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Adopting augmented reality in the age of industrial digitalisation
No full textIndustrial augmented reality (IAR) is one of the key pillars of the industrial digitalisation concepts, which connects workers with the physical world through overlaying digital information. Augmented reality (AR) market is increasing but still its adoption levels are low in industry. While companies strive to learn and adopt AR, there are chances that they fail in such endeavours due to lack of understanding key challenges and success factors in this space. This study identifies critical success factors and challenges for IAR implementation projects based on field experiments. The broadly used technology, organisation, environment (TOE) framework was used as a theoretical basis for the study, while 22 experiments were conducted for validation. It is found that, while technological aspects are of importance, organisational issues are more relevant for industry, which has not been reflected to the same extent in the literature
Aerodynamics of boundary layer ingesting fuselage fans
No full textBoundary layer ingestion (BLI) potentially offers significant reductions in fuel burn and pollutant emissions. The propulsive fuselage concept features a fan at the back of the airframe that ingests the 360 deg fuselage boundary layer. Consequently, the distortion at the fan face during cruise is close to radial. This article aims to devise and test a fan design philosophy that is tuned to this inflow distortion. Initially, a free-vortex fan design matched to clean inflow is presented. The effects of BLI on the aerodynamics of this fan are investigated. A series of design steps are then presented to develop the baseline fan into a new design matched to fuselage BLI inflow. Both fan designs have been tested within a low-speed rig. The impact of the fan design changes on the aerodynamics and the performance with BLI are evaluated using the test results. This article presents the successful application of a unique experimental facility for the analysis of BLI fuselage fans. It shows that it is possible to design a fan that accepts the radial distortion caused by fuselage BLI with a modified profile of work input. The new fan design was found to increase the work input by 4.9% and to improve the efficiency by 2.75% relative to a fan designed for clean flow. This new fan design has reduced loading near the hub to account for the incoming distortion and increased mid span loading and negative incidence toward the tip for tolerance to circumferential distortion off-design
Comprehensive characterization of mainstream marijuana and tobacco smoke
No full textRecent increases in marijuana use and legalization without adequate knowledge of the risks necessitate the characterization of the billions of nanoparticles contained in each puff of smoke. Tobacco smoke offers a benchmark given that it has been extensively studied. Tobacco and marijuana smoke particles are quantitatively similar in volatility, shape, density and number concentration, albeit with differences in size, total mass and chemical composition. Particles from marijuana smoke are on average 29% larger in mobility diameter than particles from tobacco smoke and contain 3.4× more total mass. New measurements of semi-volatile fractions determine over 97% of the mass and volume of the particles from either smoke source are comprised of semi-volatile compounds. For tobacco and marijuana smoke, respectively, 4350 and 2575 different compounds are detected, of which, 670 and 536 (231 in common) are tentatively identified, and of these, 173 and 110 different compounds (69 in common) are known to cause negative health effects through carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, or other toxic mechanisms. This study demonstrates striking similarities between marijuana and tobacco smoke in terms of their physical and chemical properties
Materials and Device Considerations in Electrophoretic Drug Delivery Devices
No full textElectrophoretic drug delivery devices are able to deliver drugs with exceptional temporal and spatial precision. This technology has emerged as a promising platform for treating pathologies ranging from neuropathic pain to epilepsy. As the range of applications continues to expand, there is an urgent need to understand the underlying physics and estimate materials and device parameters for optimal performance. Here, computational modeling of the electrophoretic drug delivery device is carried out. Three critical performance indices, namely, the amount of drug transported, the pumping efficiency and the ON/OFF ratio are investigated as a function of initial drug concentration in the device and fixed charge concentration in the ion exchange membrane. The results provide guidelines for future materials and device design with an eye towards tailoring device performance to match disease-specific demands
Those who do not move, do not notice their (supply) chains—inconvenient lessons from disruptions related to COVID-19
No full textEnergy retrofit potential evaluation: The regione lombardia school building asset
