Ultra-Damping Composites Enhanced by Yolk–Shell Piezoelectric Damping Mechanism

High-performance damping materials are significant toward reducing vibration and maintaining stability for industrial applications. Herein, a yolk–shell piezoelectric damping mechanism is reported, which can enhance mechanical energy dissipation and improve damping capability. With the addition of yolk–shell particles and carbon nanotube (CNT) conductive network, damping properties of various resin matrices are enhanced with the energy dissipation path of mechanical to electrical to heat energy. Particularly, the peak loss factor of epoxy composites reaches 1.91 and tan δ area increases by 25.72% at 20 °C. The results prove the general applicability of yolk–shell piezoelectric damping mechanism. Besides, the novel damping materials also exhibit excellent flexibility, stretchability, and resilience, offering a promising application toward damping coating, indicating broad scope of application in transportation and sophisticated electronics, etc.     

Plasmon-Assisted Self-Encrypted All-Optical Memory

All-optical responsive nanomaterials, which can rapidly switch between two stable states, have been regarded as the next-generation memories due to their potential to realize binary information storage and implement on-chip, integrated photonic neuromorphic systems. Rare earth oxides are preeminent candidates owing to their extraordinary luminescent stability and narrow optical transitions. However, due to the lack of simple and effective optical switches, it is difficult to realize all-optical data storage, encoding, and retrieval by pure rare earth-doped luminescent nanoparticles. Here, a rapid and high-contrast of 10⁴ luminescent switching of Y₂O₃:Eu³⁺ nanoparticle between the enhancement and quenching states is achieved by employing the strong light confinement and ultrafast thermal response of localized surface plasmon resonance. A self-encrypted all-optical memory is presented with optical information writing, encryption, reading, and re-writing, and a high-sensitivity synaptic response of emitters to frequency and light intensity flux, which can be harnessed to encrypt information flows and promote convenient and high-security information encryption. Such a convenient and secure plasmonic thermally assisted self-encrypting luminescent switch paves the way for constructing high-performance stimuli-responsive rare earth oxide crystals on demand and expanding their applications in various data encryption, anti-counterfeiting, and rewritable colouration devices.     

An Intrinsically Nonflammable Electrolyte for Prominent-Safety Lithium Metal Batteries with High Energy Density and Cycling Stability

Nex-generation high-energy-density storage battery, assembled with lithium (Li)-metal anode and nickel-rich cathode, puts forward urgent demand for advanced electrolytes that simultaneously possess high security, wide electrochemical window, and good compatibility with electrode materials. Herein an intrinsically nonflammable electrolyte is designed by using 1 M lithium difluoro(oxalato)borate (LiDFOB) in triethyl phosphate (TEP) and N-methyl-N-propyl-pyrrolidinium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide [Pyr₁₃][TFSI] ionic liquid (IL) solvents. The introduction of IL can bring plentiful organic cations and anions, which provides a cation shielding effect and regulates the Li⁺ solvation structure with plentiful Li⁺-DFOB⁻ and Li⁺-TFSI⁻ complexes. The unique Li⁺ solvation structure can induce stable anion-derived electrolyte/electrode interphases, which effectively inhibit Li dendrite growth and suppress side reactions between TEP and electrodes. Therefore, the LiNi_0.9Co_0.05Mn_0.05O₂ (NCM90)/Li coin cell with this electrolyte can deliver stable cycling even under 4.5 V and 60 °C. Moreover, a Li-metal battery with thick NCM90 cathode (≈ 15 mg cm⁻²) and thin Li-metal anode (≈ 50 µm) (N/P ≈ 3), also reveals stable cycling performance under 4.4 V. And a 2.2 Ah NCM90/Li pouch cell can simultaneously possess prominent safety with stably passing the nail penetration test, and high gravimetric energy density of 470 Wh kg⁻¹ at 4.4 V.     

MXene Functionalized,Highly Breathable and Sensitive Pressure Sensors with Multi-Layered Porous Structure

Breathable, flexible, and highly sensitive pressure sensors have drawn increasing attention due to their potential in wearable electronics for body-motion monitoring, human-machine interfaces, etc. However, current pressure sensors are usually assembled with polymer substrates or encapsulation layers, thus causing discomfort during wearing (i.e., low air/vapor permeability, mechanical mismatch) and restricting their applications. A breathable and flexible pressure sensor is reported with nonwoven fabrics as both the electrode (printed with MXene interdigitated electrode) and sensing (coated with MXene/silver nanowires) layers via a scalable screen-printing approach. Benefiting from the multi-layered porous structure, the sensor demonstrates good air permeability with high sensitivity (770.86–1434.89 kPa⁻¹), a wide sensing range (0–100 kPa), fast response/recovery time (70/81 ms), and low detection limit (≈1 Pa). Particularly, this sensor can detect full-scale human motion (i.e., small-scale pulse beating and large-scale walking/running) with high sensitivity, excellent cycling stability, and puncture resistance. Additionally, the sensing layer of the pressure sensor also displays superior sensitivity to humidity changes, which is verified by successfully monitoring human breathing and spoken words while wearing a sensor-embedded mask. Given the outstanding features, this breathable sensor shows promise in the wearable electronic field for body health monitoring, sports activity detection, and disease diagnosis.     

