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Open Access
Article
Publication date: 26 March 2024

Sergio de la Rosa, Pedro F. Mayuet, Cátia S. Silva, Álvaro M. Sampaio and Lucía Rodríguez-Parada

This papers aims to study lattice structures in terms of geometric variables, manufacturing variables and material-based variants and their correlation with compressive behaviour…

Abstract

Purpose

This papers aims to study lattice structures in terms of geometric variables, manufacturing variables and material-based variants and their correlation with compressive behaviour for their application in a methodology for the design and development of personalized elastic therapeutic products.

Design/methodology/approach

Lattice samples were designed and manufactured using extrusion-based additive manufacturing technologies. Mechanical tests were carried out on lattice samples for elasticity characterization purposes. The relationships between sample stiffness and key geometric and manufacturing variables were subsequently used in the case study on the design of a pressure cushion model for validation purposes. Differentiated areas were established according to patient’s pressure map to subsequently make a correlation between the patient’s pressure needs and lattice samples stiffness.

Findings

A substantial and wide variation in lattice compressive behaviour was found depending on the key study variables. The proposed methodology made it possible to efficiently identify and adjust the pressure of the different areas of the product to adapt them to the elastic needs of the patient. In this sense, the characterization lattice samples turned out to provide an effective and flexible response to the pressure requirements.

Originality/value

This study provides a generalized foundation of lattice structural design and adjustable stiffness in application of pressure cushions, which can be equally applied to other designs with similar purposes. The relevance and contribution of this work lie in the proposed methodology for the design of personalized therapeutic products based on the use of individual lattice structures that function as independent customizable cells.

Details

Rapid Prototyping Journal, vol. 30 no. 11
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2546

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 December 2022

Ying Zhou, Yu Wang, Chenshuang Li, Lieyun Ding and Cong Wang

This study aimed to propose a performance-oriented approach of automatically generative design and optimization of hospital building layouts in consideration of public health…

593

Abstract

Purpose

This study aimed to propose a performance-oriented approach of automatically generative design and optimization of hospital building layouts in consideration of public health emergency, which intended to conduct reasonable layout design of hospital building to meet different performance requirements for both high efficiency during normal periods and low risk in the pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

The research design follows a sequential mixed methodology. First, key points and parameters of hospital building layout design (HBLD) are analyzed. Then, to meet the requirements of high efficiency and low risk, adjacent preference score and infection risk coefficient are constructed as constraints. On this basis, automatic generative design is conducted to generate building layout schemes. Finally, multi-objective deviation analysis is carried out to obtain the optimal scheme of hospital building layouts.

Findings

Automatic generative design of building layouts that integrates adjacent preferences and infection risks enables hospitals to achieve rapid transitions between normal (high efficiency) and pandemic (low risk) periods, which can effectively respond to public health emergencies. The proposed approach has been verified in an actual project, which can help systematically explore the solution for better decision-making.

Research limitations/implications

The form of building layouts is limited to rectangles, and future work can explore conducting irregular layouts into optimization for the framework of generative design.

Originality/value

The contribution of this paper is the developed approach that can quickly and effectively generate more hospital layout alternatives satisfying high operational efficiency and low infection risk by formulating space design rules, which is of great significance in response to public health emergency.

Details

Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, vol. 31 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0969-9988

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 March 2024

Wenqian Feng, Xinrong Li, Jiankun Wang, Jiaqi Wen and Hansen Li

This paper reviews the pros and cons of different parametric modeling methods, which can provide a theoretical reference for parametric reconstruction of 3D human body models for…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper reviews the pros and cons of different parametric modeling methods, which can provide a theoretical reference for parametric reconstruction of 3D human body models for virtual fitting.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, we briefly analyze the mainstream datasets of models of the human body used in the area to provide a foundation for parametric methods of such reconstruction. We then analyze and compare parametric methods of reconstruction based on their use of the following forms of input data: point cloud data, image contours, sizes of features and points representing the joints. Finally, we summarize the advantages and problems of each method as well as the current challenges to the use of parametric modeling in virtual fitting and the opportunities provided by it.

