Applied Sciences, Volume 8, Issue 2

Seismic site effects and topographic effects related to ground motion occur during an earthquake due to site-specific geotechnical or geological characteristics, including the geological or geographical structure and the characteristics of near-surfa...

Recently, bio-inspired artificial muscles based on ionic polymers have shown a bright perspective in engineering and medical research, but the inherent tremor behavior can cause instability of output response. In this paper, dynamic additional grey c...

The case study, spanning three contexts, concerns a multi-usable cloud service platform for big data collection and analytics and how the development pace and efficiency of it has been improved by 50–75% by using the Arrowhead framework and changing...

Robustness and discriminability are the two most important features of perceptual image hashing (PIH) schemes. In order to achieve a good balance between perceptual robustness and discriminability, a novel PIH algorithm is proposed by combining laten...

In the printing section of a roll-to-roll gravure printed electronics machine, the plastic film tension is directly associated with the product quality. The temperature distribution of the plastic film in the printing section is non-uniform, because...

One of the main current challenges of electric vehicles (EVs) is the creation of a reliable, accessible and comfortable charging infrastructure for citizens in order to enhance demand. In this paper, a multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed to facilita...

Zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) was used as an adsorbent for the removal of toluene in its gas phase at different relative humidity (RH). High-purity ZIF-8 with an average particle size of 0.64 µm synthesized from an aqueous solution at room...

Laboratory tests on streamwise vortex-induced vibration (VIV) of a flexible, slender cylinder were carried out in a towing tank. A cylinder model, 20 mm in diameter and 3.91 m in length, was towed horizontally to generate a uniform profile of relativ...

Low-temperature cracking is a major form of distress that can compromise the structural integrity of asphalt pavements located in cold regions. A review of an Acoustic Emission (AE)-based approach is presented that is capable of assessing the low-tem...

Carbon fiber bicycle frames are complex-shaped structures and are prone to delaminations and difficult to inspect. The use of finite element model updating is common in structural dynamics but not so common in active thermography inspection. However,...

In this work, a novel, facile, and low-cost mechanical post treatment technique, i.e., ultrasonic substrate vibration post treatment (SVPT) is applied on wet spun perovskite layers. The effect of varying the time of the SVPT on the characteristics of...

In this work, aligned TiO₂ nanofibers (NFs) were synthesized using an electrospinning technique with a two-piece Al collector. The effects of processing parameters, including the calcination temperature, applied voltage, and needle-to-Al-collector di...

The reaction of wollastonite (CaSiO3) with CO2 in the presence of aqueous solutions (H2O) and varied temperature conditions (296 K, 323 K, and 333 K) was investigated. The educts (CaSiO3) and the products (CaCO3 and SiO2) were analyzed by scanning el...

It appears clear that the future of road transport is going through enormous changes (intelligent transport systems), the main one being the Intelligent Vehicle (IV). Automated driving requires a huge research effort in multiple technological areas:...

As the average age of the urban population increases, cities must adapt to improve the quality of life of their citizens. The City4Age H2020 project is working on the early detection of the risks related to mild cognitive impairment and frailty and o...

Recently, thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have attracted both academic and industrial interest due to their extraordinary characteristics, such as high efficiency, low driving voltage, bright lumi...

Featured Application: The proposed Uncertainty Flow framework may benefit the facial analysis with its promised elevation in discriminability in multi-label affective classification tasks. Moreover, this framework also allows the efficient model trai...

Abstract: In this work, glass/epoxy has been chosen as case study as it represents the most-used composite material, being appropriate for a vast variety of applications and a reasonable performance/cost compromise. This material has already been inl...

Humans have an innate tendency to anthropomorphize surrounding entities and have always been fascinated by the creation of machines endowed with human-inspired capabilities and traits. In the last few decades, this has become a reality with enormous...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is a technology that uses laser beams to measure ranges and generates precise 3D information about the scanned area. It is rapidly gaining popularity due to its contribution to a variety of applications such as Dig...

Depth image super-resolution (SR) is a technique which can reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) depth image from a low-resolution (LR) depth image. Its purpose is to obtain HR details to meet the needs of various applications in computer vision. In gen...

Featured Application: In this work, an inexpensive and available material, as volcanic glass, is used to absorb metals from wastewater and then it is used to the separation of light liquid-olefins.



Abstract: Raw porous volcanic glass from Cuba was use...

Noise pollution has become one of the four major pollution issues in the world and has drawn much attention recently. Controlling the sound source and using sound-absorbing materials reasonably is considered an effective way to reduce noise. Due to t...

Monodispersed magnetite (Fe₃O₄) nanospheres with hollow or porous interior structures were synthesized by a facile one-pot solvothermal route. The facile synthetic process was carried out by using iron (III) chloride hexahydrate (FeCl₃·6H₂O) as only...

This paper presents the numerical investigation on the seismic performance of a steel–concrete hybrid structure consisting of reinforced concrete (RC) tubular columns and steel braced truss with A-shaped steel frames, which is a novel supporting stru...

