Recent Advances on 3D Printing Technique for Thermal‐Related Applications

Advances in ink formulation and printing techniques make producing material systems with new and versatile characteristics and functionalities possible. Additive manufacturing or 3D printing enables fabricating complex structures at a faster production rate using different types of materials for various applications. Recently, 3D printing methods are being studied for thermal‐related applications. In this paper, the authors review recent progress of materials and printing techniques for thermal application devices using composite materials.

     

Feature Fusion-Based Deep Learning Network to Recognize Table Tennis Actions

A system for classifying four basic table tennis strokes using wearable devices and deep learning networks is proposed in this study. The wearable device consisted of a six-axis sensor, Raspberry Pi 3, and a power bank. Multiple kernel sizes were used in convolutional neural network (CNN) to evaluate their performance for extracting features. Moreover, a multiscale CNN with two kernel sizes was used to perform feature fusion at different scales in a concatenated manner. The CNN achieved recognition of the four table tennis strokes. Experimental data were obtained from 20 research participants who wore sensors on the back of their hands while performing the four table tennis strokes in a laboratory environment. The data were collected to verify the performance of the proposed models for wearable devices. Finally, the sensor and multi-scale CNN designed in this study achieved accuracy and F1 scores of 99.58% and 99.16%, respectively, for the four strokes. The accuracy for five-fold cross validation was 99.87%. This result also shows that the multi-scale convolutional neural network has better robustness after five-fold cross validation.     

Regulation of Polymer Configurations Enables Green Solvent-Processed Large-Area Binary All-Polymer Solar Cells With Breakthrough Performance and High Efficiency Stretchability Factor

With the great potential of the all-polymer solar cells for large-area wearable devices, both large-area device efficiency and mechanical flexibility are very critical but attract limited attention. In this work, from the perspective of the polymer configurations, two types of terpolymer acceptors PYTX-A and PYTX-B (X = Cl or H) are developed. The configuration difference caused by the replacement of non-conjugated units results in distinct photovoltaic performance and mechanical flexibility. Benefiting from a good match between the intrinsically slow film-forming of the active materials and the technically slow film-forming of the blade-coating process, the toluene-processed large-area (1.21 cm²) binary device achieves a record efficiency of 14.70%. More importantly, a new parameter of efficiency stretchability factor (ESF) is proposed for the first time to comprehensively evaluate the overall device performance. PM6:PYTCl-A and PM6:PYTCl-B yield significantly higher ESF than PM6:PY-IT. Further blending with non-conjugated polymer donor PM6-A, the best ESF of 3.12% is achieved for PM6-A:PYTCl-A, which is among the highest comprehensive performances.