Applied Sciences, Volume 12, Issue 1

With nuclear power plants worldwide approaching their design lifespans, plans for decommissioning nuclear power plants are increasing, and interest in decommissioning technology is growing. Laser cutting, which is suitable for high-speed cutting in u...

This article shows how to create a robust thermal face recognition system based on the FaceNet architecture. We propose a method for generating thermal images to create a thermal face database with six different attributes (frown, glasses, rotation,...

We analyze the empirical series of malaria incidence, using the concepts of autocorrelation, Hurst exponent and Shannon entropy with the aim of uncovering hidden variables in those series. From the simulations of an agent model for malaria spreading,...

In this article we present an isotopic analysis of human bone collagen (δ¹³C_col, and δ¹⁵N_col) and bone apatite (δ¹³C) for diet reconstruction, as well as δ¹⁸O_ap of human bone apatite for climate reconstruction, using samples f...

Paraphrase detection and generation are important natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet the term paraphrase is broad enough to include many fine-grained relations. This leads to different tolerance levels of semantic divergence in the positive...

In this paper, we study the effects of the shield tunnel construction on the deformation of an existing pipeline parallel to and above the new shield tunnel. We propose an analytical solution to predict the spatiotemporal deformation of the existing...

Inferior alveolar nerve injury is the main complication in mandibular third molar surgery. In this context, cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) has become of crucial importance in evaluating the relationship between mandibular third molar and inferi...

Several factors influence the behaviour of masonry infilled frames, which have been the subject of previous research with moderate success. The new generation of European design standards imposes the need to prevent the brittle collapse of infills an...

People who use social networks often fall prey to clickbait, which is commonly exploited by scammers. The scammer attempts to create a striking headline that attracts the majority of users to click an attached link. Users who follow the link can be r...

In this paper, a silicon ribbon (SR)-based microstructure is developed and added to a 32-channel optical phased array (OPA) to reduce the crosstalk between the antennas of grating waveguides. The spacing between the chirped grating antennas can be as...

Fuel cells are a key enabling technology for the future economy, thereby providing power to portable, stationary, and transportation applications, which can be considered an important contributor towards reducing the high dependencies on fossil fuels...

The use of minimalist shoes (MS) in running involves changes in running mechanics compared to conventional shoes (CS), but there is still little research analysing the effects of this footwear on plantar pressure, which could help to understand some...

Hamming space retrieval is a hot area of research in deep hashing because it is effective for large-scale image retrieval. Existing hashing algorithms have not fully used the absolute boundary to discriminate the data inside and outside the Hamming b...

Using Monte Carlo (with Geant4) and COMSOL simulations, the authors have defined a useful tool to reproduce the alpha spectroscopy of ²²²Rn, ²²⁰Rn and their ionized daughters by measurement systems based on electrostatic collection on a silicon detec...

Following the paradigm shift in the pharmaceutical industry from batch to continuous production, additional instrumentation and revision of control strategies to optimize material flow throughout the downstream processes are required. Tableting manuf...

The cesium atomic fountain clock is the world’s most accurate microwave atomic clock. The uncertainty of blackbody radiation (BBR) shift accounts for an increasingly large percentage of the uncertainty associated with fountain clocks and has be...

This study aims to comprehensively assess the accuracy and precision of five different devices and by incorporating a variety of analytical approaches for measuring countermovement jump height: Qualisys motion system; Force platform; Ergojump; an Acc...

This paper presents the steady-state stress analysis of single-layered and multilayered plates and shells embedding Functionally Graded Material (FGM) layers under moisture conditions. This solution relies on an exact layer-wise approach; the formula...

We have developed a traffic simulation model to quantitatively assess the resilience of a twin-tube motorway tunnel in the event of traffic accident or fire occurring within a tube. The motorway section containing the tunnel was investigated for diff...

In this work, in silico studies were carried out for the design of diterpene and polyphenol-peptide conjugates to potentially target over-expressed breast tumor cell receptors. Four point mutations were induced into the known tumor-targeting peptide...

Steel plate reinforced concrete (SC) walls can effectively resist projectile impact by preventing the rear concrete fragments flying away, thus attracting much attention in defence technology. This work numerically and analytically investigated the h...

Healthcare is an indispensable part of human life and chronic illnesses like cardiovascular diseases (CVD) have a deeply negative impact on the healthcare sector. Since the ever-growing population of chronic patients cannot be managed at hospitals, t...

Back-to-back geosynthetic-reinforced soil walls (BBGRSWs) are commonly used in embankments approaching bridges and narrow spaces. However, the available literature and design guidelines for BBGRSWs are limited. The aims of this research were to devel...

Transpired solar collectors (TSC) are one of the most popular solar thermal technologies for building façades. TSC use solar energy to heat the absorber surface, which transmits thermal energy to the ambient air. A variant of TSC, namely, a do...

