Topic Review
Smart Electro-Clothing Systems
This entry presents an overview of the smart electro-clothing systems (SeCSs) targeted at health monitoring, sports benefits, fitness tracking, and social activities. Technical features of the available SeCSs, covering both textile and electronic components, are thoroughly discussed and their applications in the industry and research purposes are highlighted. In addition, it also presents the developments in the associated areas of wearable sensor systems and textile-based dry sensors. As became evident during the literature research, such a review on SeCSs covering all relevant issues has not been presented before. This entry will be particularly helpful for new generation researchers who are and will be investigating the design, development, function, and comforts of the sensor integrated clothing materials.
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  • 01 Nov 2020
Topic Review
GNSS Denied Environments
The GNSS information is vulnerable to external interference and causes failure when unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are in a fully autonomous flight in complex environments such as high-rise parks and dense forests. This paper presents a pan-tilt based visual servoing (PBVS) method for obtaining world coordinate information. The system is equipped with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), an air pressure sensor, a magnetometer, and a pan-tilt-zoom(PTZ) camera. In this paper, we explain the physical model and the application method of the PBVS system which can be briefly summarized as follows. We track the operation target with a UAV carrying a camera and output the information about the UAV's position and the angle between the PTZ and the anchor point. In this way, we can obtain the current absolute position information of the UAV with its absolute altitude collected by the height sensing unit and absolute geographic coordinate information and altitude information of the tracked target. We have set up an actual UAV experimental environment. In order to meet the calculation requirements, some sensor data will be sent to the cloud through the network.Through the field tests, it can be concluded that the systematic deviation of the overall solution is less than the error of ordinary GNSS sensor equipment, and it can provide navigation coordinate information for the UAV in complex environments. Compared with traditional visual navigation systems, our scheme has the advantage of obtaining absolute, continuous, accurate and efficient navigation information in a short distance (within 15m from the target). This system can be used in scenarios that require autonomous cruise, such as self-powered inspections of UAVs, patrols in parks, etc.
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  • 30 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Parliamentary Train
A Parliamentary train is a passenger service operated in the United Kingdom to comply with the Railway Regulation Act 1844 that required train companies to provide inexpensive and basic rail transport for less affluent passengers. The act required that at least one such service per day be run on every railway route in the UK. Now no longer a legal requirement (although most franchise agreements require such trains), the term describes train services that continue to be run to avoid the cost of formal closure of a route or station but with reduced services often to just one train per week and without specially low prices. Such services are often called "ghost trains".
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  • 10 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Titanium in Civil Engineering
Titanium has exceptional durability, very high specific strength, a thermal expansion coefficient similar to construction materials, low weight density, and its cost has drastically decreased over the last decades. One of the main requirements in conservation engineering is the durability of the retrofit materials and the reversibility of interventions, and a possible interesting solution is the use of titanium alloys coupled with inorganic matrices made of low-cement or lime mortars. Titanium has recently been used to reinforce important masonry and archeological monuments, but little is known about this. Its use is increasing in conservation engineering without adequate knowledge of its characteristics, grades, and properties.
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  • 13 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Pianet
The Pianet is a type of electro-mechanical piano built by the Hohner company of Trossingen, West Germany, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. The designer of the early Pianet models was Ernst Zacharias, basing the mechanism closely on a 1920s design by Lloyd Loar. The Pianet was a variant of the earlier reed-based Hohner electric piano the Cembalet which, like the Pianet, was intended for home use. Hohner offered both keyboards in their range until the early 1970s. The Pianet production consisted of two distinctly different mechanism groups with characteristically different sound. The first group, lasting from introduction to 1977, had ground stainless steel reeds, a pick-up using variable capacitance, and leather faced activation pads. The second group from 1977 until the end of production used rolled spring-steel reeds, electro-magnetic pick-ups, and moulded silicone rubber activation pads.
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  • 21 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Spyros Hirdaris - Hydroelasticity of Ships
As a generic definition, hydroelasticity is the branch of science concerned with the interactions of deformable bodies with the water environment in which they operate. Hydroelasticity as the naval counterpart to aeroelasticity recognizes that at fluid structure interaction level significant differences may exist between the hydrodynamic, inertia, and elastic forces experienced by a floating marine structure. In other words, the fluid pressure acting on the structure modifies its dynamic state and, in return, the motion and distortion of the structure disturb the pressure field around it.
  • 1.5K
  • 29 Oct 2020
Topic Review
On Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0
In the era of the fourth industrial revolution, several concepts have arisen in parallel with this new revolution, such as predictive maintenance, which today plays a key role in sustainable manufacturing and production systems by introducing a digital version of machine maintenance. The data extracted from production processes have increased exponentially due to the proliferation of sensing technologies. Even if Maintenance 4.0 faces organizational, financial, or even data source and machine repair challenges, it remains a strong point for the companies that use it. Indeed, it allows for minimizing machine downtime and associated costs, maximizing the life cycle of the machine, and improving the quality and cadence of production.
