Multi-functional photonic spin Hall effect sensor controlled by phase transition

Photonic spin Hall effect(PSHE), as a novel physical effect in light–matter interaction, provides an effective metrological method for characterizing the tiny variation in refractive index(RI). In this work, we propose a multi-functional PSHE sensor based on VO_(2), a material that can reveal the phase transition behavior. By applying thermal control, the mutual transformation into different phase states of VO_(2) can be realized, which contributes to the flexible switching between multiple RI sensing tasks. When VO_(2) is insulating, the ultrasensitive detection of glucose concentrations in human blood is achieved. When VO_(2) is in a mixed phase, the structure can be designed to distinguish between the normal cells and cancer cells through no-label and real-time monitoring. When VO_(2) is metallic, the proposed PSHE sensor can act as an RI indicator for gas analytes. Compared with other multi-functional sensing devices with the complex structures, our design consists of only one analyte and two VO_(2) layers, which is very simple and elegant. Therefore, the proposed VO_(2)-based PSHE sensor has outstanding advantages such as small size, high sensitivity, no-label, and real-time detection, providing a new approach for investigating tunable multi-functional sensors.

Analysis of the Design and Application of a Novel CT Secondary Cable Line Calibrator

With the rapid development of electrical power systems,ensuring the accuracy and reliability of power transmis-sion has become particularly crucial.The secondary cable line calibrator for current transformers(CT)plays an essential role in calibrating electrical power systems.It is not only related to the safe operation of the system but also directly im-pacts the accuracy of energy metering.This study aims to design and analyze an efficient CT secondary cable line calibra-tor to explore its application effects in the power system.By thoroughly analyzing the characteristics of CT secondary ca-ble lines and the design requirements of the calibrator,this paper proposes an innovative design scheme for the calibrator.This device demonstrates significant effects in enhancing the accuracy and stability of power system calibration,providing robust technical support for the optimization and upgrade of the power system.This research not only offers a theoretical basis and practical guidance for the design and application of CT secondary cable line calibrators but also contributes new ideas and methods for the precise calibration and efficient management of the power system.

One-step spraying method to construct superhydrophobic magnesium surface with extraordinary robustness and multi-functions

The robust magnesium surfaces with multi-functions are highly desirable,and the simple and scalable methods to construct such surfaces are urgently indispensable.Herein,we conducted a one-step spraying method to facilely fabricate the robust coating with multi-functions on magnesium alloys.The as-sprayed magnesium alloys surface is superhydrophobic with a static water contact angle(WCA)of 157.0°and a roll-off angle of 6.0°.Such surface has excellent mechanical,chemical and thermal stabilities,even undergoing various physical and chemical damages,including sand impact(10 gmin^(-1),≥20 min),water impact(2 impacts s^(-1),≥180 min),abrasion(1.00 kPa,≥25 cycles),peeling(≥2.15 kPa),high temperature(200°C,≥24 h),strong acidic/salty/basic media(p H=113)and organic-solvent immersion(ethanol and n-hexane,≥24 h),demonstrating brilliant robustness.Notably,the surface displays multi-functions of corrosion protection,anti-fouling and heat insulation,which will undoubtedly promote the much wider applications of magnesium alloys.

Design of Drilling and Riveting Multi-functional End Effector for CFRP and Aluminum Components in Robotic Aircraft Assembly

To fulfill the demands for higher quality,efficiency and flexibility in aviation industry,a multi-functional end effector is designed to automate the drilling and riveting processes in assembling carbon fiber reinforced polymer(CFRP)and aluminum components for a robotic aircraft assembly system.To meet the specific functional requirements for blind rivet installation on CFRP and aluminum materials,additional modules are incorporated on the end effector aside of the basic processing modules for drilling.And all of these processing modules allow for a onestep-drilling-countersinking process,hole inspection,automatic rivet feed,rivet geometry check,sealant application,rivet insertion and installation.Besides,to guarantee the better quality of the hole drilled and joints riveted,several online detection and adjustment measures are applied to this end effector,including the reference detection and perpendicular calibration,which could effectively ensure the positioning precision and perpendicular accuracy as demanded.Finally,the test result shows that this end effector is capable of producing each hole to a positioning precision within ±0.5 mm,aperpendicular accuracy within 0.3°,a diameter tolerance of H8,and a countersink depth tolerance of±0.01 mm.Moreover,it could drill and rivet up to three joints per minute,with acceptable shearing and tensile strength.

