Search Results (1,187)

In this paper, the concept of symmetry is applied to design active trajectory tracking control of autonomous distributed drive electric vehicles considering energy efficiency—that is, the construction and solution of active trajectory tracking controllers are symmetrical. This paper proposes a hierarchical control strategy consisting of upper-level control and lower-level control to improve trajectory tracking accuracy of DDEVs considering energy-efficiency characteristics. In the upper-layer control, a sliding mode active disturbance rejection (ADRC) controller is developed to control the front wheel steering angle and active yaw moment to achieve tracking of the desired trajectory, in which an extended state observer (ESO) is synthesized to estimate and compensate for internal model uncertainties and external environmental disturbances. In the lower-layer control, a multi-objective optimization algorithm based on Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions is designed to realize the torque distribution control for improving energy efficiency and vehicle stability of the distributed drive electric vehicle. Finally, a joint simulation platform based on Matlab/Simulink-CarSim (version 2019) is established for simulation verification. The performances of ADRC, linear quadratic regulator controller (LQR), and model predictive controller (MPC) are compared in snake-like and double-lane-change maneuvers. Simulation results show that the proposed controller can effectively reduce motor energy consumption while maintaining trajectory tracking accuracy and handling stability. This work provides a certain engineering design solution for motion control of intelligent electric vehicles. Full article

To address a projected workforce gap in microelectronics, numerous companies and universities are introducing programs that bring authentic, industry-focused practices into K-12 education. Integrated STEM has emerged as an innovative approach to address the urgent push to improve STEM education. Teachers, often trained in a single discipline, are tasked with supplementing their existing curriculum to achieve this interdisciplinary approach. To better understand, we examined the conceptions and considerations of K-12 teachers who were engaged in an industry-led I-STEM professional development and were given supplemental curriculum materials. Teachers were provided with a high-quality, integrated STEM supplemental curriculum, given time to engage with it, and asked how they would use it in their classrooms. This qualitative study sought to understand the factors teachers consider when implementing integrated STEM curriculum supplementation. We found that the primary factors teachers consider during the initial stages of integrated STEM curriculum supplementation are: (1) the curriculum’s potential to enhance students’ knowledge and students’ skill development, (2) the quality of curriculum attributes, and (3) the necessary adaptations for integration into their classroom instruction. Furthermore, teachers rarely mentioned applications across STEM disciplines, which means that meaningful I-STEM PD should be grounded in integrated frameworks that explicitly guide the desired integration and use the curriculum supplement to apply knowledge and practices from other disciplines. Our findings underscore the need to explore how meaningful I-STEM professional development can be designed and delivered using levels of I-STEM integration as a framework. Full article

This article reads Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake (1995) not merely as a refunctionalisation of the classical ballet, but as a historiographical instrument that excavates the queer tensions latent in the Romantic-era ballet. Its premise is that Tchaikovsky’s score and the original libretto (1877/1895) already contain the fissures of non-normative desire, sublimated by imperial censorship and the aesthetic conventions of the period. The theoretical framework mobilizes Nick Salvato’s concept of uncloseting, Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity, and a Freudian reading of melancholia. This conceptual map is then applied to Bourne’s choreography to show how his production reactivates the repressed archive through male bodies. Three principal axes structure the analysis: the deconstruction of the swan archetype, the Oedipal function of the Queen-Mother as repressive Super-Ego, and the reinterpretation of the Prince’s melancholia as the symptom of a structural impossibility. On the basis of these elements, the article proposes the concept of historiographical uncloseting, defined as a mode in which performance operates as embodied historical research, reactivating affective archives inaccessible through textual sources alone. Bourne’s Swan Lake thus becomes a critical instrument for re-reading the queer dimensions of the archive of Romantic ballet. Full article

Traditional fossil-fuel-based industries, including electric power generation and petrochemical production, are plagued by their inherent carbon dioxide emissions. Current efforts to minimize CO₂ discharge tend to focus on costly capture and sequestration rather than utilizing the process energy and products to produce profitable chemicals. This work describes a concept and design strategy for a comprehensive facility to convert natural gas and air to carbon monoxide, which could be further used to synthesize desirable compounds and fuels. The basic components of the process are an improved supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) electric power plant for driving solid-oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC) reduction in CO₂ to CO. This study examines opportunities for integrating a sCO₂ process with an associated air separation unit (ASU) and an SOEC, including material recycling and heat integration. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is expected to show more positive results than for separate processes. Preliminary economic evaluations provide a profitable process and product route for the combined process, suggesting that carbon emission reduction could be good business. Full article