The increasing exploration of alternative methods for solving optimization problems causes that parallelization and modification of the existing algorithms are necessary. Obtaining the right solution using the meta-heuristic algorithm may require lon...

In this study, cavitation flow around a hydrofoil and its radiated hydro-acoustic fields were numerically investigated, with an emphasis on the effects of viscous flux vectors. The full three-dimensional unsteady compressible Reynolds-averaged Navier...

Thermal energy collected from the sediment layer under a water body has been suggested for use as a renewable heat source for a low energy network. A prototype system for using this sediment energy was installed in Suvilahti, Vaasa, in 2008 and is st...

Finding efficient and accurate solution methods for nonlinear equilibrium equations is a challenging task. This is the case of systems with friction-induced nonlinearities, e.g., friction-damped turbomachinery assemblies and automotive applications s...

The Nintendo Wii Balance Board (WBB) has been suggested as an inexpensive, portable and accessible alternative to costly laboratory-grade force plates for measuring the vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) and center of pressure (COP). Kinetic gait...

Advancements in diagnostic ultrasound have allowed for a rapid expansion of the quantity and quality of non-invasive information that clinical researchers can acquire from cardiovascular physiology. The recent emergence of high frame rate ultrasound...

This paper is concerned with the study of low-cost, low-power thermoacoustic electricity generators. Based on target electrical output power values of 50 and 100 W, three standing wave prototypes (of both one-stage and two-stage prototypes) integrati...

It is becoming increasingly more important to provide a low-cost point-of-care diagnostic device with the ability to detect and monitor various biological and chemical compounds. Traditional laboratories can be time-consuming and very costly. Through...

Systemic toxicity is an undesired consequence of the majority of chemotherapeutic drugs. Multifunctional nanoparticles with combined diagnostic and therapeutic functions show great promise towards personalized nanomedicine. Halloysite clay nanotubes...

This work presents the results of the overall design of the first Italian roundabout with jointed plain concrete pavement. The examined case study complies with current international standards and practices for geometry of roundabouts and road paveme...

The paper reports the results from the tests of recycled mixture samples containing waste materials. Six types of waste materials were used in the mineral mix, in various configurations. Statistical inference was based on the multidimensional analysi...

Infrared thermography (IRT) is a powerful non contact imaging technique, appropriate for the protection of cultural heritage. The National Technical University of Athens research team (scientist responsible: A. Moropoulou), started to use this techni...

Soil nitrogen is one of the crucial components for plant growth. An accurate diagnosis based on soil nitrogen information is the premise of scientific fertilization in precision agriculture. Soil nitrogen content acquisition based on near-infrared (N...

The confined porous environment of metal organic frameworks (MOFs) is an attractive system for studying reaction mechanisms. Compared to flat oxide surfaces, MOFs have the key advantage that they exhibit a well-defined structure and present significa...

This paper aims to study the comparative performance of original multi-objective population-based incremental learning (MPBIL) and three improvements of MPBIL. The first improvement of original MPBIL is an opposite-based concept, whereas the second a...

This paper presents an improved version of the metric-based iterative closest point algorithm to estimate robot poses by matching 2D laser scans with different overlapping percentages. Because of the greatly varied density distribution of realistic p...

The adequate protection against lightning surges and the limitation of the expected annual failure rate of high-voltage substations are critical issues, in an effort to secure the safety of the equipment and the personnel. Various factors affect the...

The multiphase fluid flow under the influence of electro-magnetohydrodynamics (EHD) is investigated in this study. The base fluid contains hafnium particles. Two illustrative models namely fluid phase and particulate phase are considered for three di...

With the rapid increase of private vehicles, traffic congestion has become a worldwide problem. Various models have been proposed to undertake traffic prediction. Among them, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models are quite popular f...

Biopotential signals are mainly characterized by low amplitude and thus often distorted by extraneous interferences, such as power line interference in the recording environment and movement artifacts during the acquisition process. With the presence...

Bipedal locomotion remains one of the major open challenges of humanoid robotics. The common approaches are based on simple reduced model dynamics to generate walking trajectories, often neglecting the whole-body dynamics of the robots. As motions in...

There are several models for representing emotions in affect-aware applications, and available emotion recognition solutions provide results using diverse emotion models. As multimodal fusion is beneficial in terms of both accuracy and reliability of...

The prediction of travel time is challenging given the sparseness of real-time traffic data and the uncertainty of travel, because it is influenced by multiple factors on the congested urban road networks. In our paper, we propose a three-layer neura...

In this study, we investigated geometrical characteristics of the inkjet-printed lines with non-zero receding contact angle (CA) on plasma-treated substrates in terms of various printing variables and analyzed the fluidic behavior and hydrodynamic in...

This paper describes the motion control system for a powered wheelchair using eye gaze in an unknown environment. Recently, new Human-Computer Interfaces (HCIs) that have replaced joysticks have been developed for a person with a disability of the up...