With the increased deployment of power modules in demanding conditions, sintering materials, especially composite sintering materials, have raised growing interest due to their cost-effectiveness and suitability. Therefore, this study explores the viability of Cu–Ag composite sintering material, focusing on solvent influence through microstructure and mechanical behavior analysis. Micron-sized particle-based Cu–Ag composite pastes were designed and compared using eight solvents (four epoxy-free and four epoxy-added) based on fluidity and thermal stability. The sintered joints' performance, assessed through shear strength analysis, showed comparable values to pure silver sintering for both epoxy-free and epoxy-added samples. Optimized samples from each solvent system underwent reliability analysis, demonstrating that Cu–Ag joints with epoxy resin exhibited significantly higher shear strength after high-temperature storage and thermal cycling tests. Micromorphology and elemental composition analysis revealed differences in aging mechanisms, primarily attributed to variations in porosity due to oxide formation and pore filling by epoxy resin under different solvent systems. Further nanoindentation characterization of micromechanical properties, including hardness, modulus, and creep properties, during high-temperature aging, established constitutive models for insights into reliability evolution. In conclusion, the optimized epoxy-added Cu–Ag sintered joints proposed in this study demonstrated exceptional reliability and acceptable micromechanical properties, presenting a promising option for high-temperature power packaging.

A lane-changing (LC) maneuver may cause the follower in the target lane (new follower) to decelerate and give up space, potentially affecting crash risk and traffic flow efficiency. In congested flow, a more aggressive LC maneuver occurs where the lane changer is partially next to the new follower and creates negative gaps, namely negative gap forced LC (NGFLC). Although NGFLC forms the foundation of sideswipe crashes, little has been done to address its impacts and the contributing factors. To tackle this issue, a total of 15,810 LC trajectory samples are extracted from three drone videos at different locations. These samples are categorized into NGFLC and normal LC groups for comparative analysis. Five commonly used conflict indicators are extended into two-dimensional to evaluate the crash risk of LC maneuver. The change of time gaps during LC maneuver are examined to quantify the impact of LC on traffic flow efficiency. We find that NGFLCs significantly increase crash risk, reflected by the number of hazardous LC events and potential crash areas compared to normal LC. Additionally, results reveal that both the lane changer and the new follower tend to maintain a larger time gap after NGFLCs. Factors including time headway, relative speed, and historical gaps in the target lane significantly affect NGFLC incidence. Once the movement of the leader in the original lane is taken into account, the prediction accuracy improves from 81% to 91%. The transferability tests indicate that the findings about the negative impact of NGFLC and the accuracy of its prediction model are consistent across different locations. These findings hold implications for driving assistance systems to better predict and mitigate NGFLCs.

Copper sintering has gained great attention as a die-attach technology for power electronics because of its potential cost effectiveness and high reliability under harsh working conditions. However, the mechanism of how the intrinsic pores within such sintered joints influence the thermal and electrical properties still needs further investigation. The evolution of pores within such sintered joints is difficult for in-situ observation during the sintering process and reliability tests, while the porosity level greatly affects the thermal and electrical properties. In this work, four two-dimensional (2D) models with various random pore structures were established based on the Quartet Structure Generation Set (QSGS) algorithm. Then, finite element method (FEM) simulations were conducted to simulate the heat and current conduction in the sintered materials. Subsequently, the distribution of temperature as well as the electric potential in the porous sintered materials were further discussed. Lastly, both the thermal and the electrical conductivities were calculated, followed by a concluded parabolic relationship of thermal and electrical conductivities with the porosity. These findings offer insights into optimizing and predicting copper sintered joint performance and accelerate the wide application of copper sintering.

With the popularization of wide band-gap power modules in offshore wind power systems and water surface photovoltaic power stations, packaging materials face challenges of corrosion by salt, blended with high humidity. Copper-silver (Cu-Ag) composite sintered paste was proposed by researchers as a novel die-attach material for a lower cost and anti-electro migration ability. However, the potential difference between copper and silver forms galvanic corrosion in a high-humidity environment, resulting in accelerated failure combined with salt mist. To further promote the application of composite sintered materials, a copper-silver double-sphere galvanic corrosion model based on finite element simulation was proposed in this paper. The relationship between corrosion rate and time of different Cu-Ag particle size combinations under different sintering degrees was predicted by initial exchange current density. Through the electrochemical characterization of the sintered samples, the optimal combination of materials was further discussed. The accuracy of the model was also verified. The conclusions obtained from both the experiments and simulation work provide guidance for future anti-corrosion analysis, as well as the reliability improvement of novel composite sintered materials.