Objective: To evaluate reproductive outcomes following fertility-sparing surgery for deep endometriosis (DE), specifically assessing the impact of bowel resection on spontaneous conception rates and the predictive value of the Endometriosis Fertility Index (EFI). Design: Retrospective observational cohort study. Setting: High-volume tertiary referral center for endometriosis. Patients: A total of 507 women with histologically confirmed endometriosis and documented infertility or active desire for pregnancy, managed between 2018 and 2025. Patients undergoing hysterectomy were excluded. Interventions: Laparoscopic complete excision of endometriotic lesions using a nerve-sparing technique. The surgical strategy for bowel involvement was tailored to nodule characteristics: 194 patients (38.3%) underwent segmental colorectal resection, 38 (7.5%) underwent rectal shaving, and 9 (1.8%) were treated with advanced organ-sparing techniques (lateral rectal resection or extra-mucosal excision—EMEB). Main Outcome Measures: Postoperative pregnancy rate (PR), mode of conception (spontaneous vs. ART), and factors influencing fertility. Results: The cohort presented with severe disease (mean rASRM stage 3.4) and a high prevalence of primary infertility (79.3%). During the follow-up period, 310 patients achieved pregnancy, resulting in an overall pregnancy rate of 61.1%. Notably, 70.3% of these pregnancies were achieved spontaneously. Radicality did not compromise fertility: the segmental resection group achieved a pregnancy rate of 91.2% (177/194), while patients treated with rectal shaving achieved 100%. The EFI score was identified as a robust predictor of success (mean score 5.5 in pregnant vs. 4.9 in non-pregnant patients, p < 0.05). Conclusions: Comprehensive nerve-sparing excision of DE, including segmental bowel resection, is associated with high pregnancy rates and a predominant restoration of natural fertility. Surgery should be considered a first-line strategy to reduce dependency on assisted reproductive technologies. Full article

Orthotropic laminates are highly desirable in composite structures because they eliminate bending–twisting coupling, simplify structural behavior, improve analytical predictability, and facilitate structural design, optimization, and certification. However, achieving fully orthotropic behavior in laminated composites remains challenging because conventional laminate architectures generally retain stiffness couplings arising from anisotropic ply orientations and stacking-sequence effects. This work introduces the Tailored Antisymmetric Composite (TAC) concept, a laminate architecture that provides the closest practical approximation to full orthotropy while preserving broad stiffness-tailoring capability and manufacturability. TAC laminates are constructed from tailored antisymmetric sublaminates that enforce $D_{16}=D_{26}=0$ while maintaining extremely small extension–bending coupling terms $B_{16}$ and $B_{26}$. Representative TAC and symmetric Quad laminates were compared analytically, statistically, and experimentally. Monte Carlo simulations comprising 100,000 realizations with realistic ±0.1° AFP/ATL fiber-orientation deviations showed that the distributions of the extension–bending coupling terms $B_{16}^{*}$ and $B_{26 }^{*}$ remained nearly indistinguishable for both laminate architectures, with probability-density overlap coefficients between 0.87 and 0.98. In contrast, the bending–twisting coupling terms $D_{16}^{*}$ and $D_{26}^{*}$ were 140–600 times lower in TAC laminates than in the corresponding Quad laminates, and their statistical distributions exhibited complete separation. Experimental measurements of post-cure warpage confirmed that TAC laminates achieved dimensional stability comparable to symmetric Quad laminates while exhibiting lower variability. These results demonstrate that TAC laminates combine exact elimination of bending–twisting coupling with negligible extension–bending coupling, statistical robustness to realistic manufacturing variability, and excellent dimensional stability, establishing TAC as a practical and systematic route toward full orthotropy in laminated composite structures. Full article

Predictive processing (PP) accounts often characterize mental illness as maladaptive and epistemically distorting due to mismatches between brain-generated top-down models and bottom-up sensory inputs, with this review identifying exceptions. First, hypervigilance in trauma survivors with PTSD or depression may sustain desirable gaps between anticipated problems and actual harms that would otherwise occur. Second, PP defenders have argued that depressive slowdowns follow from maladaptive brain-based regulatory models, yet physiological problems may make activity strenuous—in which case slowing down is adaptive. Third, PP researchers introduce tacit normative assumptions. For example, in autism and ADHD, they stipulate thresholds for how specific (hence error-prone) predictive models should be, and PP interpretations of schizophrenia sometimes presuppose Western concepts of self as normative neurocognitive ideals. Fourth, PP accounts of prediction error can tacitly invoke veridical representation, even though advocates regularly claim that cognition evolved primarily for action, not truth-seeking. While criticizing PP for its overreaches, this review also explores how greater attention to these exceptions and factors such as cultural variability may strengthen the framework’s capacity to understand and contribute to the treatment of a range of psychiatric conditions. Full article