Findings

Considering the aspects of integrity and accurate of representations of the shape and posture of the body, and the efficiency of the calculation of the requisite parameters, the reconstruction method of human body by integrating orthogonal image contour morphological features, multifeature size constraints and joint point positioning can better represent human body shape, posture and personalized feature size and has higher research value.

Originality/value

This article obtains a research thinking for reconstructing a 3D model for virtual fitting that is based on three kinds of data, which is helpful for establishing personalized and high-precision human body models.

Details

International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, vol. 36 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0955-6222

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 29 March 2024

Tugrul Oktay and Yüksel Eraslan

The purpose of this paper is to improve autonomous flight performance of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) via simultaneous morphing wingtip and control system design…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to improve autonomous flight performance of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) via simultaneous morphing wingtip and control system design conducted with optimization, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and machine learning approaches.

Design/methodology/approach

The main wing of the UAV is redesigned with morphing wingtips capable of dihedral angle alteration by means of folding. Aircraft dynamic model is derived as equations depending only on wingtip dihedral angle via Nonlinear Least Squares regression machine learning algorithm. Data for the regression analyses are obtained by numerical (i.e. CFD) and analytical approaches. Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) is incorporated into the design process to determine the optimal wingtip dihedral angle and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) coefficients of the control system that maximizes autonomous flight performance. The performance is defined in terms of trajectory tracking quality parameters of rise time, settling time and overshoot. Obtained optimal design parameters are applied in flight simulations to test both longitudinal and lateral reference trajectory tracking.

Findings

Longitudinal and lateral autonomous flight performances of the UAV are improved by redesigning the main wing with morphing wingtips and simultaneous estimation of PID coefficients and wingtip dihedral angle with SPSA optimization.

Originality/value

This paper originally discusses the simultaneous design of innovative morphing wingtip and UAV flight control system for autonomous flight performance improvement. The proposed simultaneous design idea is conducted with the SPSA optimization and a machine learning algorithm as a novel approach.

Details

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, vol. 96 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1748-8842

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 April 2024

Xu Yang, Xin Yue, Zhenhua Cai and Shengshi Zhong

This paper aims to present a set of processes for obtaining the global spraying trajectory of a cold spraying robot on a complex surface.

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to present a set of processes for obtaining the global spraying trajectory of a cold spraying robot on a complex surface.

Design/methodology/approach

The complex workpiece surfaces in the project are first divided by triangular meshing. Then, the geodesic curve method is applied for local path planning. Finally, the subsurface trajectory combination optimization problem is modeled as a GTSP problem and solved by the ant colony algorithm, where the evaluation scores and the uniform design method are used to determine the optimal parameter combination of the algorithm. A global optimized spraying trajectory is thus obtained.

Findings

The simulation results show that the proposed processes can achieve the shortest global spraying trajectory. Moreover, the cold spraying experiment on the IRB4600 six-joint robot verifies that the spraying trajectory obtained by the processes can ensure a uniform coating thickness.

Originality/value

The proposed processes address the issue of different parameter combinations, leading to different results when using the ant colony algorithm. The two methods for obtaining the optimal parameter combinations can solve this problem quickly and effectively, and guarantee that the processes obtain the optimal global spraying trajectory.

Details

Robotic Intelligence and Automation, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2754-6969

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 February 2022

Prajakta Thakare and Ravi Sankar V.

Agriculture is the backbone of a country, contributing more than half of the sector of economy throughout the world. The need for precision agriculture is essential in evaluating…

Abstract

Purpose

Agriculture is the backbone of a country, contributing more than half of the sector of economy throughout the world. The need for precision agriculture is essential in evaluating the conditions of the crops with the aim of determining the proper selection of pesticides. The conventional method of pest detection fails to be stable and provides limited accuracy in the prediction. This paper aims to propose an automatic pest detection module for the accurate detection of pests using the hybrid optimization controlled deep learning model.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper proposes an advanced pest detection strategy based on deep learning strategy through wireless sensor network (WSN) in the agricultural fields. Initially, the WSN consisting of number of nodes and a sink are clustered as number of clusters. Each cluster comprises a cluster head (CH) and a number of nodes, where the CH involves in the transfer of data to the sink node of the WSN and the CH is selected using the fractional ant bee colony optimization (FABC) algorithm. The routing process is executed using the protruder optimization algorithm that helps in the transfer of image data to the sink node through the optimal CH. The sink node acts as the data aggregator and the collection of image data thus obtained acts as the input database to be processed to find the type of pest in the agricultural field. The image data is pre-processed to remove the artifacts present in the image and the pre-processed image is then subjected to feature extraction process, through which the significant local directional pattern, local binary pattern, local optimal-oriented pattern (LOOP) and local ternary pattern (LTP) features are extracted. The extracted features are then fed to the deep-convolutional neural network (CNN) in such a way to detect the type of pests in the agricultural field. The weights of the deep-CNN are tuned optimally using the proposed MFGHO optimization algorithm that is developed with the combined characteristics of navigating search agents and the swarming search agents.