Development of a novel multi-functional integrated bioconjugate effectively targeting K-Ras mutant pancreatic cancer

Folate receptor(FR)overexpression occurs in a variety of cancers,including pancreatic cancer.In addition,enhanced macropinocytosis exists in K-Ras mutant pancreatic cancer.Furthermore,the occurrence of intensive desmoplasia causes a hypoxic microenvironment in pancreatic cancer.In this study,a novel FR-directed,macropinocytosis-enhanced,and highly cytotoxic bioconjugate folate(F)-human serum albumin(HSA)-apoprotein of lidamycin(LDP)-active enediyne(AE)derived from lidamycin was designed and prepared.F-HSA-LDP-AE consisted of four moieties:F,HSA,LDP,and AE.F-HSA-LDP presented high binding efficiency with the FR and pancreatic cancer cells.Its uptake in wild-type cells was more extensive than in K-Ras mutant-type cells.By in vivo optical imaging,F-HSA-LDP displayed prominent tumor-specific biodistribution in pancreatic cancer xenograft-bearing mice,showing clear and lasting tumor localization for 360 h.In the MTT assay,F-HSA-LDP-AE demonstrated potent cytotoxicity in three types of pancreatic cancer cell lines.It also induced apoptosis and caused G2/M cell cycle arrest.F-HSALDP-AE markedly suppressed the tumor growth of AsPc-1 pancreatic cancer xenografts in athymic mice.At well-tolerated doses of 0.5 and 1 mg/kg,(i.v.,twice),the inhibition rates were 91.2%and 94.8%,respectively(P<0.01).The results of this study indicate that the F-HSA-LDP multi-functional bioconjugate might be effective for treating K-Ras mutant pancreatic cancer.

A Mixture of Glycosylated proBNP and BNP-32 Is a Suitable Calibrator for BNP Immunoassays

Aim: Measurement of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) is widely used as a diagnostic and risk assessment tool for cardiovascular disease. Recent studies have demonstrated that BNP-32 and its precursor proBNP circulate in the blood stream, and that most commercial BNP immunoassays measure both forms. However, recombinant or synthetic BNP-32 is used as the standard for those BNP immunoassays. This gap between clinical samples and the standard might be a potential source of variation in BNP measurements among assays. The purpose of this study is to validate a more suitable calibrator for BNP immunoassays. Methods: External BNP calibrators containing both BNP-32 and glycosylated proBNP were prepared at two concentration levels. Target BNP concentrations of the low and high levels were 40 and 160 pg/mL, respectively. And to reflect clinical samples, the molar ratios of BNP-32 to glycosylated proBNP in these concentration levels were adjusted to 50:50 and 25:75, respectively. BNP concentrations of plasma samples along with the external BNP calibrators were measured at two commercial labs and using an automated analyzer MI02 Shionogi&reg;BNP (MI02). These samples and the calibrators were also measured using an immunoradiometric assay (IRMA) as a standard assay procedure. Concentrations of the plasma samples measured at the labs or using the MI02 were adjusted according to a comparison of the measured concentrations of the external BNP calibrators with the IRMA. Results: After measured concentrations of the plasma samples were adjusted using the external BNP calibrators, the correlation between each measurement and the IRMA was improved. The range of the slopes according to Passing-Bablok regression analysis narrowed from 0.628 - 0.955 to 0.911 - 1.005. Conclusions: Our data suggests that a mixture of BNP-32 and glycosylated proBNP at different ratios by concentration level is suitable for calibration to minimize variations in BNP measurements among immunoassays.

Multi-functional optical fiber sensor system based on a dense wavelength division multiplexer

We propose a novel and efficient multi-functional optical fiber sensor system based on a dense wavelength division multiplexer(DWDM).This system consists of an optical fiber temperature sensor, an optical fiber strain sensor, and a 48-channel DWDM.This system can monitor temperature and strain changes at the same time.The ranges of these two sensors are from-20℃ to 100℃ and from-1000 με to 2000 με, respectively.The sensitivities of the temperature sensor and strain sensor are 0.03572 nm/℃ and 0.03808 nm/N, respectively.With the aid of a broadband source and spectrometer,different kinds and ranges of parameters in the environment can be monitored by using suitable sensors.

A design and application of compound multi-functional sensor in wood-based panel processing

A compound multi-functional sensor was designed by the study on the on-line testing technology of wood-based panels, and its properties of shape, functions, size, resistance to special environment were studied in details. The operational principles of different sensors, technical flow of manufacturing, development of software systems of special functions, and the assessments of technical specification were also be introduced. This sensor adopted many new technologies, such as the applications of piezoresistant effect and heat sensitive effect can effectively measure the pressure and temperature, digital signal processing technology was used to extract and treat signals, and resist interference, encapsulation technology was used to keep the normal run of sensor under a harsh environment. Thus, the on-line compound multi-functional temperature/pressure sensor can be applied better to supervise the production of wood-based panels. All technical specifications of the compound multi-functional sensor were tested and the results met the requirements of the equipments.

