A systematic review on ear anthropometry and its industrial design applications

Ergonomics is extensively studied to provide a scientific understanding of humans’ physical and cognitive use of products and workplaces. Ergonomics of the external ear is crucial for the industrial design of various ear‐related products. For this review, 50 articles regarding ear anthropometry and its applications in product design that met determined inclusion criteria were selected after searching four databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Science Direct. Previous anthropometric information acquired with traditional measurement, photogrammetric method, and three dimensional (3D) anthropometric techniques (photogrammetry, magnetic resonance imaging, computerized tomography, 3D scanning, and ear impression). Those studies demonstrated that demographic factors, including age, ethnicity, gender, and ear symmetry, should be considered when designing for specific markets. Ear sizes kept growth throughout the entire lifetime. Results also showed that males had larger ear sizes than females in most populations. Most of linear, area, and ratio dimensions showed a good symmetry between left and right ears, while angular dimensions tended to be nonsymmetric. Differences in anthropometric findings existed among Asian, Western, and African populations. Hence, there is a need to establish more universal anthropometric databases for different ethnicities to meet the development of product form and function. Furthermore, fit and comfort perception was important to be examined for product design, which can be studied through questionnaire on comfort perception, analysis online comments of consumers, and virtual fit analysis. With a comprehensive presentation of literature, future research opportunities were inspired from the perspective of industrial design.     

The role of anthropometry in designing for sustainability

An understanding of human factors and ergonomics facilitates the design of artefacts, tasks and environments that fulfil their users’ physical and cognitive requirements. Research in these fields furthers the goal of efficiently accommodating the desired percentage of user populations through enhanced awareness and modelling of human variability. Design for sustainability (DfS) allows for these concepts to be leveraged in the broader context of designing to minimise negative impacts on the environment. This paper focuses on anthropometry and proposes three ways in which its consideration is relevant to DfS: reducing raw material consumption, increasing usage lifetimes and ethical human resource considerations. This is demonstrated through the application of anthropometry synthesis, virtual fitting, and sizing and adjustability allocation methods in the design of an industrial workstation seat for use in five distinct global populations. This work highlights the importance of and opportunities for using ergonomic design principles in DfS efforts.

Practitioner Summary: This research demonstrates the relevance of some anthropometry-based ergonomics concepts to the field of design for sustainability. A global design case study leverages human variability considerations in furthering three sustainable design goals: reducing raw material consumption, increasing usage lifetimes and incorporating ethical human resource considerations in design.     

Developing a diagnosis system of work‐related capabilities for students: A computer‐assisted assessment

A gap exists between students' employment needs and higher education offerings. Thus, developing the capability to meet the learning needs of students in supporting their future aspirations should be facilitated. To bridge this gap in practice, this study uses multiple methods (i.e., nominal group technique and instructional systems development) and robust tests (e.g., reliability and validity) to develop a diagnosis system of work‐related capabilities. The research participants are twofold. At the early stage, this study invites three professors and three senior Human Resources managers to join the panel and help this study develop required capabilities. At the design and implementation stages, the research participants are freshman students at a famous university in Taiwan. This system enables college students to evaluate their capability scores by comparing themselves with the performances of prior students. The diagnosis results not only help students make learning plans during their university education, but also assist educators in adjusting the structure of the curriculum. Future studies are invited to use or adapt the assessment of work‐related capabilities, as well as proposed system procedure and architecture this study developed.     

A hybrid consumer‐oriented model for product affective design: An aspect of visual ergonomics

Crucial issues for product designers include how to capture consumers’ attention, evoke their pleasurable preferences, and affect their purchase decisions. In this article, we focus on consumers’ affective preferences in relation to visual ergonomics to propose a new hybrid consumer‐oriented model using gray relational analysis (GRA), gray prediction (GP), and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The GRA is used to identify the most influential elements of the product form to help product designers focus their attention more on these elements without compromising the predictive performance. The GP is used in conjunction with the GRA to obtain a better structure for the hybrid consumer‐oriented model, and TOPSIS is performed to determine the optimal alternatives for best matching consumers’ affective preferences. These experimental results show that the new hybrid consumer‐oriented model incorporated with the CAD/CAM system can facilitate the product affective design process.     