Findings

The analysis using insect identification from habitus image Database based on the performance metrics, such as accuracy, specificity and sensitivity, reveals the effectiveness of the proposed MFGHO-based deep-CNN in detecting the pests in crops. The analysis proves that the proposed classifier using the FABC+protruder optimization-based data aggregation strategy obtains an accuracy of 94.3482%, sensitivity of 93.3247% and the specificity of 94.5263%, which is high as compared to the existing methods.

Originality/value

The proposed MFGHO optimization-based deep-CNN is used for the detection of pest in the crop fields to ensure the better selection of proper cost-effective pesticides for the crop fields in such a way to increase the production. The proposed MFGHO algorithm is developed with the integrated characteristic features of navigating search agents and the swarming search agents in such a way to facilitate the optimal tuning of the hyperparameters in the deep-CNN classifier for the detection of pests in the crop fields.

Details

Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology , vol. 22 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1726-0531

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 April 2024

Lu Wang, Jiahao Zheng, Jianrong Yao and Yuangao Chen

With the rapid growth of the domestic lending industry, assessing whether the borrower of each loan is at risk of default is a pressing issue for financial institutions. Although…

Abstract

Purpose

With the rapid growth of the domestic lending industry, assessing whether the borrower of each loan is at risk of default is a pressing issue for financial institutions. Although there are some models that can handle such problems well, there are still some shortcomings in some aspects. The purpose of this paper is to improve the accuracy of credit assessment models.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, three different stages are used to improve the classification performance of LSTM, so that financial institutions can more accurately identify borrowers at risk of default. The first approach is to use the K-Means-SMOTE algorithm to eliminate the imbalance within the class. In the second step, ResNet is used for feature extraction, and then two-layer LSTM is used for learning to strengthen the ability of neural networks to mine and utilize deep information. Finally, the model performance is improved by using the IDWPSO algorithm for optimization when debugging the neural network.

Findings

On two unbalanced datasets (category ratios of 700:1 and 3:1 respectively), the multi-stage improved model was compared with ten other models using accuracy, precision, specificity, recall, G-measure, F-measure and the nonparametric Wilcoxon test. It was demonstrated that the multi-stage improved model showed a more significant advantage in evaluating the imbalanced credit dataset.

Originality/value

In this paper, the parameters of the ResNet-LSTM hybrid neural network, which can fully mine and utilize the deep information, are tuned by an innovative intelligent optimization algorithm to strengthen the classification performance of the model.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 April 2024

Mihaela Brindusa Tudose, Flavian Clipa and Raluca Irina Clipa

This study proposes an analysis of the performance of companies that have assumed the responsibility of facilitating the digitalization of economic activities. Because of their…

Abstract

Purpose

This study proposes an analysis of the performance of companies that have assumed the responsibility of facilitating the digitalization of economic activities. Because of their potential to accelerate digitization, these companies have been financially supported. The monitoring of the performances recorded by these companies, including the evaluation of the impact of different determining factors, meets both the needs of the financiers (concerned with the evaluation of the efficiency of the use of nonreimbursable financing) and the needs of continuous improvement of the activities of the companies in the field.

Design/methodology/approach

The study assesses performance dynamics and the impact of its determinants. The model allows achieving a simplified vision of performance and its determinants, supporting decision-makers in the management process. The construction of an estimation model based on the multiple regression method was considered. Robustness tests were performed on the results, using parametric and nonparametric tests.

