A series of nitrogen-containing heterocyclic 4,4′,5,5′-tetranitro-2,2′-biimidazolate salts was synthesized with the cations as pyridinium (3), pyrazolium (4), 3-amino-pyrazolium (5), imidazolium (6), N-methylimidazolium (7), 1,2,4-triazolium (8), 3-amino-1,2,4-triazolium (9), 3,5-diamino-1,2,4-triazolium (10), 1,2,3-triazolium (11), 1,5-diamino-tetrazolium (12), and 2,2′-biimidazolium (13). These salts were characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared spectroscopy, and elemental analysis. Their properties were measured or calculated. Salts 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 were confirmed by single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Salt 13 with a bicyclic cation has the highest heat of formation of 3.06 kJ/g. With the highest detonation performance (29.9 GPa, 8,638 m/s) and low sensitivity (30 J, > 360 N), salt 12 is a promising candidate as an insensitive explosive.

A kind of launching platform driven by two permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) motors which is used to launch kinetic load to hit the target, always faces strong parameter uncertainties and strong external disturbance such as the air current impulsion, which would degrade their tracking accuracy greatly. In this paper, an adaptive robust nonlinear controller is proposed for high-accuracy motion control of the launching platform, in which the adaption law is designed to estimate the unknown coupling coefficients of torque disturbance and feed-forward cancellation technique is used to compensate the coupling torque disturbance and some other constant disturbances. In addition, a nonlinear robust feedback term is designed to inhibit the influence of the parameter estimation error and the other model uncertainty to stabilise the closed-loop system. Considering that some system states are immeasurable due to cost-reduction, volume/weight limitations and structure restriction or heavy measurement noise is usually associated with the measurements, which may also deteriorate the achievable performance of full-state feedback controllers; a high-order sliding-mode observer is used to estimate the unmeasured system states, and it is synthesised with the adaptive robust controller via feed-forward cancellation method. The intermediary virtual control law and the final control law are derived by integrating the backstepping method. Furthermore, the controller theoretically guarantees a prescribed tracking transient performance and final tracking accuracy while achieving asymptotic tracking performance in the presence of parametric uncertainties only, which is very important for high-accuracy tracking control of launching platform. Extensive comparative experimental results are obtained to verify the high performance nature of the proposed control strategy.

Purpose: Reinforcement of reinforced concrete (RC) beams in-service have always been an important research field, anchoring steel plate in the bottom of the beams is a kind of common reinforcement methods. In actual engineering, the contribution of pavement layer to the bearing capacity of RC beams is often ignored, which underestimates the bearing capacity and stiffness of RC beams to a certain extent. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of pavement layer on the RC beams before and after reinforcement. Design/methodology/approach: First, static load experiments are carried out on three in-service RC hollow slab beams, meanwhile, nonlinear finite element models are built to study the bearing capacity of them. The nonlinear material and shear slip effect of studs are considered in the models. Second, the finite element models are verified, and the numerical simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental results. Last, the finite element models are adopted to carry out the research on the influence of different steel plate thicknesses on the flexural bearing capacity and ductility. Findings: The experimental results showed that pavement layers increase the flexural capacity of hollow slab beams by 16.7%, and contribute to increasing stiffness. Ductility ratio of SPRCB3 and PRCB2 was 30% and 24% lower than that of RCB1, respectively. The results showed that when the steel plate thickness was 1 mm–6 mm, the bearing capacity of the hollow slab beam increased gradually from 2158.0 kN.m to 2656.6 kN.m. As the steel plate thickness continuously increased to 8 mm, the ultimate bearing capacity increased to 2681.0 kN.m. The increased thickness did not cause difference to the bearing capacity, because of concrete crushing at the upper edge. Originality/value: In this paper, based on the experimental study, the bearing capacity of hollow beam strengthened by steel plate with different thickness is extrapolated by finite element simulation, and its influence on ductility is discussed. This method not only guarantees the accuracy of the bearing capacity evaluation, but also does not require a large number of samples, and has certain economy. The research results provide a basis for the reinforcement design of similar bridges.