In research on complex networks, mining relatively important nodes is a challenging and practical work. However, little research has been done on mining relatively important nodes in complex networks, and the existing relatively important node mining...

Students’ evaluation of teaching, for instance, through feedback surveys, constitutes an integral mechanism for quality assurance and enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education. These surveys usually comprise both the Likert scale...

Concern about the health of people who traveled onboard was raised during the COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. The ship’s narrow space offers an environment conducive to the virus’s spread. Close contact isolation re...

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the mix design and performance of fiber-reinforced pervious concrete using lightweight coarse aggregates instead of ordinary coarse aggregates. There were two main stages in the relevant testing work....

We propose a mechanical design for a simple teleoperated unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to negotiate uneven terrain. UGVs are typically classified into legged, legged-wheeled, wheeled, and tanked forms. Legged vehicles can significantly shift their ce...

Fatty liver disease is considered a critical illness that should be diagnosed and detected at an early stage. In advanced stages, liver cancer or cirrhosis arise, and to identify this disease, radiologists commonly use ultrasound images. However, bec...

This paper presents an approach to enhance electronic traveling aids (ETAs) for people who are blind and severely visually impaired (BSVI) using indoor orientation and guided navigation by employing social outsourcing of indoor route mapping and assi...

Audio-visual emotion recognition is the research of identifying human emotional states by combining the audio modality and the visual modality simultaneously, which plays an important role in intelligent human-machine interactions. With the help of d...

Enlarging or reducing the antenna beam width of antennas can improve the positioning capability of detection systems. A miniaturized and easily fabricated ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna system for long-distance electromagnetic detection is proposed in...

The optimal delivery route problem for truck–drone delivery is defined as a traveling salesman problem with drone (TSP-D), which has been studied in a wide range of previous literature. However, most of the existing studies ignore truck waiting...

It is important and difficult to improve the tensile strength of backfill material to ensure the stability of goafs. In this study, rice straw (RS) in fiber form is used to improve the tensile properties of cemented paste backfill (CPB). An orthogona...

The advanced connection requirements of industrial automation and control systems have sparked a new revolution in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network has evolved into an open and...

In the original publication, there was a mistake in Figure 2a as published [...]

Shear strength is an essential index for the evaluation of soil stability. Test results of the shear strength of scaled coarse-grained soil (CGS for short) are usually not able to accurately reflect the actual properties and behaviors of in situ CGS...

In this study, curved risers stepped spillways models based on the increasing angle of suspension were tested to check for improvement in energy dissipation and pressure distributions. Four fourteen-steps stepped spillway models with a slope 1:0.84 w...

Supernumerary teeth and odontomas are obstacles for spontaneous tooth eruption and may result in impaction. The aim of the study is to present a conservative treatment approach for impacted teeth following surgical obstruction removal by reviewing th...

Genetic differentiation between 40 lentil genotypes was tested using molecular markers. The genotypes were produced from a Greek landrace of commercial interest via the honeycomb breeding methodology, i.e., single-plant selection in the absence of co...

In this study, a passive truss-link mechanism applicable to large-scale deployable structures was designed to achieve successful deployment in space. First, we simplified the selected truss-link mechanisms to the two-dimensional geometry and calculat...

To alleviate the impact of fake news on our society, predicting the popularity of fake news posts on social media is a crucial problem worthy of study. However, most related studies on fake news emphasize detection only. In this paper, we focus on th...

This study mainly deals with the effect of hydrodistillation (HD) and water-steam distillation (WSD) methods on the color, yield, and chemical profile of the essential oil (EO) from Cryptomeria japonica fresh leaves from São Miguel Island (Azores Arc...

The in-situ measurement of the content and orientation of steel fibres in concrete structures is of great importance for the assessment of their specific mechanical properties, especially in the case of repair. For existing structures, the actual fib...

Nowadays, food is no longer just for nutrition. Consumers are more demanding and expect to get health benefits from their daily meals. Various areas of the food industry are in great demand of functional chemicals to enhance the taste and nutritional...

Magnetic microrobotics is a promising technology for improving minimally invasive surgery (MIS) with the ambition of enhancing patient care and comfort. The potential benefits include limited incisions, less hemorrhaging and postoperative pain, and f...

Although hyperspectral remote sensing techniques have increasingly been used in the nutritional quantification of plants, it is important to understand whether the method shows a satisfactory response during the various phenological stages of the cro...

Non-centrifugal sugar (NCS) is the scientific term the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) uses to define a solid product, produced by sugarcane juice evaporation, which is unrefined or minimally refined. NCS is referred to in various names globa...

Forest roads are of great economic importance as they ensure the transport of logs and forest biomass toward collection and processing centers, which is why they should be evaluated periodically, in order to establish the degree of degradation and pe...