Applied Sciences, Volume 8, Issue 9

Protective coatings, in recent years also from nanocomposite formulations, are commonly applied onto architectural stone and stone artefacts, mainly to prevent absorption of condensed water and dissolved atmospheric pollutants into the porous stone s...

One of the main topics of Smart Home (SH) research is the recognition of activities performed by its inhabitants, which is considered to be one of the bases to foster new technological solutions inside the home, including services to prolong independ...

Recent advancements in material technologies have promoted the development of various preparation strategies and applications of novel polymer–nanoclay composites. Innovative synthesis pathways have resulted in novel polymer–nanoclay comp...

A series of natural photoactive dyes, named as D1–D6 were successfully extracted from six kinds of plant leaves for solar cells. The photoelectrical properties of dyes were measured via UV-Vis absorption spectra, cyclic voltammetry as well as p...

Undesirable outputs, such as carbon emissions and loss of property due to traffic accidents, hold great significance for the sustainable development of the transport industry. In this study, we applied a super-efficiency data envelopment analysis mod...

We present an analytical model of a flapping-wing actuator, including its electrical, aerodynamic, and mechanical systems, for estimating the lift force from the input electrical power. The actuator is modeled as a two-degree-of-freedom kinematic sys...

As a clean and renewable energy source, wave energy is of great significance in solving primary energy shortages and environmental pollution. Direct-drive wave power systems consisting of linear generators have attracted the attention of researchers...

The weld form of intersecting joints in a steel tubular truss structure changes with the various intersecting curves. As the key role of joints in energy dissipation and seismic resistance, the weld is easy to damage, as a result the constitutive beh...

Office employees are exposed to acoustic noise, especially in an open office environment. Passive or active headsets sufficiently reduce the level of noise, but their long-time wear is uncomfortable. The paper presents an active headrest system built...

Alternative low-cost sources (e.g., balloons, gun fires) are used for impulse response measurements when a dodecahedron speaker is not available. This study sets to explore the applicability of a method utilizing a common directional loudspeaker as a...

This paper describes the theory and implementation of a digital audio workstation plug-in for chord sequence generation. The plug-in is intended to encourage and inspire a composer of electronic dance music to explore loops through chord sequence pat...

Long-term durability of the vacuum edge seal plays a significant part in retrofitting triple vacuum glazing (TVG) to existing buildings in achieving progress towards a zero-energy building (ZEB) target. Vacuum pressure decrement with respect to time...

In this paper, a novel method to quantify the incubation of damage on piezoelectric crystal is presented. An intrinsic length scale parameter obtained from nonlocal field theory is used as a novel measure for quantification of damage precursor. Featu...

Occasionally, wind curtailments may be required to avoid an oversupply when wind power, together with the minimum conventional generation, exceed load. By curtailing wind power, the forecast uncertainty and short-term variations in wind power can be...

It is well known in literature that frequency fluctuations of different physical quantities clearly show 1/f noise power spectra. In the present work, the authors observe that in some brittle materials, such as concrete, masonry, and mortar, Acoustic...

The qualitative analysis for structural robustness study subjected to severe earthquakes is unable to meet engineering requirements, and a quantitative analysis method for structural robustness is needed to be proposed. The existing analysis methods,...

The article describes the effect of a magnetic field applied to a ferrofluid–lubricated hydrodynamic journal bearing–rotor system. A rotor with a single journal bearing in one end was built to be the test rig. The experimental results sho...

The intent of this paper is to provide an overview of basic concepts, types, techniques, and experimental studies of the current state-of-the-art Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSSs). FSS is a periodic surface with identical two-dimensional arrays of...

Image adjustment methods are one of the most widely used post-processing techniques for enhancing image quality and improving the visual preference of the human visual system (HVS). However, the assessment of the adjusted images has been mainly depen...

An excimer laser three-dimensional (3D) micromachining system is proposed based on a mask image projection method and the optical diffraction effect. The effects of optical diffraction on the laser machining rate are evaluated using a hole-arrayed ma...

Over recent years, much attention has been paid to the performance evaluation of industrial-type burners. The ignition and stable combustion process are of great significance in assessing the quality of burner. The planar laser-induced fluorescence (...

This paper investigated the property evolutions of Mo thin films that were subjected to post-sputtering heat treatments from 700 °C to 1100 °C. It was found that, after annealing, the use of Si wafers eliminated crack formations found in prev...

In recent years, healthcare has attracted much attention, which is looking for more and more data analytics in healthcare to relieve medical problems in medical staff shortage, ageing population, people living alone, and quality of life. Data mining,...

This paper aims to achieve real-time and accurate detection of surface defects by using a deep learning method. For this purpose, the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) network was adopted as the meta structure and combined with the base convolution...

In this paper, we propose a combined metasurface consisting of an aluminum substrate and an array of TiO₂ blocks to achieve a wideband terahertz absorber. We incorporated several similar dielectric blocks with different side length into each unit cel...

