SHeRo: Scalable hexapod robot for maintenance,repair, and operations

Improper maintenance, repair, and operations of societal centric structures can lead to catastrophic failures that drastically affect global economy, the environment, and everyday life. Due to the remote, cramped and highly irregular environmental nature of these structures, routine manual procedures and operations can be rather tedious, dangerous, and hazardous for humans. Automating maintenance, repair, and operations removes human workers from having to crawl within highly cluttered and constrained spaces, breathing in stale air mixed with fumes from welding or particulate from repair work, and provides higher reliability and consistency in the repair work. This paper introduces SHeRo, a scalable hexapod robot designed for maintenance, repair, and operations within remote, inaccessible, irregular, and hazardous environments. The scalability of the design enhances traditional hexapod robot designs by incorporating two prismatic joints into each leg. A detailed discussion on the design and realization of SHeRo is provided. An analysis on the stability and workspace of SHeRo is presented and a dynamic criterion is developed to integrate the concepts of robot stability and constant orientation workspace into a stable workspace. The analytical solution of the lateral stable workspace of SHeRo is derived along with a metric for comparing stable workspace between different robot configurations. A simulated demonstration and two physical experimental demonstrations are presented showing the advantage of introducing scalability into the hexapod robot design along with the workspace enhancement and flexibility of the scalable hexapod robot.     

Robust and stable flow shop scheduling with unexpected arrivals of new jobs and uncertain processing times

In real scheduling problems, some disruptions and unexpected events may occur. These disruptions cause the initial schedule to quickly become infeasible and non-optimal. In this situation, an appropriate rescheduling method should be used. In this paper, a new approach has been proposed to achieve stable and robust schedule despite uncertain processing times and unexpected arrivals of new jobs. This approach is a proactive–reactive method which uses a two-step procedure. In the first step an initial robust solution is produced proactively against uncertain processing times using robust optimization approach. This initial robust solution is more insensitive against the fluctuations of processing times in future. In the next step, when an unexpected disruption occurs, an appropriate reactive method is adopted to deal with this unexpected event. In fact, in the second step, the reactive approach determines the best modified sequence after any unexpected disruption based on the classical objective and performance measures. The robustness measure is implemented in the reactive approach to increase the performance of the real schedule after disruption. Computational results indicate that this method produces better solutions in comparison with four classical heuristic approaches according to effectiveness and performance of solutions.     

Investigation into the effect of carboxylic acid monomer on particle nucleation and growth in emulsifier-free emulsion copolymerization of styrene-butadiene-acrylic acid

Latexes of carboxylated styrene-butadiene rubber were prepared via batch emulsion copolymerization with different amounts of acrylic acid in the absence of emulsifier. The effect of acid monomer was investigated in the particle formation and growth. It was observed that the amount of acrylic acid strongly affected the particle formation. The number of particles and thus polymerization rate increased with increasing of the acid content. There was no significant difference in the polymerization rate per particle in all experiments. The results show that in this case particle growth process is less dependent on the acrylic acid amount in comparison with its influence on nucleation stage and then particle number. Several parameters such as polymerization rate and number of latex particle per unit volume of the aqueous phase were calculated. Attempt was made to evaluate the average number of growing chain per particle. Also average particle diameter of the above carboxylated SBR latexes was obtained through some calculations from the direct measurement of average particle diameter in the swollen state by light scattering technique for the first time.     

Quantitative31P nuclear magnetic resonance analysis of the phospholipids of erythrocyte membranes using detergent

³¹P Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra of human erythrocyte lysates dissolved in sodium cholate were acquired. The narrow resonances of phospholipids were mostly well resolved, allowing identification and accurate quantitative analysis of phospholipid classes of the erythrocyte membranes. The ether-linked phosphatidylethanolamine components of the erythrocyte membranes were identified, based on the removal of plasmalogens by acidolysis and of diacyl phospholipid species by degradation using phospholipase A₁. It was also shown that the introduction of double bonds on the acyl chains of phosphatidylcholine shifted the³¹P NMR resonances to lower frequencies. Quantitative analyses of phospholipids from the spectra were based on their apparent molar concentrations. The recoveries of phospholipids from erythrocytes were significantly higher than those using conventional extraction procedures.     

