Intelligent Manufacturing and Design Under Challenging Conditions

Dear Colleagues,

Human exploration of the unknown continually drives us to operate in deep earth, deep sea, and deep space. These endeavors inevitably confront the difficulties of challenging conditions—extreme heat and cold, high pressure and vacuum, intense radiation, and low background radiation. Today’s equipment intended for such conditions is widely employed in oil drilling, mineral extraction, deep-space missions, and deep-sea exploration. Yet, many of these industrial systems still rely on outdated design methods and manufacturing concepts, leading to inefficient development cycles and frequent safety incidents.

By integrating state-of-the-art intelligent manufacturing—spanning design, fabrication, testing, field operation, and maintenance—we can leverage computer-aided engineering, data-driven approaches, and deep-learning technologies to markedly raise both the efficiency and safety of equipment development in challenging conditions. These advances will not only strengthen humanity’s ability to explore the unknown but also accelerate the discovery of new scientific principles.

This Special Issue, “Intelligent Manufacturing and Design Under Challenging Conditions,” invites contributions that report the latest developments and applications in this broad domain. While our primary focus includes deep-space exploration, deep-sea resource development, deep-earth science and engineering, mining engineering, and major scientific instrumentation, we welcome any work that addresses the intersection of complex systems and intelligent manufacturing. We anticipate that the findings featured here will advance engineering design theory, sustainable manufacturing technologies, data-driven intelligent manufacturing, and artificial intelligence for equipment operating under challenging conditions.

Original research papers and comprehensive reviews on (but not limited to) the following topics are encouraged:

• Research progress in equipment development for challenging conditions;
• Innovative design theories and methods for engineering products;
• Structural design and analysis of equipment for challenging conditions;
• Design and manufacture of exploration, development, and simulation devices for deep earth, deep sea, and deep space;
• Deep-learning-based intelligent equipment and its applications;
• Intelligent control strategies and devices leveraging small-sample data;
• Digital-twin theory and methods for equipment in challenging conditions;
• Extreme-size manufacturing and related fundamental approaches;
• Sustainable manufacturing processes and additive manufacturing technologies for challenging conditions;
• Manufacturing processes and methods under challenging conditions;
• Equipment operation monitoring and safety assessment under challenging conditions;
• Test methods and operation and maintenance of simulators for challenging conditions.

Dr. Ling Chen
Dr. Yanyan Li
Prof. Dr. Jinming Zhou
Prof. Dr. Guoqing Zhang
Guest Editors

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