No full textThis chapter summarizes a long list of research activities aimed at defining a method to assess the retrofit potential of school buildings, based on maintenance needs, energy-saving potential, and the life cycle cost of the retrofitted building. New concepts are introduced as the gained comfort cost (GCC) as well as new methods are suggested as a probabilistic approach to describe users’ behavior. Moreover, innovative methods as artificial neural networks have been employed to predict school buildings’ energy performances. The GCC is a new key performance indicator employed to compare different retrofit strategies, focusing on a single classroom. Furthermore, the retrofit potential is evaluated also for the whole school building, exploiting building information modelling (BIM) to collect and transfer information to the building energy model (BEM). This method to analyze energy savings associated with the retrofit of a school building is combined with a method to manage and forecast the running costs of building stocks. The cost forecasting method has been validated through 11 case studies. Eventually, the scale is widened to all the school buildings in Regione Lombardia and the potential energy savings are computed by artificial neural networks (ANN) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). These methods allow to evaluate energy retrofit potential of school buildings and their life cycle costs at different scales of intervention, from the single classroom to all the buildings in a region, allowing the public decision-maker to choose the best policy for retrofitting his school building stock
Comparing agent-based control architectures for next generation telecommunication network infrastructures
No full textMulti-agent systems have been an effective choice for designing control systems that are flexible and agile. However, few attention has been given to the evaluation of the architectures of such systems. This becomes critical with the emerging requirements in complex domains such as digital network infrastructures. In this paper, we propose an approach for the evaluation of agent-based control architectures and introduce three multi-agent based architectures for the supervisory control of network service operations of the next generation of digital infrastructures. With the proposed approach, we evaluated the architectures and the implemented control systems prototypes under a realistic network infrastructure environment. Our approach has been effective to evaluate the candidate architectures. The results of communication overhead and reaction time, have shown that agent-based hierarchical and heterarchical-ring architectures have outperformed the heterarchical-complete network architecture
The role of single-cell mechanical behaviour and polarity in driving collective cell migration
No full text© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. The directed migration of cell collectives is essential in various physiological processes, such as epiboly, intestinal epithelial turnover, and convergent extension during morphogenesis, as well as during pathological events such as wound healing and cancer metastasis. Collective cell migration leads to the emergence of coordinated movements over multiple cells. Our current understanding emphasizes that these movements are mainly driven by large-scale transmission of signals through adherens junctions. In this study, we show that collective movements of epithelial cells can be triggered by polarity signals at the single-cell level through the establishment of coordinated lamellipodial protrusions. We designed a minimalistic model system to generate one-dimensional epithelial trains confined in ring-shaped patterns that recapitulate rotational movements observed in vitro in cellular monolayers and in vivo in genital or follicular cell rotation. Using our system, we demonstrated that cells follow coordinated rotational movements after establishing directed Rac1-dependent polarity over the entire monolayer. Our experimental and numerical approaches show that the maintenance of coordinated migration requires the acquisition of a front–rear polarity within each single cell but does not require the maintenance of cell–cell junctions. Taken together, these unexpected findings demonstrate that collective cell dynamics in closed environments as observed in multiple in vitro and in vivo situations can arise from single-cell behaviour through a sustained memory of cell polarity
Wireless Energy-On-Demand Using Magnetic Quasi-Resonant Coupling
No full textThis article proposes and implements a novel magnetic quasi-resonant coupling (MQRC) scheme to realize the concept of energy-on-demand wireless power transfer (WPT). To prevent illegal receivers harvesting wireless energy, the proposed energy-on-demand technology nominates the authorized receiver to take over the initiative and generate a well-defended security key based on a two-dimensional frequency-and-duration chaos. The switched-capacitorless quasi-resonant transmitter flexibly employs a new continuous operating frequency regulation strategy to self-adapt the arbitrary energy-on-demand from the authorized receiver, hence achieving synchronous multifrequency WPT. Moreover, the proposed MQRC-WPT system takes the merit of power transmission enhancement over conventional one while improving the transmission efficiency especially during low power level. Theoretical analysis, electromagnetic simulation, and practical experimentation are provided to verify the feasibility of proposed energy-on-demand MQRC-WPT system with security
Extreme Values in Optical Fiber Communication Systems
No full textExtreme value theory provides a framework to assess rare but extreme events such as network outages or cycle slips. We present the theory of extreme value statistics and its application to optical fiber communication systems