Highly efficient synthesis of coumarin derivatives in the presence of H14[NaP5W30O110] as a green and reusable catalyst

A variety of heteropolyanions including: Keggin, Dawson, Preyssler, mixed addenda and sandwich types, catalyzed the formation of 4-methylnaphtho-(1,2-b)-pyran-2-one (coumarin) from the condensation of α-naphthol and ethylacetoacetate in a solvent free system and under heating conditions. Our data vividly indicate that sodium30–tungsto pentaphosphate, [NaP₅W₃₀O₁₁₀]¹⁴⁻, which so-called Preyssler’s anion, with high hydrolytic (pH 0–12) and thermal stability is the catalyst of choice. This catalyst catalyzed the synthesis of other coumarin derivatives in high yields and good selectivity.     

Conceptual design of a novel hybrid fuel cell/desalination system

A novel concept for integrating fuel cells with desalination systems is proposed and investigated in this work. Two unique case studies are discussed — the first involving a hybrid system with a reverse osmosis (RO) unit and the second — integrating with a thermal desalination process such as multi-stage flash (MSF). The underlying motivation for this system integration is that the exhaust gas from a hybrid power plant (fuel cell/turbine system) contains considerable amount of thermal energy, which may be utilized for desalination units. This exhaust heat can be suitably used for preheating the feed in desalination processes such as reverse osmosis which not only increases the potable water production, but also decreases the relative energy consumption by approximately 8% when there is an increase of just 8°C rise in temperature. Additionally, an attractive hybrid system application which combines power generation at 70%+ system efficiency with efficient waste heat utilization is thermal desalination. In this work, it is shown that the system efficiency can be raised appreciably when a high-temperature fuel cell co-generates DC power in-situ with waste heat suitable for MSF. Results indicate that such hybrid system could show a 5.6% increase in global efficiency. Such combined hybrid systems have overall system efficiencies (second-law base) exceeding those of either fuel-cell power plants or traditional desalination plants.     

Linear principal transformation: toward locating features in N-dimensional image space

Projection Functions have been widely used for facial feature extraction and optical/handwritten character recognition due to their simplicity and efficiency. Because these transformations are not one-to-one, they may result in mapping distinct points into one point, and consequently losing detailed information. Here, we solve this problem by defining an N-dimensional space to represent a single image. Then, we propose a one-to-one transformation in this new image space. The proposed method, which we referred to as Linear Principal Transformation (LPT), utilizes Eigen analysis to extract the vector with the highest Eigenvalue. Afterwards, extrema in this vector were analyzed to extract the features of interest. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we performed two sets of experiments on facial feature extraction and optical character recognition in three different data sets. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the observed algorithms in the paper and achieves accuracy from 1.4 % up to 14 %, while it has a comparable time complexity and efficiency.     

An empirical study of control logic specifications for programmable logic controllers

This paper presents an empirical study of control logic specifications used to document industrial control logic code in manufacturing applications. More than one hundred input/output related property specifications from ten different reusable function blocks were investigated. The main purpose of the study was to provide understanding of how the specifications are expressed by industrial practitioners, in order to develop new tools and methods for specifying control logic software, as well as for evaluating existing ones. In this paper, the studied specifications are used to evaluate linear temporal logic in general and the specification language ST-LTL, tailored for functions blocks, in particular. The study shows that most specifications are expressed as implications, that should always be fulfilled, between input and output conditions. Many of these implications are complex since the input and output conditions may be mixed and involve sequences, timer issues and non-boolean variables. Using ST-LTL it was possible to represent all implications of this study. The few non-implication specifications could be specified in ST-LTL as well after being altered to suit the specification language. The paper demonstrates some advantages of ST-LTL compared to standard linear temporal logic and discusses possible improvements such as support for automatic rewrite of complex specifications.     

Alternating active-phase algorithm for multimaterial topology optimization problems: a 115-line MATLAB implementation

Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization - A new algorithm for the solution of multimaterial topology optimization problems is introduced in the present study. The presented method is based on...