing health care demand.

Aim: This study aims to evaluate and analyse the risk factors in temporary ICU from the perspective of nurses.

Photoindentation: A New Route to Understanding Dislocation Behavior in Light.

It was recently found that extremely large plasticity is exhibited in bulk compression of single-crystal ZnS in complete darkness. Such effects are believed to be caused by the interactions between dislocations and photoexcited electrons and/or holes. However, methods for evaluating dislocation behavior in such semiconductors with small dimensions under a particular light condition had not been well established.

Temperature and deformation measurement for large-scale flat specimens based on image mosaic algorithms.

Synchronous measurement of the temperature and deformation fields of large-scale flat specimens is challenging in engineering experiments, especially for high-temperature environment where the non-contact optical method is attempted. To overcome this difficulty of large-scale flat specimens tested at high temperature in the open arc wind tunnel environment, measurement principles and experiments of large-scale flat specimens based on a multi-camera system are proposed using digital image stitching as well as the improved two-color method for temperature measurement. First, the digital image mosaic method is used to process and evaluate the mosaic effect of multi-camera images, the optimal mosaic parameters are selected, and the calculation results are given.

Optimized deposition time boosts the performance of Prussian blue modified nanoporous gold electrodes for hydrogen peroxide monitoring.

Prussian blue (PB) modified nanoporous gold (NPG) electrodes exhibit great potential for improving the detection sensitivity and stability for hydrogen peroxide monitoring. The NPG provides large surface-to-volume ratio as well as diffusion 'highways' to assist the transfer of the ions. In the present work, we optimized the deposition time for NPG fabrication and examine the electrochemical performance of the electrodes.

Overcoming high luminance gradient using serial exposure time method for synchronous full-field measurement of temperature and deformation.

The high-temperature optical method has been widely used for evaluating structural materials subjected to high temperature. Obtaining high-quality images of a specimen surface in such a harsh environment is detrimental for the accurate measurement of temperature and strain field. However, the high-temperature environment poses many challenges on these measurements, e.

In situ full-field measurement of surface oxidation on Ni-based alloy using high temperature scanning probe microscopy.

We use in situ scanning probe microscopy (SPM) to investigate the high temperature oxidation of Ni-based single crystal alloys at the micro-/nanoscale. SiO micro-pillar arrays were pre-fabricated on the alloy surface as markers before the oxidation experiment. The SPM measurement of the oxidized surface in the vicinity of SiO micro-pillars was conducted real time at temperatures from 300 °C to 800 °C.

Measurements for displacement and deformation at high temperature by using edge detection of digital image.

In this work, we propose a structural deformation measuring method based on structural feature processing (straight line/edge detection) of the recorded digital images for specimens subjected to a high-temperature environment. Both radiation light and oxidation at high temperatures challenge the optics-based measurements. The images of a rectangular piece of copper specimen are obtained by using a bandpass filtering method at high temperatures, then all the edges are detected by using an edge detection operator, and then a Hough transform is conducted to search the straight edges for the calculation of deformation.

Full-field measurement of surface topographies and thin film stresses at elevated temperatures by digital gradient sensing method.

Thin film stresses in thin film/substrate systems at elevated temperatures affect the reliability and safety of such structures in microelectronic devices. The stresses result from the thermal mismatch strain between the film and substrate. The reflection mode digital gradient sensing (DGS) method, a real-time, full-field optical technique, measures deformations of reflective surface topographies.

In situ observation and measurement of composites subjected to extremely high temperature.

In this work, we develop an instrument to study the ablation and oxidation process of materials such as C/SiC (carbon fiber reinforced silicon carbide composites) and ultra-high temperature ceramic in extremely high temperature environment. The instrument is integrated with high speed cameras with filtering lens, infrared thermometers and water vapor generator for image capture, temperature measurement, and humid atmosphere, respectively. The ablation process and thermal shock as well as the temperature on both sides of the specimen can be in situ monitored.