Quasi-distribution Appraisal about Finite Element Analysis of Multi-functional Structure Made of Honeycomb Sandwich Materials

A new appraisal method（QDA, quasi-distribution appraisal） which could be used to evaluate the finite element analysis of multi-functional structure made of honeycomb sandwich materials is developed based on sub-section Bezier curve. It is established by simulating the distribution histogram data obtained from the numerical finite element analysis values of a satellite component with sub-section Bezier curve. Being dealt with area normalization method, the simulation curve could be regarded as a kind of probability density function（PDF）, its mathematical expectation and the variance could be used to evaluate the result of finite element analysis. Numerical experiments have indicated that the QDA method demonstrates the intrinsic characteristics of the finite element analysis of multi-functional structure made of honeycomb sandwich materials, as an appraisal method, it is effective and feasible.

A Weakly-Supervised Crowd Density Estimation Method Based on Two-Stage Linear Feature Calibration

In a crowd density estimation dataset,the annotation of crowd locations is an extremely laborious task,and they are not taken into the evaluation metrics.In this paper,we aim to reduce the annotation cost of crowd datasets,and propose a crowd density estimation method based on weakly-supervised learning,in the absence of crowd position supervision information,which directly reduces the number of crowds by using the number of pedestrians in the image as the supervised information.For this purpose,we design a new training method,which exploits the correlation between global and local image features by incremental learning to train the network.Specifically,we design a parent-child network(PC-Net)focusing on the global and local image respectively,and propose a linear feature calibration structure to train the PC-Net simultaneously,and the child network learns feature transfer factors and feature bias weights,and uses the transfer factors and bias weights to linearly feature calibrate the features extracted from the Parent network,to improve the convergence of the network by using local features hidden in the crowd images.In addition,we use the pyramid vision transformer as the backbone of the PC-Net to extract crowd features at different levels,and design a global-local feature loss function(L2).We combine it with a crowd counting loss(LC)to enhance the sensitivity of the network to crowd features during the training process,which effectively improves the accuracy of crowd density estimation.The experimental results show that the PC-Net significantly reduces the gap between fullysupervised and weakly-supervised crowd density estimation,and outperforms the comparison methods on five datasets of Shanghai Tech Part A,ShanghaiTech Part B,UCF_CC_50,UCF_QNRF and JHU-CROWD++.

Low-Cost 4-20 mA Loop Calibrator

Instrument calibration is vital to a successful control system because signal inputs to the system controllers come from such instruments. This paper presents a method for actualizing a standard low-cost loop calibrator for the famous 4-20 mA electrical signaling scheme. The loop calibrator generates a linear current signal from 4 to 20 mA over a 250 ? typical process instrument load for calibration. The realization of the loop calibrator relies on a voltage-to-current converter to build a constant current source. The voltage controlled constant current source is built from discrete components and an op-amp to keep the cost low. Results from simulations and the prototype demonstrate the performance of the 4-20 mA loop calibrator which utilizes a greatly reduced number of components. The cost of these components is approximately 34% of the least expensive calibrator sampled, though other production costs are not included. This conclusion reinforces the fact that loop calibrators can be cheaper.

Design and Realization of a Portable Temperature Sensor Calibrator

Due to the complex erection environment of various types of automatic stations,the provincial meteorological inspection department is difficult to carry out this work in terms of equipment or staffing. For this reason,a portable temperature sensor calibrator was developed,and it uses semiconductor refrigeration technology to increase and decrease temperature quickly. It uses an intelligent PID temperature controller as a control device to provide a stable temperature environment; it is small,light and easy to operate,and it provides technical support for the calibration of temperature sensors. The structure and working principle of this equipment were analyzed,and its performance was tested. All the indicators could meet the requirements of field calibration. The calibrator will provide a strong guarantee for the reliability of temperature data obtained at automatic meteorological stations.

Non-crossing Quantile Regression Neural Network as a Calibration Tool for Ensemble Weather Forecasts