消费品质量安全影响因子评估系统设计与实现

主要研究了消费品质量安全影响因子评估系统的设计与实现。首先分析了消费品质量安全影响因子评估工作流程,从而确定了系统的功能需求。然后通过用例分析、静态行为建模、动态行为建模等UML分析工具对评估系统进行了功能设计和数据库设计。最后选取了VisualStudio开发平台根据三层架构理论对该系统进行了实现。该系统适用于所有消费品质量安全影响因子评估工作。     

产品设计规划问题建模及遗传算法求解

针对目前产品设计过程规划研究中存在的不足,在充分考虑实际设计过程中存在的各种不确定因素的基础上,以产品开发过程中的全体任务为规划对象,以设计迭代时间和成本为目标,将设计过程规划问题描述为基于仿真的随机优化问题进行处理。提出一种模型求解的混合遗传算法,该算法引入最优计算量分配技术进行样本分配,极大地提高了算法的搜索效率,有效地改善了遗传算法搜索的可靠性。以汽轮机轴承转子系统的设计为例,对提出的方法的有效性进行了验证,仿真结果表明,该建模方法有效且算法求解效率高。该方法可推广应用于各种产品设计过程的规划,具有普遍意义。     

A novel full‐wave CAD for the design of tapered leaky‐wave antennas in hybrid waveguide printed‐circuit technology

This work presents a novel computer‐aided design (CAD) tool for the design of tapered leaky‐wave antennas (LWAs) in hybrid waveguide printed‐circuit technology. The software package is composed of several tools, which are connected together to provide a semi‐automated step‐by‐step design procedure. The design procedure is presented and the different tools are described, together with the involved theory, leading to the design of tapered LWAs. A practical taper design is performed, and comparisons with simulations using commercial software (HFSS) are presented for validation purposes. Due to the full‐wave nature of the technique used in the analysis engine, excellent agreement is shown between the proposed 2D‐based approach, and 3D HFSS results. Also, the analysis procedure is fast, thus leading to semi‐automated designs that are not affordable with common 3D optimization techniques. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2006.     

Boundary‐based optimization strategies for design of fragment‐type isolation structure in compact MIMO systems

Fragment‐type structures have been used to acquire high isolation in compact multiple‐input and multiple‐output (MIMO) systems. In this paper, two novel optimization strategies, boundary‐based two‐dimensional (2D) median filtering operator and boundary‐based 2D weighted sum filtering operator, are proposed to design fragment‐type isolation structures first when specific boundary conditions are considered in engineering designs. Second, two computer aided optimization techniques are proposed through combining these two operators with MOEA/D‐GO (multi‐objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition combined with enhanced genetic operators), respectively. Finally, fragment‐type isolation structures of a compact MIMO PIFAs (planar inverted‐F antennas) system operating at 2.345‐2.36 GHz are designed. Comparison results show that more alternative designs could be found at the expense of searching speed, and both better front‐back‐ratio and wider impedance bandwidth are observed.     

Solvability conditions and design for synchronization of discrete‐time multiagent systems

This paper provides solvability conditions for state synchronization with homogeneous discrete‐time multiagent systems with a directed and weighted communication network under partial‐ or full‐state coupling. Our solvability conditions reveal that the synchronization problem is solvable for all possible, a priori given, set of graphs associated with a communication network only under the condition that the agents are at most weakly unstable (ie, agents have all eigenvalues in the closed unit disc). However, if an upper bound on the eigenvalues inside the unit disc of the row stochastic matrices associated with any graph in a given set of graphs is known, then one can achieve synchronization for a class of unstable agents. We provide protocol design for at most weakly unstable agents based on a direct eigenstructure assignment method and a standard H₂ discrete‐time algebraic Riccati equation. We also provide protocol design for strictly unstable agents (ie, agents have at least one eigenvalue outside the unit disc) based on the standard H₂ discrete‐time algebraic Riccati equation.     

Protocol sequence and control co‐design for a collection of networked control systems

This paper is concerned with the simultaneous stabilization of a collection of plants shared by the wireless network with capacity limitation. We use most regular binary sequences (MRBS) to control the medium access status of the plants. The design procedure of the scheduling policy translates to determine two parameters of the MRBS. With the MRBS protocol, each plant is essentially a sampled‐data control system with time varying sampling intervals. We derive a sufficient condition for determining the MRBS protocol that guarantees the controllability, observability, and stability of each plant. Most importantly, we give a methodology for MRBS protocol and controller co‐design, in which the controller has switching gains that are piecewise constant and dependent on the sampling intervals yielded by the MRBS. The main results are established using piecewise Lyapunov functional and the average dwell time technique. It is shown that the method can guarantee simultaneous stabilization of the collection of plants robustly in situations where the controller gain does not match the sampling interval or the sampling interval violates the maximum allowable transmission interval criteria. A numerical example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the co‐design method. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A low‐complexity design for distributed containment control of networked pure‐feedback systems and its application to fault‐tolerant control