A Visible and Near-Infrared Light-Fueled Omnidirectional Twist-Bend Crawling Robot

In recent years, although light-driven soft actuators have attracted intense scientific attention and achieved remarkable progress, the design and construction of an intelligent robotic system with maneuverability, self-adaptability, untethered control, and greater freedom of action, in particular the omnidirectional motion capability on a plane, remains challenging. Herein, four types of photo-thermal fillers and an unprecedented twist-bend actuation mode is introduced into a liquid crystal elastomer-based soft robot. The obtained twist-bend crawling robot not only exhibits in situ rotation, four-way turning, and four-way linear motion under light irradiation with four wavelength bands (520, 655, 808, and 980 nm), but also demonstrates the ability to avoid obstacles in complex geographical environments. This work may bring a new perspective for fabrication and development of soft robots that can adapt to dynamic and complex environmental conditions.     

Asymptotic switched composite adaptive control with application to robotic interaction tasks

This article proposes a new switched adaptive control design for uncertain switched systems with composite (time-driven and state-dependent) switching and shows its applicability in switched impedance control. A composite switched adaptive control design, consisting of the direct switched adaptive control and the indirect switched adaptive control counterpart, is developed to improve the control performance. Specifically, a new stability condition for composite switching is proposed by making use of differential matrix equations and Sylvester matrix equations, which are a generalization of Lyapunov matrix equations. The design results in a time-varying multiple Lyapunov function that is decreasing at the switching instants. From the theoretical point of view, the relevance of this work is the construction of the adaptive laws that guarantee asymptotic tracking error and asymptotic estimation for the direct and indirect switched adaptive control loops, respectively. From the practical point of view, the relevance of this work is validated in a new switched impedance control for the robot interaction with uncertain and discontinuous environments.     

Kinematic Control of Serial Manipulators Under False Data Injection Attack

With advanced communication technologies, cyber-physical systems such as networked industrial control systems can be monitored and controlled by a remote control center via communication networks. While lots of benefits can be achieved with such a configuration, it also brings the concern of cyber attacks to the industrial control systems, such as networked manipulators that are widely adopted in industrial automation. For such systems, a false data injection attack on a control-center-to-manipulator (CC-M) communication channel is undesirable, and has negative effects on the manufacture quality. In this paper, we propose a resilient remote kinematic control method for serial manipulators undergoing a false data injection attack by leveraging the kinematic model. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed method can guarantee asymptotic convergence of the regulation error to zero in the presence of a type of false data injection attack. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated via simulations.      

适用于车头泊入的路径规划和跟踪控制新方法

自动泊车作为智能汽车自动驾驶技术的一个关键组成部分,已成为业界关注和研究的热点。现有的自动泊车系统都是基于倒车实现,而大多数新型电动汽车充电口安装在车头,因此设计了车头泊入的泊车新方法。该方法首先对车辆进行运动学建模,然后根据汽车与车库的相对位置基于几何推导进行路径规划,最后利用PID对泊车过程进行跟踪控制。采用PID路径跟踪控制算法与现有泊车跟踪控制算法相比较,有效简化了算法结构,克服了“计算爆炸”的问题,具有较强的鲁棒性,符合现有新型电动汽车车头泊入的需求。使用Matlab和CarSim联合仿真实车参数模型车的运动学模型,完善了传统泊车过程模型的运动仿真分析,仿真结果验证了所设计的跟踪控制方法的有效性。     

超低频天线最优波束成形设计研究

针对现有超低频天线发射端单一化缺陷和通信距离受限瓶颈,为实现超低频电磁发信系统的小型化和远距离传输,该文对旋转式永磁体机械天线的超低频电磁发信技术进行了理论创新和工程实践。探究多输入单输出(MISO)场景下超低频多机械天线电磁辐射理论,建立了基于三相感应电机的多机械天线阵列的空间磁场分布模型。仿真结果表明：利用三相感应电机组成的2元机械天线阵列可使磁感应强度在近场提高3 dB。该文还提出了多天线超低频近场最优波束成型技术。仿真结果表明：当天线之间的初始相位相等时径向接收磁场分量场强最大。设计高精度同步技术并搭建原理样机进行测试,实验结果表明：发送端采用2元天线组阵,信号功率提高6 dBm,传输距离可达50 m。