A PREDICTIVE APPROACH TO THE IN-PLANE MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF STITCHED COMPOSITE LAMINATES

This contribution attempts to model the alteration of the in-plane elastic properties in laminates caused by stitching, and to predict the in-plane effective tensile strength of the stitched composite laminates. The distortion of in-plane fibers is considered to be the main cause that affects the in-plane mechanical properties. A fiber distortion model is proposed to characterize the fiber misalignment and the fiber content concentration due to stitching. The undistorted region, the fiber distortion region, the resin-rich pocket and the through-thickness reinforcement section are taken into account. The fiber misalignment and inhomogeneous fiber content due to stitching have been formulated by introducing two parameters, the distortion width and maximum misalignment. It has been found that the ply stress concentration in stitched laminates is influenced by the two concurrent factors, the stitch hole and inhomogeneous fiber content. The stitch hole brings about the stress concentration whereas the higher fiber content at the local region induced by stitching restrains the local deformation of the composite. The model is used to predict the tensile strength of the [0/45/0/-45/90/45/0/-45]58 T300/QY9512 composite laminate stitched by Kevlar 29 yarn with different stitching configurations, showing an acceptable agreement with experimental data.

Mechanical Behavior and Microstructure Characterization of 3D Stitched Quartz Fibers-reinforced Silica Composites

The mechanical properties of silica material in the monolithic form are ;far from acceptable levels. In this paper, 3D stitched quartz preform was used for the fiber reinforcement, and quartz fibers- reinforced silica composites were prepared by the silica sol-infiltration-sintering method. The density of the composite was up to 1.71 g/cm3 after 10 infiltration-sintering cycles. The flexural strength and the in-plane shear strength were 61.7 MPa and 20.3 MPa, respectively. The flexural stress-deflection curve exhibited mostly nonlinear behavior, which was different from that of monolithic ceramics. Because of the existence of the fiber in Z axis direction, shearing property between the different layers of 3D stitched composites were greatly enhanced. Toughness effect of the 3D stitched quartz preform was conspicuous. The as-fabricated composites showed non-catastronhic failure behavior resulting from weak fiber/matrix interface.

Stitched Ground Planes for Textile Antenna Application: An Experimental Study

This paper presents an application of stitched ground plane for microstrip patch antenna design. In this work Matlab interface to computer embroidery techniques were used to implement the felt and denim substrates on microstrip patch antenna. These antennas were simulated using a commercial full 3D electromagnetic CST Microwave Studio 2019. A method to optimize the stitch patterns with conductive thread for antenna ground plane for 2.45 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band and 5 GHz wearable wireless local area networks (WLAN) frequencies was achieved. Rigid and flexible wearable antennas (microstrip patch antennas) were fabricated using the stitched ground plane. The electrical resistance was reduced between the meshes during the stitching design process. Results in terms of bandwidth, radiation patterns and reflection coefficients (S11) are presented.

Perceptual quality assessment of panoramic stitched contents for immersive applications:a prospective survey

The recent advancements in the field of Virtual Reality(VR)and Augmented Reality(AR)have a substantial impact on modern day technology by digitizing each and everything related to human life and open the doors to the next generation Software Technology(Soft Tech).VR and AR technology provide astonishing immersive contents with the help of high quality stitched panoramic contents and 360°imagery that widely used in the education,gaming,entertainment,and production sector.The immersive quality of VR and AR contents are greatly dependent on the perceptual quality of panoramic or 360°images,in fact a minor visual distortion can significantly degrade the overall quality.Thus,to ensure the quality of constructed panoramic contents for VR and AR applications,numerous Stitched Image Quality Assessment(SIQA)methods have been proposed to assess the quality of panoramic contents before using in VR and AR.In this survey,we provide a detailed overview of the SIQA literature and exclusively focus on objective SIQA methods presented till date.For better understanding,the objective SIQA methods are classified into two classes namely Full-Reference SIQA and No-Reference SIQA approaches.Each class is further categorized into traditional and deep learning-based methods and examined their performance for SIQA task.Further,we shortlist the publicly available benchmark SIQA datasets and evaluation metrices used for quality assessment of panoramic contents.In last,we highlight the current challenges in this area based on the existing SIQA methods and suggest future research directions that need to be target for further improvement in SIQA domain.

