Despite their high energy consumption, rural residential houses in the hot summer and cold winter (HSCW) zone still have a generally poor indoor thermal environment. The objective of this study was to understand the current status of the indoor thermal environment for rural residential houses in the HSCW zone and analyze its cause in order to develop some strategies for improvement through passive design of the building envelope. Face-to-face questionnaires and interviews, air-tightness testing, and temperature and humidity monitoring were conducted to understand the building envelope, energy consumption, and indoor thermal environment. Then, some passive design strategies were simulated, including the application of functional interior materials such as hygroscopic and phase change materials. An overall passive design for the building envelope can increase the room temperature by 3.6 °C, reduce the indoor relative humidity by 12% in the winter, and reduce the room temperature by 4.4 °C in the summer. In addition, the annual energy-saving rate can reach ~35%.

Ti–6Al–4V alloy is widely used as a biomaterial for hard tissue replacement, but its Young’s modulus is still higher than that of human bone tissue, which may cause a “stress shielding” effect and lead to implant loosening. In addition, metal implants with low magnetic susceptibility are beneficial for obtaining minimal artifacts in magnetic resonance imaging. To reduce Young’s modulus and magnetic susceptibility of Ti–6Al–4V alloy, a series of irregular prismatic porous structure models were designed based on the Voronoi principle, built by changing the irregularity, prism-diameter-to-initial-seed-spacing ratio, and seed number, and studied using finite-element analysis. Porous samples were prepared by selective laser melting and subjected to a compression test and magnetic susceptibility test. The simulation results show that the prism-diameter-to-initial-seed-spacing ratio has the greatest impact on porosity compared with the irregularity and seed number. The simulation-predicted porosity and compression modulus are highly consistent with the measured ones. The irregular prismatic porous Ti–6Al–4V samples exhibit mechanical properties similar to those of human bones and show a magnetic susceptibility of no more than 50% that of compact Ti–6Al–4V. A regulatable irregular prismatic porous structure is feasible for designing porous implants with desirable properties for biomedical applications.

A common understanding of plastic deformation of metallic glasses (MGs) at room temperature is that such deformation occurs via the formation of runaway shear bands that usually lead to catastrophic failure of MGs. Here we demonstrate that inhomogeneous plastic flow at nanoscale can evolve in a well-controlled manner without further developing of shear bands. It is suggested that the sample undergoes an elasto-plastic transition in terms of quasi steady-state localized shearing. During this transition, embryonic shear localization (ESL) propagates with a very slow velocity of order of ~1 nm/s without the formation of a hot matured shear band. This finding further advances our understanding of the microscopic deformation process associated with the elasto-plastic transition and may shed light on the theoretical development of shear deformation in MGs.