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  • 24 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Geothermal Heat Pump
A geothermal heat pump (GHP) or ground source heat pump (GSHP) is a type of heat pump used to heat and/or cool a building by exchanging heat with ground, often through a vapor-compression refrigeration cycle. It uses the earth all the time, without any intermittency, as a heat source (in the winter) or a heat sink (in the summer). This design takes advantage of the moderate temperatures in the ground to boost efficiency and reduce the operational costs of heating and cooling systems, and may be combined with solar heating to form a geosolar system with even greater efficiency. They are also known by other names, including geoexchange, earth-coupled, earth energy systems. The engineering and scientific communities prefer the terms "geoexchange" or "ground source heat pumps" to avoid confusion with traditional geothermal power, which uses a high-temperature heat source to generate electricity. Ground source heat pumps harvest heat absorbed at the Earth's surface from solar energy. The temperature in the ground below 6 metres (20 ft) is roughly equal to the local mean annual air temperature (MAAT). Depending on latitude, the temperature beneath the upper 6 metres (20 ft) of Earth's surface maintains a nearly constant temperature reflecting the mean average annual air temperature (in many areas, between 10 and 16 °C/50 and 60 °F), if the temperature is undisturbed by the presence of a heat pump. Like a refrigerator or air conditioner, these systems use a heat pump to force the transfer of heat from the ground. Heat pumps can transfer heat from a cool space to a warm space, against the natural direction of flow, or they can enhance the natural flow of heat from a warm area to a cool one. The core of the heat pump is a loop of refrigerant pumped through a vapor-compression refrigeration cycle that moves heat. Air source heat pumps are typically more efficient at heating than pure electric heaters, even when extracting heat from cold winter air, although efficiencies begin dropping significantly as outside air temperatures drop below 5 °C (41 °F). A ground source heat pump exchanges heat with the ground. This is much more energy-efficient because underground temperatures are more stable than air temperatures throughout the year. Seasonal variations drop off with depth and disappear below 7 metres (23 ft) to 12 metres (39 ft) due to thermal inertia. Like a cave, the shallow ground temperature is warmer than the air above during the winter and cooler than the air in the summer. A ground source heat pump extracts ground heat in the winter (for heating) and transfers heat back into the ground in the summer (for cooling). Some systems are designed to operate in one mode only, heating or cooling, depending on climate. Geothermal pump systems reach fairly high coefficient of performance (CoP), 3 to 6, on the coldest of winter nights, compared to 1.75–2.5 for air-source heat pumps on cool days. Ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) are among the most energy-efficient technologies for providing HVAC and water heating. Setup costs are higher than for conventional systems, but the difference is usually returned in energy savings in 3 to 10 years. Geothermal heat pump systems are reasonably warranted by manufacturers, and their working life is estimated at 25 years for inside components and 50+ years for the ground loop. As of 2004, there are over one million units installed worldwide providing 12 GW of thermal capacity, with an annual growth rate of 10%.
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  • 11 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Friction Spot Stir Welding
In the last decade, the friction stir welding of polymers has been increasingly investigated by the means of more and more sophisticated approaches. Since the early studies, which were aimed at proving the feasibility of the process for polymers and identifying suitable processing windows, great improvements have been achieved. This owes to the increasing care of academic researchers and industrial demands. These improvements have their roots in the promising results from pioneer studies; however, they are also the fruits of the adoption of more comprehensive approaches and the multidisciplinary analyses of results. The introduction of instrumented machines has enabled the online measurement of processing loads and temperature, and critical understanding of the principal aspects affecting the material flow and welds quality. Such improvements are also clearly demonstrated by the increase of the strength of recent joints (up to 99% of joining efficiency) as compared to those reached in early researches (almost 47%). This article provides a comprehensive review of the recent progresses on the process fundamentals, quality assessment and the influence of process parameters on the mechanical behavior. In addition, emphasis is given to new developments and future perspectives.
  • 1.5K
  • 28 Oct 2020
Topic Review
3D Cell Culture
A 3D cell culture is an artificially created environment in which biological cells are permitted to grow or interact with their surroundings in all three dimensions. Unlike 2D environments (e.g. a Petri dish), a 3D cell culture allows cells in vitro to grow in all directions, similar to how they would in vivo. These three-dimensional cultures are usually grown in bioreactors, small capsules in which the cells can grow into spheroids, or 3D cell colonies. Approximately 300 spheroids are usually cultured per bioreactor.
  • 1.5K
  • 30 Nov 2022
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