Despite the maturity of ensemble numerical weather prediction(NWP),the resulting forecasts are still,more often than not,under-dispersed.As such,forecast calibration tools have become popular.Among those tools,quantile regression(QR)is highly competitive in terms of both flexibility and predictive performance.Nevertheless,a long-standing problem of QR is quantile crossing,which greatly limits the interpretability of QR-calibrated forecasts.On this point,this study proposes a non-crossing quantile regression neural network(NCQRNN),for calibrating ensemble NWP forecasts into a set of reliable quantile forecasts without crossing.The overarching design principle of NCQRNN is to add on top of the conventional QRNN structure another hidden layer,which imposes a non-decreasing mapping between the combined output from nodes of the last hidden layer to the nodes of the output layer,through a triangular weight matrix with positive entries.The empirical part of the work considers a solar irradiance case study,in which four years of ensemble irradiance forecasts at seven locations,issued by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts,are calibrated via NCQRNN,as well as via an eclectic mix of benchmarking models,ranging from the naïve climatology to the state-of-the-art deep-learning and other non-crossing models.Formal and stringent forecast verification suggests that the forecasts post-processed via NCQRNN attain the maximum sharpness subject to calibration,amongst all competitors.Furthermore,the proposed conception to resolve quantile crossing is remarkably simple yet general,and thus has broad applicability as it can be integrated with many shallow-and deep-learning-based neural networks.

Fiber-Loop Ringdown Multi-Function Sensors

We demonstrate a fiber-loop ring down multi-function sensors system, which can be used to measure refractive index and curvature simultaneously. Good agreement has been found between theoretical analyses and experimental results. It has great potential for sensor applications.

Considering calcium-binding proteins in invertebrates: multi-functional proteins that shape neuronal growth

Calcium is a critical second messenger molecule in all cells and is vital in neurons for synaptic transmission.Given this importance,calcium ions are tightly controlled by a host of molecular players including ion channels,sensors,and buffering proteins.Calcium can act directly by binding to signaling molecules or calcium’s effects can be indirect,for example by altering nuclear histones.

Analysis of Dynamic Cross Response between Spindles in a Dual Spindle Type Multi-Functional Turning Machine

In order to meet increasing demand for higher productivity and flexibility, recently many kinds of multi-functional machine tools, which are capable of multiple machining functions or different kinds of machining processes on one machine, have been developed and widely used in manufacturing industries. In this study, a multi-functional turning lathe, which has two spindles and two turrets so that multiple turning operations and various machining processes could be performed simultaneously, has been developed. Furthermore, the equations of correlation between whole responses and cross responses of the two spindles have been derived to examine to what extent the two spindles affect each other’s vibrations.

Design and Development of a Multi-functional Laparoscopic Device

This study presents a design of a multifunctional laparoscopic appendectomy device that includes three surgical instruments commonly used in laparoscopic appendicitis surgeries:endoloop,endobag and scissors.It collects these three independent surgical tools in a single laparoscopic appendectomy device.These days there is a trend of moving to multi-functional surgery devices during minimally invasive surgery.The main reasons behind the minimal invasive surgery are to avoid changing the devices several times during the operation,to reduce the time spent in operation,to increase the efficiency of the operation,to facilitate the follow-up of the camera and devices,and to leave trocars to be used for other surgical instruments.The multi-functional appendectomy device that,we present here,provides these benefits.The standard trocar entries are appropriate for its usage.The presented multifunctional laparoscopic appendectomy device offers more practical use in comparison to individual devices.On the other hand,development of these multi-functional surgery devices can be directly enhanced to the robotic surgery devices.

Design and Development of a Forest Nursery, for the Enhancement of Multi-Functional Agriculture and for a Didactical Purpose

The experimental idea of the present project was elaborated in order to create a structure where different categories and institutions could collaborate, with the common aim to develop a sustainable and profitable agriculture in mountain and marginal areas. The target was the recovering of an abandoned agricultural site, throughout its re-organisation, re-qualification and auto-sustainability, involving local citizens. This approach was based on three further broad functions such as environmental, economic and social purposes. This cooperation, that allows the capitalization of local knowledge and the forging of relationships between local and external sources of expertise, information and advice, is fundamental to the future of existing rural communities, in particular in mountain areas. The model proposed, with the elaboration of a management software and technical agronomic sheets, could be an incentive for the activities already present in that region and to stimulate new ones. The enhancing of the native ecological system, the biodiversity tutelage and the valorization of the knowledge of the territory is the basic requirement for the successful of any land management.

Multi-Functioning in Virtual Monitoring of Thin-Walled Bridges

Multi-functioning in virtual monitoring and assessment of ultimate dynamics of thin-walled bridges is treated in present paper. The approach enables multiple functions in virtual monitoring of the bridges made of integrated thin-walled members with their hierarchical configuration. Theoretical, numerical and experimental in situ assessments of the problem are presented. Some results of structural application are submitted.

A Portable Multi-functional Real-time Digital Simulator Dedicated to Protective Relay Testing

The paper intfoduces a PC-DSP based real-time digital simulator which is portable in size and aimed at the closed-loop testing of various types of protective relays for their design and application. The simulator can be widely used in not only concerning utilities but also manufacturers and research / certification institutes because of its many functions. The hardware architecture and software implementation of the simulator are described. The main features and functions of the simulator are also