This paper addresses a low‐complexity distributed containment control problem and its extension to fault‐tolerant control for networked nonlinear pure‐feedback systems under a directed graph. The multiple dynamic leaders are neighbors of only a subset of the followers described by completely non‐affine multi‐input multi‐output pure‐feedback dynamics. It is assumed that all followers' nonlinearities are heterogeneous and unknown. The proposed containment controller is implemented by using only error surfaces integrated by performance bounding functions and does not require any differential equations for compensating uncertainties and faults. Thus, compared with the previous containment control approaches for multi‐agent systems with unknown non‐affine nonlinearities, the distributed containment control structure is simplified. In addition, it is shown that the proposed control scheme can be applied to the fault‐tolerant containment control problem in the presence of unexpected system and actuator faults, without reconstructing any control structure. It is shown from Lyapunov stability theorem that all followers nearly converge to the dynamic convex hull spanned by the dynamic leaders and the containment control errors are preserved within certain given predefined bounds. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simulation‐based optimization for rigorous assessment of ground plane modifications in compact UWB antenna design

Introducing ground plane modifications is a popular approach in the design of compact UWB antennas. Yet, specific topological alterations are normally reported on case to case basis without thorough investigations concerning their general suitability for antenna miniaturization. In particular, detailed performance comparison of different ground plane modifications is lacking in the literature. In this article, the effect of selected ground plane modifications on achievable miniaturization rate is considered based on a set of four UWB antennas. EM‐driven optimization is carried out to minimize the antenna footprints while maintaining acceptable matching within the UWB frequency range. In each case, all geometry parameters of the respective structures are utilized in the design process. For the sake of fair comparison, all antennas are implemented on the same dielectric substrate. Our results indicate a clear performance pattern, here, an advantage of the elliptical ground plane slit below the feed line over the rectangular one (average size reduction ratio of 26% versus 19% across the benchmark set). Our conjectures are confirmed by physical measurements of the fabricated antenna prototypes.     

Scalable lumped modeling of single‐ended and differential inductors for RF IC design

A lumped scalable model of silicon integrated inductors for RF IC design is presented. It was validated up to 20 GHz using measured performance parameters of more than 70 single‐ended and differentially driven spirals covering 0.2‐ to 8.3 nH inductance values. Excellent accuracy, full geometrical scalability, compactness and high capability for implementation in circuit simulators promote the proposed model as a reliable time‐saving design tool. Two circuital example, i.e., 5‐GHz down‐converter and 10‐GHz VCO, are also presented to demonstrate its use in practical cases. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2009.     

Anti‐windup design of active disturbance rejection control for sampled systems with input delay

A novel anti‐windup design of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed for industrial sampled systems with input delay and saturation. By using a generalized predictor to estimate the delay‐free system output, a modified extended state observer is designed to simultaneously estimate the system state and disturbance, which could become an anti‐windup compensator when the input saturation occurs. Accordingly, a feedback controller is analytically designed for disturbance rejection. By proposing the desired closed‐loop transfer function for the set‐point tracking, a prefilter is designed to tune the tracking performance while guaranteeing no steady‐state output tracking error. A sufficient condition for the closed‐loop system stability is established with proof for practical application subject to the input delay variation. Illustrative examples from the literature are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and merit of the proposed control design.     

New approach for the analysis and design of negative‐resistance oscillators: Application to a quasi‐MMIC VCO

This article proposes a new approach for the analysis and design of negative‐resistance oscillators using computer‐aided engineering tools. The method presented does not require any special probe and makes the oscillator design similar to the methodology applied to amplifiers. It speeds up convergence and avoids uncertainties in the solution. The negative‐resistance oscillator is split into two parts: an active‐amplifying part and a resonator part. A chain is constructed by linking both parts and repeating them several times, which is known as the repeated circuit simulation procedure. This method allows the separation of the signal flowing between them. Small‐signal AC‐sweep and harmonic‐balance techniques, both available in several commercial software packages, are applied. This method is theoretically justified and shows convergence with less iteration. Furthermore, it is more robust than standard harmonic‐balance probes in the case of multiple frequencies of oscillation. It has been demonstrated in the design of a quasi‐MMIC VCO. This VCO has an external resonator circuit (coaxial resonator and varactor) and a MMIC negative‐resistance circuit, which was manufactured using ED02AH p‐HEMT technology (OMMIC). © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2006.     

Full‐Order and Reduced‐order Observer Design for a Class of Fractional‐order Nonlinear Systems

The paper is concerned with problem of the full‐order and reduced‐order observer design for a class of fractional‐order one‐sided Lipschitz nonlinear systems. By introducing a continuous frequency distributed equivalent model and using indirect Lyapunov approach, the sufficient condition for asymptotic stability of the full‐order observer error dynamic system is presented. Furthermore, the proposed design method was extended to reduced‐order observer design for fractional‐order nonlinear systems. All the stability conditions are obtained in terms of LMI, which are less conservative than some existing ones. Finally, a numerical example demonstrates the validity of this approach.