Novel Stitched Ground Plane Optimizations for Microstrip Patch Antennas at Wi-Fi and WiMAX Applications

This work explores the optimal mesh structure, stitch density and production technique of stitched ground plane for microstrip patch antenna. Meshed ground plane was used as a generic problem. A stitched ground plane is pro-posed and designed using Matlab interface to computer embroidery. Using the meshed or stitched ground plane as a case study, the resistance between meshes was analysed and measured. The equivalent resistance between nodes is a function of their distance apart. A finite resistive grid was simulated and compared to measured sets of data. A microstrip patch antenna with stitched ground shows comparable performance to the conventional etched ground of the size in terms of bandwidth. The stitched ground plane has a higher band-width than the etched copper ground plane because of the increased thickness of the substrate. Thus, it can be concluded that the use of the interface method shows the possibilities of controlling the stitch density and distances between mesh nodes. The interface increases the stitching density and reduces the elec-trical resistance between mesh nodes making the antennas flexible and weara-ble. The functionality of these antenna samples has been tested and validated using microstrip patch ground at 2.45 GHz and 5 GHz. Measurement results on the proposed stitched ground planes were compared with the theory of infinite resistive network that shows good agreement.

Controllable Crack Propagation in Off-Axis Crushing of Stitched Composite Absorbers

Crack growth resistance plays a different role in crashworthiness analysis since the progressive energy absorption is based on controllable fracture mechanisms. In this regard, the present paper studies the efficient crack growth resistance in off-axis crushing of composite tubular structures by implementing natural fiber yarns. One of the through-to-thickness reinforcement methods known as stitching has been chosen to influence the axial and off-axis crushing process. Improving the crack growth resistance and appropriate fiber breakage at different stages of crushing process can significantly improve the resistance force and consequently the energy absorption capability of composite absorbers in axial and off-axis crushing. This analysis will be applied to non-stitched and stitched CFRP composite boxes which showed brittle fracture and transverse shearing crushing modes under off-axis loading of 10 degrees. The analytical methods are also implemented to analysze the effect of various failure mechanisms such as bending, friction, bundle fracture, and interlaminar crack growth for the observed crushing modes. The proposed model is able to predict the crushing load and crush force efficiency in close agreement from experimental studies.

Low-Velocity Impact Response of Stitched Multi-layer Foam Sandwich Composites

Low-velocity impact damage known as“imperceptible”damage usually destroys the structural integrity of the material and seriously affects the service life of the materials.To improve the low-velocity impact resistance of foam sandwich composites,an innovative concept of a stitched multi-layer sandwich structure by organically combining the discrete splitting of foam layer with full thickness stitching was proposed,and its low-velocity impact resistance obtained through drop-hammer impact tests was explored.The results showed that the multi-layer foam sandwich structure acted as a stress disperser and reduced the irreversible impact damage.The depth and area of low-velocity impact damage of multi-layer foam sandwich composites gradually decreased with increasing the number of the layers.The stitched structure would improve the integrity of the foam sandwich composites and inhibit the propagation of cracks.The maximum impact load of the stitched foam sandwich composite increased by approximately 5% compared with that of the non-stitched material.In addition,the low-velocity impact damage depth,damage area and absorbed energy of the stitched three-layer foam sandwich composite were reduced by 37.7%,34.6% and 20.7%,respectively,compared with those of the non-stitched single-layer sandwich material.

In-Plane Elastic Properties of Stitched Plain Weave Composite Laminate

A representative volume element method and a novel mesomechanical-based polyline model are proposed to describe the misalignment of in-plane fibers induced by the insertion of stitch thread.A multi-scale mathematical model of in-plane elastic parameters for stitched composite laminate is established with ply-angle and stitch parameters as well as material parameters taken into account.Based on the fabrication of specimens and the verification of experimental platform,the superposition influences of stitch on structural anisotropy are revealed by the developed theoretical model.Results indicate that the stitch orientation can increase the structural anisotropy.The decreases of stitch pitch and spacing as well as the increase of thread diameter obviously reduce the elastic and shear moduli of laminates.Furthermore,the elastic and shear moduli as well as Poisson’s ratios show sinusoidal changes with a period of 90°as the ply-angle increases.The theoretical model not only analyzes the in-plane mechanical properties of stitched laminate with ply-angle,but also lays a foundation for the dynamic studies of stitched sandwich structures with ribs in the future.

Reduction of vibration by periodically stitched sandwich panel

This work reveals that the addition of periodically distributed stitches to sandwich structure enables a significant reduction of vibration in stop-band and this new functionality is systematically investigated.Firstly,a finite element model which is capable of taking into consideration the three layers of the sandwich as well as the stitches is developed.The diagram of dispersion is calculated by applying Floquet-Bloch theorem to the boundaries of unit cell.With properly chosen properties of stitches,a stop-band for flexural wave is observed.This stop-band is further confirmed by the forced response of a large stitched sandwich panel under point excitation.The level of vibration in the stop-band is significantly reduced.The influence of the stitch rigidity and density on upper and lower limits of stop-band is also examined,which confirms that stitched sandwich can be tuned to mitigate vibration in a certain frequency band with appropriate stitch properties.These investigations have demonstrated the potential application of stitched sandwich in the area of vibration reduction.