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) integrate physical processes and information components through communication networks and are therefore vulnerable to cyber attacks. Opacity is a security property that prevents an adversary from inferring sensitive information from observations, and it has been studied mainly for discrete-event systems. In this paper, we extend this concept to discrete-time piecewise affine (DT-PWA) systems, which constitute an important class of hybrid systems used to model CPSs. In conventional opacity analysis, the result is typically binary, i.e., a system is either opaque or not. For systems with continuous dynamics, however, such a binary characterization may be insufficient, and it is desirable to evaluate the degree of security. To address this issue, we introduce a notion of opacity that incorporates security levels. We first formulate opacity for DT-PWA systems and then derive a necessary and sufficient condition for opacity. Based on this condition, we present a verification method using polytope computations and discuss the interpretation of the proposed notion. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Full article

All real control systems are subject to uncertainties and disturbances, so feedback controllers have to be designed such that closed-loop systems possess the desired dynamic and steady-state responses in the presence of any allowable uncertainties and disturbances. It is common practice to address the effects of uncertainties and disturbances via bounding techniques and the almost disturbance decoupling approach, respectively. Linear, affine, and power growth conditions on uncertainties are required for almost disturbance decoupling. However, when these conditions are not satisfied, almost disturbance decoupling is not possible. A new concept called weak disturbance decoupling is introduced to mitigate the effects of disturbances. A weak disturbance decoupling problem is to find a feedback controller so that the close-loop system has the weak disturbance decoupling performance, that is, the closed-loop system is stable and the norm of the output is not greater than the sum of a positive constant and the product of the norm of the disturbance and a positive constant. Full article

Effective diabetes management heavily relies on appropriate insulin administration, which strongly depends on the correct administration strategy. In this sense, insulin administration plays a fundamental role, as its use depends on the patient’s clinical condition and diabetes type. Traditional syringe-based methods require proper training to ensure that insulin is successfully delivered into the subcutaneous tissue, where it can be absorbed and metabolized; however, it is desirable to develop an insulin applicator that does not require training for its appropriate use. Aiming to provide support solutions that help patients to develop a correct administration technique, a biodesign-based methodology, coupled with biomimetic concepts, is employed to design a device that assists the user in creating a stable skin fold and guiding needle orientation during injection without requiring exhaustive training for device usage. A three-step approach is employed for the design, where computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) methods are employed to ensure that the device produces a laminar insulin flow and the device strength is tested. It should be pointed out both methods are required since complications produced by sudden flows must be avoided, with CFD allowing assessment of the device mechanical properties in terms of the device strength. Initial functional evaluation indicates that the proposed approach does not require extensive training or complex operational procedures, facilitating its integration into everyday use. The device design is validated from the results obtained for the CFD analysis, as no turbulent flow is produced, whereas the FEA indicates that the geometrical form can handle the stresses produced by the folding generation without generating excessive deformations. Moreover, an infrared thermography analysis is also carried out to find out if the folding force generation is located in the zone of interest, the results of which indicate that the device operates in the desired physical zone. Full article

Safety is a fundamental issue in autonomous mobile robot design. This paper presents a safety-critical control framework for nonholonomic tractor-trailer vehicles subject to both safety and physical constraints. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are employed to enforce hard safety constraints, generating a safe set that ensures obstacle avoidance. These CBFs are integrated with control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) to enable trajectory tracking while maintaining safety. To reduce conflicts between CBFs and CLFs and improve obstacle avoidance performance, we optimize their decay rates. Leveraging the concept of differential flatness, we design a controller that enables the system to follow the desired safe trajectory. Finally, the effectiveness and performance of the proposed method are demonstrated through numerical simulations and real-world experiments. Full article

The fuel and operation efficiency of combustion engines and power plants as a whole depends essentially on the in-cycle air temperature and drops when the temperature increases. Thermally stabilized, fuel-efficient engine operation at lower air temperatures is possible due to cooling. This can be conducted by heat recovery chillers (HRC) consuming the heat removed from the engine. Such combined production of power, heat, and refrigeration, applied for cooling engine in-cycle air, is considered to be a promising trend in integrated energy systems (IES) and energetics as a whole. The in-cycle trigeneration ensures a sustainable, thermally stabilized, and highly fuel-efficient operation of power plants. Starting from the strong influence of cyclic air temperature, the rate of in-cycle air cooling is considered as the rate of engine thermal stabilization (RS) and calculated as a ratio of the real drop in cyclic air temperatures to their target values when cooling air to the desired temperatures. Such a novel approach allows for assessing the effectiveness of cooling air issuing based on both aspects: fuel efficiency and engine thermal stabilization quantitatively by RS as a unified primary criterion indicator to synthesize a cooling system with heightened RS. A case study of an IES with in-cycle trigeneration confirmed that the developed an innovative gas engine cyclic air cooling system provided increased annual average weighted values of RS_avr of about 0.44 with an enlarged duration of engine thermally stabilized operation against 0.24 for a basic typical system. Furthermore, the engine’s thermally stabilized operation due to in-cycle air cooling ensures minimum thermal load fluctuations, caused by air temperature variation. As a result, the concept of sustainable fuel-efficient operation of IES due to in-cycle air cooling and the general approaches, hypotheses, and criteria at its core have been developed. Full article

