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The purpose of this study is to improve the performance of AISI 430 stainless steel (430 SS) in increasing its oxidation resistance, suppressing coating spalling and cracking, sustaining appropriate conductivity and blocking Cr evaporation as an interconnect material for intermediate temperature solid oxide fuel cells; a protective co-contained coating is formed onto stainless steel via the surface alloying process and followed by thermal oxidation.

In this work, oxidation behavior of coated specimen is studied during isothermal and cyclic oxidation measurements. Moreover, the conductivity is also investigated by area specific resistance (ASR) measurement.

Co-contained spinel layer shows an outstanding performance in preventing oxidation and improving conductivity compared with uncoated specimens. The protective spinel coating also reduces the ASR for coated specimen (0.0576O cm²) as compared to the uncoated specimen (1.87296O cm²) after isothermal oxidation.

The probable mechanism of co-contained alloy converting into spinel and the spinel transfer electron is presented.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the surface electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance of AISI 430 stainless steel (430 SS) as bipolar plates for proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), a protective Nb-modified layer is formed onto stainless steel via the plasma surface diffusion alloying method. The effect of diffusion alloying time on electrochemical behavior and surface conductivity is evaluated.

In this work, the surface electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance of modified specimen are evaluated by the potentiodynamic and potentionstatic polarization tests. Moreover, the hydrophobicity is also investigated by contact angle measurement.

The Nb-modified 430 SS treated by 1.5 h (1.5Nb) presented a lower passivation current density, lower interfacial contact resistance and a higher hydrophobicity than other modified specimens. Moreover, the 1.5 Nb specimen presents a smoother surface than other modified specimens after potentionstatic polarization tests.

The effect of diffusion alloying time on electrochemical behavior, surface conductivity and hydrophobicity of modified specimen is evaluated. The probable anti-corrosion mechanism of Nb-modified specimen in simulated acid PEMFC cathode environment is presented.

To solve the obstacle detection problem in robot autonomous obstacle negotiation, this paper aims to propose an obstacle detection system based on elevation maps for three types of obstacles: positive obstacles, negative obstacles and trench obstacles.

The system framework includes mapping, ground segmentation, obstacle clustering and obstacle recognition. The positive obstacle detection is realized by calculating its minimum rectangle bounding boxes, which includes convex hull calculation, minimum area rectangle calculation and bounding box generation. The detection of negative obstacles and trench obstacles is implemented on the basis of information absence in the map, including obstacles discovery method and type confirmation method.

The obstacle detection system has been thoroughly tested in various environments. In the outdoor experiment, with an average speed of 22.2 ms, the system successfully detected obstacles with a 95% success rate, indicating the effectiveness of the detection algorithm. Moreover, the system’s error range for obstacle detection falls between 4% and 6.6%, meeting the necessary requirements for obstacle negotiation in the next stage.

This paper studies how to solve the obstacle detection problem when the robot obstacle negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is to find an accurate, efficient and easy-to-implement point estimate method (PEM) for the statistical moments of random systems.

First, by the theoretical and numerical analysis, the approximate reference variables for the frequently used nine types of random variables are obtained; then by combining with the dimension-reduction method (DRM), a new method which consists of four sub-methods is proposed; and finally, several examples are investigated to verify the characteristics of the proposed method.

Two types of reference variables for the frequently used nine types of variables are proposed, and four sub-methods for estimating the moments of responses are presented by combining with the univariate and bivariate DRM.

In this paper, the number of nodes of one-dimensional integrals is determined subjectively and empirically; therefore, determining the number of nodes rationally is still a challenge.

Through the linear transformation, the optimal reference variables of random variables are presented, and a PEM based on the linear transformation is proposed which is efficient and easy to implement. By the numerical method, the quasi-optimal reference variables are given, which is the basis of the proposed PEM based on the quasi-optimal reference variables, together with high efficiency and ease of implementation.