Efficient Unsupervised Image Stitching Using Attention Mechanism with Deep Homography Estimation

Traditional feature-based image stitching techniques often encounter obstacles when dealing with images lackingunique attributes or suffering from quality degradation. The scarcity of annotated datasets in real-life scenesseverely undermines the reliability of supervised learning methods in image stitching. Furthermore, existing deeplearning architectures designed for image stitching are often too bulky to be deployed on mobile and peripheralcomputing devices. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel unsupervised image stitching methodbased on the YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once version 8) framework that introduces deep homography networksand attentionmechanisms. Themethodology is partitioned into three distinct stages. The initial stage combines theattention mechanism with a pooling pyramid model to enhance the detection and recognition of compact objectsin images, the task of the deep homography networks module is to estimate the global homography of the inputimages consideringmultiple viewpoints. The second stage involves preliminary stitching of the masks generated inthe initial stage and further enhancement through weighted computation to eliminate common stitching artifacts.The final stage is characterized by adaptive reconstruction and careful refinement of the initial stitching results.Comprehensive experiments acrossmultiple datasets are executed tometiculously assess the proposed model. Ourmethod’s Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) improved by 10.6%and 6%. These experimental results confirm the efficacy and utility of the presented model in this paper.

Recent Situation of Acupuncture and Moxibustion in the Treatment of Stomach Pain with Deficiency and Cold of Spleen and Stomach

Stomachache is one of the most common diseases of digestive system, among which stomach pain of deficiency cold of spleen and stomach is the most common. Acupuncture and moxibustion therapy as an external treatment of traditional Chinese medicine for relieving stomach pain due to deficiency of spleen and stomach, has the advantages of convenient operation, small adverse reactions and remarkable curative effect, which is easy for patients to accept. In this paper, acupuncture and moxibustion therapy such as moxibustion and warm acupuncture therapy for stomach pain of spleen and stomach deficiency cold type is summarized to provide evidence-based basis for clinical treatment of stomach pain of spleen and stomach deficiency cold type.

Predicting the Stitch Density of Finished Fabrics Using Weft Blended Grey Knit Fabrics

Stitch density is one of the critical quality parameters of knit fabrics. This parameter is closely related to other physical quality parameters like fabric weight, fabric tightness factor, fiber types, blend ratio, yarn diameter and linear density, and fabric structure. Selecting stitch density (wales per inch, course per inch) is essential to getting the appropriate fabric weight and desired quality. Usually, no rules or assumptions exist to get the desired stitch density in the finished fabric stage. Fifteen types of blended knit fabrics were prepared to conduct the study. The varying percentages of cotton, polyester, and elastane are incorporated in the blends. Regression analysis and regression ANOVA tests were done to predict the stitch density of finished fabrics. A suitable regression equation is established to get the desired results. The study also found that the stitch density value in the finished stage fabric decreases by approximately 15% compared to the stitch density in the grey fabric stage. This study will help the fabric manufacturers get the finished fabric stitch density in advance by utilizing the grey fabric stitch density data set. The author expects this research to benefit the knitting and dyeing industry, new researchers, and advanced researchers.

Tensile Mechanical Behavior and Failure Mechanism of a Plain-Woven SiCf/SiC Composites at Room and Elevated Temperatures

Ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) are the preferred materials for solving advanced aerospace high-temperature structural components;it has the comprehensive advantages of higher temperature (~1500˚C) and low density. In service environments, CMCs exhibit complex damage mechanisms and failure modes, which are affected by constituent materials, meso-architecture and inhere defects. In this paper, the in-plane tensile mechanical behavior of a plain-woven SiCf/SiC composite at room and elevated temperatures was investigated, and the factors affecting the tensile strength of the material were discussed in depth. The results show that the tensile modulus and strength of SiCf/SiC composites at high temperature are lower, but the fracture strain increases and the toughness of the composites is enhanced;the stitching holes significantly weaken the tensile strength of the material, resulting in the material is easy to break at the cross-section with stitching holes.

A Gridless Router Based on Hierarchical PB Corner Stitching Structure

A multi layer gridless area router is reported.Based on corner stitching,this router adopts tile expansion to explore path for each net.A heuristic method that penalizes nodes deviating from the destination is devised to accelerate the algorithm.Besides,an enhanced interval tree is used to manage the intermediate data structure.In order to improve the completion rate of routing,a new gridless rip up and rerouting algorithm is proposed.The experimental results indicate that the completion rate is improved after the rip up and reroute process and the speed of this algorithm is satisfactory.