Findings

The results of the analysis at the level of the extended sample indicated that, during the analyzed period, the economic and commercial performances decreased, and significant influences in this respect include the financing structure, sales dynamics and volume of receivables. The analysis at the level of the restricted sample confirmed these interdependencies and provided additional evidence of the impact of other determinants.

Research limitations/implications

The study contributes both to performance research and to the assessment of the prospects for accelerating digitalization in support of economic activities. Since the empirical research was carried out on a sample of Romanian companies that provide services in information technology, which accessed nonreimbursable financing, the representativeness of the results is limited to this sector. For the analyzed sample, the study provides support for improving performance.

Practical implications

The results of the study prove to be useful from a microeconomic and macroeconomic perspective as well, as they provide evidence on the performance of companies that have implemented information and communication technology (ICT) projects and on the efficiency of the use of non-reimbursable funding dedicated to business support.

Originality/value

The study fills the literature gap regarding the performance of companies that have developed ICT projects and received grant funding for the implementation of these projects. The literature review indicated that there are few studies conducted on these companies, which did not include Romanian companies.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 28 September 2022

Angeliki Kylili, Phoebe-Zoe Georgali, Petros Christou and Paris Fokaides

The built environment is taking enormous leaps towards its digitalization. Computer-aided tools such as building information modeling (BIM) are found in the forefront of this…

491

Abstract

Purpose

The built environment is taking enormous leaps towards its digitalization. Computer-aided tools such as building information modeling (BIM) are found in the forefront of this evolution, playing a critical role in creating the foundations for the upcoming development of smart low-carbon cities. However, the potential of BIM is still untapped – links will need to be created among the available and forthcoming methodologies under one integral operational system. The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated BIM-based life cycle-oriented framework for achieving sustainable constructions at the pre-construction phase. The developed framework represents an example of the approaches that the construction industry will need to adopt to integrate the different tools under an integrated smart city context.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodological approach follows the development of four same-volume different-configuration three-dimensional BIM designs, which are coupled with life cycle assessment (LCA) tools for establishing sustainable building design.

Findings

The results of this paper indicated that the choice of building design and shape can play a significant role in reducing the embodied energy and embodied carbon of buildings, achieving a reduction of up to 15% compared to a reference building of same volume and gross floor area.

Originality/value

The originality of this paper is found in its approach application by coupling three-dimensional BIM models with LCA data, the use of reinforcement detailing in an nD BIM study and the employment of country-specific LCA databases.

Details

Construction Innovation , vol. 24 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1471-4175

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 April 2024

Valentin Marchal, Yicha Zhang, Rémy Lachat, Nadia Labed and François Peyraut

The use of continuous fiber-reinforced filaments improves the mechanical properties obtained with the fused filament fabrication (FFF) process. Yet, there is a lack of simulation…

Abstract

Purpose

The use of continuous fiber-reinforced filaments improves the mechanical properties obtained with the fused filament fabrication (FFF) process. Yet, there is a lack of simulation tailored tools to assist in the design for additive manufacturing of continuous fiber composites. To build such models, a precise elastic model is required. As the porosity caused by interbead voids remains an important flaw of the process, this paper aims to build an elastic model integrating this aspect.

Design/methodology/approach

To study the amount of porosity, which could be a failure initiator, this study proposes a two step periodic homogenization method. The first step concerns the microscopic scale with a unit cell made of fiber and matrix. The second step is at the mesoscopic scale and combines the elastic material of the first step with the interbead voids. The void content has been set as a parameter of the model. The material models predicted with the periodic homogenization were compared with experimental results.

Findings

The comparison between periodic homogenization results and tensile test results shows a fair agreement between the experimental results and that of the numerical simulation, whatever the fibers’ orientations are. Moreover, a void content reduction has been observed by increasing the crossing angle from one layer to another. An empiric law giving the porosity according to this crossing angle was created. The model and the law can be further used for design evaluation and optimization of continuous fiber-reinforced FFF.

Originality/value

A new elastic model considering interbead voids and its variation with the crossing angle of the fibers has been built. It can be used in simulation tools to design high performance fused filament fabricated composite parts.

Details

Rapid Prototyping Journal, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2546

Keywords

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