Robotic hand system design for mirror therapy rehabilitation after stroke

Microsystem Technologies - This paper developed a robotics-assisted device for the stroke patients to perform the hand rehabilitation. Not only the system can perform passive range of motion...     

Effects of assembly errors on axial positioning accuracy for rotating machinery with magnetoresistance-based magnetic encoders

Microsystem Technologies - In positioning systems, magnetic scales consisting of magnetoresistive sensors are widely used in the generation of position signals for machine tools. To obtain a...     

Research on simulation of ship electric propulsion system with flywheel energy storage system

Flywheel energy storage has been widely used to improve the ground electric power quality. This paper designed a flywheel energy storage device to improve ship electric propulsion system power grid quality. The practical mathematical models of flywheel energy storage and ship electric propulsion system were established. Simulation research on the effect of ship electric propulsion system power quality, made by flywheel energy storage, was completed by using the software Matlab/simulink. We have done a lot of simulation experiments on sudden load of ship integrated electric propulsion system, one system is with flywheel energy storage, another one is not with. Comparing with these simulation results, we can see that the flywheel energy storage designed in this paper has improved ship electric propulsion system network power quality as well as increases the reliability of the ship power grid. The conclusions can provide a theoretical guidance for the design of flywheel energy storage applied in ship integrated electric propulsion system.     

Probing and diagnosis of slider–disk interactions in nanometer clearance regime using artificial neural network

This paper addresses the issue of system identification for an active-head slider used to form a stable and reliable head–disk interface with a spacing of sub 3?nm. A new identification method is proposed to fit the highly non-stationary and highly nonlinear slider dynamics. The estimated model can be used for design of a model based nonlinear controller to control the flying height within the desired range. The effectiveness of the proposed system identification method is verified with simulation examples.     

Hybrid modeling for smart roller leveling in precision magnetic scale manufacturing

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - In smart manufacturing, machines are interconnected through cyber physical system (CPS) to achieve efficient manufacturing production. Manufacturing...     

A novel universal joint with PZT-driven cyclic symmetric stator

Rotary actuation generated by a cyclic symmetric stator vibrations have been investigated in this research by using numerical finite elements. The cyclic symmetric stator’s vibration response is characterized through parameter studies with varying number of protrusion fingers, their geometry parameters and contact angle between stator fingers and rotor. The structure responses on the stator disk and protrusion finger of the stator have been experimentally validated in this study. The split-frequency structure vibration response on the protrusion fingers has been found to be catalogued by the number of the finger on the stator disk. The radial deformation of the protrusion finger was examined and characterized by two different parameters, namely the displacement strength and the bending deformation angle. The numerical studies in this research were validated by experimental mechatronic prototype, from which good agreement between the two and consistency between prediction and measurement were found.     

Rank-Order Correlation-Based Feature Vector Context Transformation for Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval

As a crucial task in information retrieval, ranking defines the preferential order among the retrieved documents for a given query. Supervised learning has recently been dedicated to automatically learning ranking models by incorporating various models into one effective model. This paper proposes a novel supervised learning method, in which instances are represented as bags of contexts of features, instead of bags of features. The method applies rank-order correlations to measure the correlation relationships between features. The feature vectors of instances, i.e., the 1st-order raw feature vectors, are then mapped into the feature correlation space via projection to derive the context-level feature vectors, i.e., the 2nd-order context feature vectors. As for ranking model learning, Ranking SVM is employed with the 2nd-order context feature vectors as the input. The proposed method is evaluated using the LETOR benchmark datasets and is found to perform well with competitive results. The results suggest that the learning method benefits from the rank-order-correlation-based feature vector context transformation.     

Preparation of thermosensitive gold nanoparticles by plasma pretreatment and UV grafted polymerization

This work is to develop an easy method of plasma treatment and graft polymerization to prepare thermosensitive gold nanoparticles. Gold nanoparticles (Nano-Au) were reduced by trisodium citrate combined with hydrogen tetrachloroaurate(III) tetrahydrate (chloroauric acid) and modified with 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid (MUA) by the self-assembly monolayers (SAM). The surface graft polymerization of N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAAm) was carried out by two steps, using O₂ plasma pretreatment of the surface on MUA SAM modified Nano-Au to form the peroxide groups on Nano-Au(MUA), and then subsequently using UV light to induce grafting with thermosensitive polymer. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to direct investigation of the particle size and morphology in situ. The diameters of the gold nanoparticles measured from the TEM images are in good agreement with data measured at room temperature which is about 15 nm. The thermosensitive gold nanoparticles were characterized by chemical structure of surface (ESCA) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). ESCA result suggests that plasma treatments can be employed to generate peroxides on the Nano-Au(MUA) for the subsequent UV graft polymerization of PNIPAAm.