Computer aided stitching approach for dental restoration models

According to the bio-characteristics of the lower and upper cavity surfaces of dental restoration, a stitching approach is proposed based on a virtual zipper working mechanism and a minimization of the surface total curvature energy, which is used to resolve the stitching problems existing during computer-aided design for dental restorations. First, the two boundaries corresponding to the lower and upper surfaces are triangulated based on the zipper working mechanism to generate the initial stitching surface patch, of which the edges are distributed uniformly between the boundaries. Secondly, the initial stitching surface patch is subdivided and deformed to reconstruct an optimized surface patch according to the bio-characteristics of the teeth. The optimized surface patch is minimally distinguishable from the surrounding mesh in smoothness and density, and it can stitch the upper and lower cavity surfaces naturally. The experimental results show that the dental restorations obtained by the proposed method can satisfy both the shape aesthetic and the fitting accuracy, and meet the requirements of clinical oral medicine.

Stitch welding of Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloy by fiber laser

Stitch welding of plate covered skeleton structure of Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloys has a variety of applications in aerospace vehicle manufacture. The laser stitch welding of Ti-6Al-4V titanium alloys was carried out by a 4 kW ROFIN fiber laser. Influences of laser welding parameters on the macroscopic geometry, porosity, microstructure and mechanical properties of the stitch welded seams were investigated by digital microscope, optical microscope, scanning electron microscope and universal tensile testing machine. The results showed that the three-pipe nozzle with gas flow rate larger than 5 L/min could avoid oxidization, presenting better shielding effect in comparison with the single-pipe nozzle. Porosity formation could be suppressed with the gap between plate and skeleton less than 0.1 mm, while the existing porosity can be reduced with remelting. The maximum shear strength of stitch welding joint with minimal porosity was obtained by employing laser power of 1700 W, welding speed of 1.5 m/min and defocusing distance of ＋8 ram.

An All-E-Beam Lithography Process for the Patterning of 2D Photonic Crystal Waveguide Devices

We present an all-e-beam lithography （EBL） process for the patterning of photonic crystal waveguides. The whole device structures are exposed in two steps. Holes constituting the photonic crystal lattice and defects are first exposed with a small exposure step size （less than 10nm）. With the introduction of the additional proximity effect to compensate the original proximity effect, the shape, size, and position of the holes can be well controlled. The second step is the exposure of the access waveguides at a larger step size （about 30nm） to improve the scan speed of the EBL. The influence of write-field stitching error can be alleviated by replacing the original waveguides with tapered waveguides at the joint of adjacent write-fields. It is found experimentally that a higher exposure efficiency is achieved with a larger step size;however,a larger step size requires a higher dose.

Stitch Fix 数据驱动的服装零售公司

Stitch Fix运用大数据技术改造甚至颠覆了传统的服装零售业,其数据驱动的新零售模式,对我国正在推动的大数据战略下的商业模式创新具有借鉴意义。2011年成立于美国旧金山的Stitch Fix是一家服装零售公司,同时也是一家大数据科技公司。除了提供自有服饰品牌外,Stitch Fix还提供700多个流行服装品牌,其商业模式充分展现了线上线下结合并以数据为驱动力的新零售业态。

Underwater Image Bidirectional Matching for Localization Based on SIFT

For the purpose of identifying the stern of the SWATH （Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull） availably and perfecting the detection technique of the SWATH ship＇s performance, this paper presents a novel bidirectional image registration strategy and mosaicing technique based on the scale invariant feature transform （SIFT） algorithm. The proposed method can help us observe the stern with a great visual angle for analyzing the performance of the control fins of the SWATH. SIFT is one of the most effective local features of the scale, rotation and illumination invariant. However, there are a few false match rates in this algorithm. In terms of underwater machine vision, only by acquiring an accurate match rate can we find an underwater robot rapidly and identify the location of the object. Therefore, firstly, the selection of the match ratio principle is put forward in this paper; secondly, some advantages of the bidirectional registration algorithm are concluded by analyzing the characteristics of the unidirectional matching method. Finally, an automatic underwater image splicing method is proposed on the basis of fixed dimension, and then the edge of the image＇s overlapping section is merged by the principal components analysis algorithm. The experimental results achieve a better registration and smooth mosaicing effect, demonstrating that the proposed method is effective.

Multi-camera calibration method based on minimizing the difference of reprojection error vectors

In order to achieve a high precision in three-dimensional（3D） multi-camera measurement system, an efficient multi-cameracalibration method is proposed. A stitching method of large scalecalibration targets is deduced, and a fundamental of multi-cameracalibration based on the large scale calibration target is provided.To avoid the shortcomings of the method, the vector differencesof reprojection error with the presence of the constraint conditionof the constant rigid body transformation is modelled, and mini-mized by the Levenberg-Marquardt （LM） method. Results of thesimulation and observation data calibration experiment show thatthe accuracy of the system calibrated by the proposed methodreaches 2 mm when measuring distance section of 20 000 mmand scale section of 7 000 mm × 7 000 mm. Consequently, theproposed method of multi-camera calibration performs better thanthe fundamental in stability. This technique offers a more uniformerror distribution for measuring large scale space.