Common sense tells us that feeling love involves loving another as another and is not merely an accident of self-love, while the Sanskrit theory of rasa aesthetics tells us that genuine love must be returned. God’s love for humanity would not require these distinctions, however, if it exists at all, and Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) claims that it does not. Rather, he finds that God’s love is not a philosophical problem because the very idea of God experiencing pleasure or pain as a result of desire for another (which constitutes common transactional conceptions of love) is irrational. This philosophical problem is compounded by the intrinsic value of loving without reciprocity, the follies of delusion, and the complicated—if not implicit—demands of reciprocity. Although Spinoza teaches a devotional path to liberation based on a logic of emotion in his Ethics, it is in the Bhagavadgītā’s twenty verses on “Bhaktiyoga” that a philosophy of devotion extends to a practice for the sake of love in moral action. This virtue-theoretic approach to emotion responses yields yoga-classed results such that the characteristic traits of love are dedicated to humanity and productive actions are offered to God. This study reconciles the complex challenge of achieving adequate moral knowledge with Spinoza’s claims that the path is rare, not difficult. If knowledge of what to do can be united with how to serve, divine love may be theoretically realised. The conclusion is that one may conduct ordinary secular transactions without contradiction yet generate a kind of affective currency as a channel for experiencing embodied liberation in a virtuous friendship with humanity via God. Full article

This narrative conceptual review aims to examine how veterinary science intertwines with the different ontologies of resilience. As resilience has increasingly become an influential yet conceptually diverse framework, its different ontologies shape and are shaped by veterinary science thinking. This paper will begin with a brief overview of the origins of the resilience concept and its three major ontologies: engineering, psychological, and ecological resilience. Following these different ontologies, the paper then explores animal-level resilience, where engineering framings emphasise disease response and production stability, while welfare-oriented perspectives frame resilience in terms of the affective experience and the lived realities of animals. It then considers veterinary professional resilience, highlighting how emotional labour, workload pressures and structural constraints shape wellbeing across the profession. Finally, it analyses how veterinary science contributes to socio-ecological resilience through One Health approaches in public health, food systems and climate adaptation. Across these domains, resilience is often framed as a desirable attribute, yet it remains a value-laden concept that can obscure inequities or normalise preventable harms. This paper calls for critical, justice-oriented engagement with resilience to ensure it supports ethically grounded veterinary practice and promotes healthier, happier animals, more equitable systems, and sustainable professional environments. Full article

Background/Objectives. Warfarin possesses a bitter taste and requires a personalized dose in the range of 4.5 to 77 mg per week. This study investigated the potential for personalizing warfarin dosing by developing taste-masked matrix pellets. Pellets, supposedly, can be counted and orally administered in the required quantity to obtain the required dose. Methods. The study evaluated the effects of drug load (10, 20, and 30 wt.%) on the duration of thermal postprocessing (to achieve the desired aspect ratio) and drug release. The warfarin sodium clathrate was characterized by determining its pKa value and dissolution kinetics in water, stomach-simulated media (0.1 M HCl, pH 1.2), and mouth-simulated media (phosphate-buffered solution (PBS), pH 6.8). A solid dispersion of warfarin sodium clathrate with Kollicoat^® Smartseal 100 P or Eudragit^® E PO was prepared using hot melt extrusion (HME). The mechanical properties of extruded filaments were characterized by measuring their elastic modulus. The microparticles (1–4 mm in length) prepared with filament cut pelletizing were thermally treated to produce ‘smoothened’ particles, which were analyzed with optical microscopy and drug release testing. Conclusions. Microparticles with smoothened edges and an aspect ratio close to one are expected to improve mouthfeel and potentially patient compliance. No drug release was observed in mouth-simulated media, which indicated applicability to the taste masking of the microparticles. The proposed thermal treatment of HME microparticles, exemplified in this study, is a novel concept with underexplored potential in preparing taste-masked matrix pellets and dose personalization. Full article