Additive Manufacturing of Porous Structures for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Applications

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown promising benefits in many applications. This has been enabled by the emergence of additive manufacturing (AM), which give the designers a large amount of geometrical freedom. In this paper, a novel design process of fused deposition modeling (FDM) combining both topology and infill optimization is introduced for AM of high performance porous structures. Tensile testing of FDM printed samples is first carried out to study the effect of the build orientation on the mechanical properties of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) samples. It is found that samples built perpendicular to the load axis are the weakest with a tensile strength of 29 MPa and Young's modulus of 1960 MPa. The materials properties are fed to the finite elements analysis (FEA) for geometrical topology optimization, aiming to maximize stiffness and reduce weight of those parts. Afterwards, an infill optimization is carried out on the topology optimized parts using different mesostructures such as honeycomb, triangular, and rectangular to achieve high structural performance. The results showed that triangular pattern with 50% infill density had the lowest developed stresses, less mass, and strain energy when compared to other structures. Optimum UAVs parts of a quadcopter are successfully manufactured, assembled, and tested.

     

Innovative techniques in pediatric liver transplantation: reduced-, split- and living-donor related liver transplantation

BACKGROUND: Biological systems that show threshold phenomena are candidates for stochastic resonance as a mechanism to explain what appears to be biovariability. Stochastic resonance is the amplification of weak signals by "noise." OBJECTIVE: This review discusses the areas of contact dermatitis in which threshold events have been documented. The purpose is to point out the mechanism by which stochastic resonance may affect patch test results. METHODS: A literature review technique was used. RESULTS: The recent finding of a neurological influence on contract dermatitis provides a mechanism for stochastic resonance to affect patch test results. CONCLUSION: Stochastic resonance is likely to affect patch test results when more than one patch test result is positive.     

Estimation of net radiation from the MODIS data under all sky conditions: Southern Great Plains case study

Net radiation is a key component in the surface radiation budget. Numerous studies have developed frameworks to estimate net radiation or its components (upwelling or downwelling longwave and/or shortwave radiation) from remote sensing data for clear sky conditions. Application of existing methodologies to estimate net radiation for cloudy sky conditions from remote sensing sensors remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we present a framework to estimate instantaneous and daily average net radiation under all sky conditions from using the data from the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), onboard from the Terra satellites. Bisht et al. (2005) methodology is used for the clear sky portion of the MODIS overpass; while for cloudy portion of the MODIS overpass an extension of Bisht et al. (2005) methodology is applied. The extension of Bisht et al. (2005) methodology utilizes the MODIS cloud data product (MOD06_L2) for cloud top temperature, cloud fraction, cloud emissivity, cloud optical thickness and land surface temperature for cloudy days. The methodology is applied over the Southern Great Plains (SGP) for a time period covering all seasons of 2006. During the MODIS-Terra overpasses in 2006 over the SGP, only 24% of day-overpasses and 9% of night-overpasses had 75% or more of the study region as cloud free. Thus, this proposed study is applicable to a large portion of the MODIS-Terra overpasses. The root mean square errors (RMSE) of instantaneous and daily average net radiation estimated under cloudy conditions using the MOD06_L2 product, comparing to ground-based measurements are 37 W m^− 2 and 38 W m^− 2, respectively. The strength of the proposed methodology is that it can rely exclusively on remote sensing data in the absence of ancillary ground observations, thus it has a potential to estimate surface energy budget globally.     

Report of the Second Workshop on the Usage of NetFlow/IPFIX in Network Management

Following the success of the First Workshop on the Usage of NetFlow/IPFIX (Pras et al. in J Netw Syst Manag 17(4), 2009) in 2008, the European EMANICS Network of Excellence organized a second workshop in October 2009, held at Jacobs University Bremen. This report summarizes the workshop and presents its main conclusions.     

Tetra-trees properties in graphic interaction

The localization of the components of an object near to a device before obtaining the real interaction is usually determined by means of a proximity measurement to the device of the object’s features. In order to do this efficiently, hierarchical decompositions are used, so that the features of the objects are classified into several types of cells, usually rectangular.In this paper we propose a solution based on the classification of a set of points situated on the device in a little-known spatial decomposition named tetra-tree. Using this type of spatial decomposition gives us several quantitative and qualitative properties that allow us a more realistic and intuitive visual interaction, as well as the possibility of selecting inaccessible components. These features could be used in virtual sculpting or accessibility tasks.In order to show these properties we have compared an interaction system based on tetra-trees to one based on octrees.     

Generating blogs out of product catalogues: An MDE approach

Blogs can be used as a conduit for customer opinions and, in so doing, building communities around products. We attempt to realise this vision by building blogs out of product catalogues. Unfortunately, the immaturity of blog engines makes this endeavour risky. This paper presents a model-driven approach to face this drawback. This implies the introduction of (meta)models: the catalogue model, based on the standard Open Catalog Format, and blog models, that elaborate on the use of blogs as conduits for virtual communities. Blog models end up being realised through blog engines. Specifically, we focus on two types of engines: a hosted blog platform and a standalone blog platform, both in Blojsom. However, the lack of standards in a broad and constantly evolving blog-engine space, hinders both the portability and the maintainability of the solution. Hence, we resort to the notion of “abstract platform” as a way to depart from the peculiarities of specific blog engines. Additionally, the paper measures the reuse gains brought by MDE in comparison with the manual coding of blogs.     

DEMORS: A hybrid multi-objective optimization algorithm using differential evolution and rough set theory for constrained problems

The aim of this paper is to show how the hybridization of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) and a local search method based on the use of rough set theory is a viable alternative to obtain a robust algorithm able to solve difficult constrained multi-objective optimization problems at a moderate computational cost. This paper extends a previously published MOEA [Hernández-Díaz AG, Santana-Quintero LV, Coello Coello C, Caballero R, Molina J. A new proposal for multi-objective optimization using differential evolution and rough set theory. In: 2006 genetic and evolutionary computation conference (GECCO’2006). Seattle, Washington, USA: ACM Press; July 2006], which was limited to unconstrained multi-objective optimization problems. Here, the main idea is to use this sort of hybrid approach to approximate the Pareto front of a constrained multi-objective optimization problem while performing a relatively low number of fitness function evaluations. Since in real-world problems the cost of evaluating the objective functions is the most significant, our underlying assumption is that, by aiming to minimize the number of such evaluations, our MOEA can be considered efficient. As in its previous version, our hybrid approach operates in two stages: in the first one, a multi-objective version of differential evolution is used to generate an initial approximation of the Pareto front. Then, in the second stage, rough set theory is used to improve the spread and quality of this initial approximation. To assess the performance of our proposed approach, we adopt, on the one hand, a set of standard bi-objective constrained test problems and, on the other hand, a large real-world problem with eight objective functions and 160 decision variables. The first set of problems are solved performing 10,000 fitness function evaluations, which is a competitive value compared to the number of evaluations previously reported in the specialized literature for such problems. The real-world problem is solved performing 250,000 fitness function evaluations, mainly because of its high dimensionality. Our results are compared with respect to those generated by NSGA-II, which is a MOEA representative of the state-of-the-art in the area.     

Linear complete differential resultants and the implicitization of linear DPPEs

The linear complete differential resultant of a finite set of linear ordinary differential polynomials is defined. We study the computation by linear complete differential resultants of the implicit equation of a system of n$n$ linear differential polynomial parametric equations in n−1$n-1$ differential parameters. We give necessary conditions to ensure properness of the system of differential polynomial parametric equations.