Dynamic optimization has wide applications in scientific and industrial researches. Multiresolution techniques provide an efficient way to solve dynamic optimization problems but have some disadvantages. An improved multiresolution technique is devel...

Neural style transfer, which has attracted great attention in both academic research and industrial engineering and demonstrated very exciting and remarkable results, is the technique of migrating the semantic content of one image to different artist...

The extended Kalman filter (EKF) as a primary integration scheme has been applied in the Global Positioning System (GPS) and inertial navigation system (INS) integrated system. Nevertheless, the inherent drawbacks of EKF contain not only instability...

By using different weights to deal with the autocorrelation function data of every delay time period, the information utilization of dynamic light scattering can be obviously enhanced in the information-weighted constrained regularization inversion,...

The Johnson–Holmquist-II(JH-2) model is introduced as the constitutive model for rock materials in tunnel smooth blasting. However, complicated and/or high-cost experiments need to be carried out to obtain the parameters of the JH-2 constitutiv...

Nearest neighbor search is a very active field in machine learning. It appears in many application cases, including classification and object retrieval. In its naive implementation, the complexity of the search is linear in the product of the dimensi...

The stator inter-turn short circuit fault is one of the most common and key faults in permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM). This paper introduces a time–frequency method for inter-turn fault detection in stator winding of PMSM using improv...

In electrical engineering problems, bio- and nature-inspired optimization techniques are valuable ways to minimize or maximize an objective function. We use the root tree algorithm (RTO), inspired by the random movement of roots, to search for the gl...

To improve the performance of petroleum asphalt, bio-char was used as a modifier for a petroleum asphalt binder, in this study. The rheological properties of bio-char modified asphalt binders were compared with different particle sizes and contents,...

Piezoelectric actuators are widely utilized to convert electrical energy into mechanical strain with considerable potential in micro mobile robot applications. However, the use of Pb-based Lanthanumdoped Zirconate Titanates (PZTs) leads to two diffic...

Ship-to-shore (STS) container cranes are important pieces of equipment in container terminals for container handling, so they need to be properly designed to avoid damage or collapse due to natural hazards (i.e., storms or earthquakes). However, the...

This article presents a framework to integrate and optimize the design of large-scale wind turbines. Annual energy production, load analysis, the structural design of components and the wind farm operation model are coupled to perform a system-level...

We present a wideband metamaterial (MM) filter based on a metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) structure. The proposed structure consists of a quartz dielectric substrate and two metallic square-loop arrays, which were deposited on both surfaces of the subst...

Sintered metal porous media are widely used in a broad range of industrial equipment. Generally, the flow properties in porous media are represented by an incompressible Darcy‒Forchheimer regime. This study uses a modified Forchheimer equation to rep...

A new strategy that repairs severely damaged reinforced concrete (RC) columns after an earthquake is proposed as a simpler and quicker solution with respect to the strategies currently available in the literature. The external concrete parts are remo...

The effect of sediment on the hydraulics of jet energy dissipation is an urgent issue for high dams built on sediment-laden rivers. Accordingly, flume experiments were conducted using a ski-jump type energy dissipator in flows of four sediment concen...

Decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms provide a good framework for static multi-objective optimization. Nevertheless, there are few studies on their use in dynamic optimization. To solve dynamic multi-objective optimization prob...

The purpose of the current investigation was two-fold: (i) to describe the development of 3D printed prostheses using antibacterial filaments and (ii) to verify the antibacterial properties of the 3D printed prostheses. Three-dimensional printed fing...

An important challenge in optical communications is the generation of highest-quality waveforms with a Mach–Zehnder modulator with a limited electrical swing (V_pp). For this, we discuss, under limited V_pp, the influence of the waveform design o...

In this article, the Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) with posterior clustering and visualization is introduced and applied to extract important features to reveal households’ characteristics based on electricity usage data. The main goal of...

Aspergillus flavus and A. parsiticus produce aflatoxins that are highly toxic to mammals and birds. In this study, the inhibitory effects of 1,8-cineole and t-cinnamaldehyde were examined on the growth of Aspergillus flavus ATCC 22546 and aflatoxin p...

In recent years, concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) bridges have been widely used in bridge construction. However, interface disengaging is one of the bridges’ most common defects. It affects not only the confinement of the steel tube to the...

We have demonstrated sum-frequency generation of a compact continuous-wave orange laser in a step-chirped magnesium oxide doped periodically poled lithium niobate in single-pass mode. A 974 nm laser diode was mixed with a C-band amplified spontaneous...

We propose a new deep learning network capable of successfully segmenting intervertebral discs and their complex boundaries from magnetic resonance (MR) spine images. The existing U-network (U-net) is known to perform well in various segmentation tas...

For diminishing welding defects such as incomplete penetration, which may easily occur during the twin wire Double Pulsed Metal Inert Gas (DP-MIG) high-speed welding, a novel method using additional shielding gas is introduced in this paper. A branch...