The exceptional characteristics of magnesium alloys make them appropriate materials in various applications, although their low corrosion resistance critically limits their use. Sol−gel coating is among the most efficient ways to avoid corrosion, and silanes/siloxane polymers play a very essential role in the formation of sol−gel coating materials. These materials form very stable chemical bonds on surfaces of metals because of their siloxane (−Si−O−) network along with their thermal and chemical stability. In this work, the current progress of silane-based coatings on magnesium alloys is reviewed. First, we have focused on hybrid organic− inorganic sol−gel coatings using silanes and then a critical examination of protection effects of these coatings on a magnesium alloy. Modification methods of these coatings to achieve improved barrier properties have also been emphasized along with the role of silanes in the making of superhydrophobic surfaces. The recent development of silanes as outstanding precursors was also highlighted.

Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution devices can assist the blind in sensing the visual environment by translating the visual information into a sound pattern. To improve the translation quality, the task performances of the blind are usually employed to evaluate different encoding schemes. In contrast to the toilsome human-based assessment, we argue that machine model can be also developed for evaluation, and more efficient. To this end, we firstly propose two distinct cross-modal perception model w.r.t. the late-blind and congenitally-blind cases, which aim to generate concrete visual contents based on the translated sound. To validate the functionality of proposed models, two novel optimization strategies w.r.t. the primary encoding scheme are presented. Further, we conduct sets of human-based experiments to evaluate and compare them with the conducted machine-based assessments in the cross-modal generation task. Their highly consistent results w.r.t. different encoding schemes indicate that using machine model to acceler-

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Recent progress on the application of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for metallurgical analysis particularly achieved by Chinese research community is briefly reviewed in this article. The content is mainly focused on the progress in experimental research and calibration methods toward LIBS applications for metallurgical online analysis over the past few years. Different experiment setups such as single-pulse and double-pulses LIBS schematics are introduced. Various calibration methods for different metallic samples are presented. Quantitative results reported in the literature and obtained in the analysis of various samples with different calibration methods are summarized. At the last section of this article, the difficulties of LIBS application for molten metal analysis in a furnace are discussed.Keywords laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), metallurgical analysis, molten metal, calibration methods 52.90.+z PACS numbers

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