Aquatic community dynamics are closely dominated by flow regime and water quality conditions, which are increasingly threatened by dam regulation, water diversion, and nutrition pollution. However, further understanding of the ecological impacts of flow regime and water quality conditions on aquatic multi-population dynamics has rarely been integrated into existing ecological models. To address this issue, a new niche-based metacommunity dynamics model (MDM) is proposed. The MDM aims to simulate the coevolution processes of multiple populations under changing abiotic environments, pioneeringly applied to the mid-lower Han River, China. The quantile regression method was used for the first time to derive ecological niches and competition coefficients of the MDM, which are demonstrated to be reasonable by comparing them with the empirical evidence. Simulation results show that the Nash efficiency coefficients for fish, zooplankton, zoobenthos, and macrophytes are more than 0.64, while the Pearson correlation coefficients for them are no less than 0.71. Overall, the MDM performs effectively in simulating metacommunity dynamics. For all river stations, the average contributions of biological interaction, flow regime effects, and water quality effects to multi-population dynamics are 64%, 21%, and 15%, respectively, suggesting that the population dynamics are dominated by biological interaction. For upstream stations, the fish population is 8%–22% more responsive to flow regime alteration than other populations, while other populations are 9%–26% more responsive to changes in water quality conditions than fish. For downstream stations, flow regime effects on each population account for less than 1% due to more stable hydrological conditions. The innovative contribution of this study lies in proposing a multi-population model to quantify the effects of flow regime and water quality on aquatic community dynamics by incorporating multiple indicators of water quantity, water quality, and biomass. This work has potential for the ecological restoration of rivers at the ecosystem level. This study also highlights the importance of considering threshold and tipping point issues when analyzing the “water quantity-water quality-aquatic ecology” nexus in future works.

Lane-changing (LC) in congested traffic has been identified as a trigger for the sudden deceleration behavior of the new follower in the target lane, leading to severe traffic disturbances. Thus, investigating the response of the new follower to an LC maneuver is an important research topic in the literature. To date, numerous efforts have been devoted to understanding the impact of the lane changer on the new follower after the insertion, while less attention has been given to this influence during the pre-insertion stage (anticipation). Therefore, this paper aims to establish a new car-following (CF) model to capture the new follower's driving behavior during anticipation. Specifically, we introduce an attention mechanism deviating from Newell's CF rules to quantify the impact of anticipation. Then, we apply a neural network with an attention layer to estimate the attention mechanism and incorporate it into the Newell CF model, which yields a new CF model, denoted as CF_Attention. Using real-world trajectory data, we design three experiments and select three representative CF models to validate the CF_Attention. The results indicate that the CF_Attention outperforms the other models in predicting the new follower's trajectory, which is not affected by the heterogeneous behavior of the new follower and the anticipation duration. Additionally, the CF_Attention is proven effective in capturing the speed-space relationship and the formation of oscillation. Finally, our transferability test suggests that the CF_Attention is promising for different locations and times without requiring retraining. The results of this study could advance the integration of the LC impact and CF behavior, and could be implemented into commercial traffic simulation programs to describe vehicle movements in traffic flow more accurately.

Recent years, the sintered silver paste was introduced and further developed for power electronics packaging due to low processing temperature and high working temperature. The pressure-less sintering technology reduces the stress damage caused by the pressure to the chip, improves reliability, and is widely applied in manufacturing. Currently, most existed studies are focused on alcohol-based sintered silver pastes while resins have been demonstrated to improve the bonding properties of solder joints. Hence, the performance and sintering mechanisms with epoxy-based silver paste need to be further explored. In this work, a methodology for multifactor investigation is settled on the epoxy-based silver paste to reveal the relationship between the strength and the different influence factors. We first analyzed the characteristics of commercialized epoxy-based silver paste samples, including silver content, silver particle size, organic composition, sample viscosity, and thermal conductivity. Samples were then prepared for shear tests and microstructure analysis under different pressure-less sintering temperatures, holding time, substrate surface, and chip size. Full factor analysis results were further discussed in detail for correlation. The influence factors were ranked from strong to weak as follows: sintering temperature, substrate surface, chip size, and holding time. Finally, a thermal cycling test was carried out for reliability analysis. Epoxy residues are one of the possible reasons, which result in shear strength decreasing exponentially.