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This paper aims to concentrate on recent innovations in flexible wearable sensor technology tailored for monitoring vital signals within the contexts of wearable sensors and systems developed specifically for monitoring health and fitness metrics.

In recent decades, wearable sensors for monitoring vital signals in sports and health have advanced greatly. Vital signals include electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, electromyography, inertial data, body motions, cardiac rate and bodily fluids like blood and sweating, making them a good choice for sensing devices.

This report reviewed reputable journal articles on wearable sensors for vital signal monitoring, focusing on multimode and integrated multi-dimensional capabilities like structure, accuracy and nature of the devices, which may offer a more versatile and comprehensive solution.

The paper provides essential information on the present obstacles and challenges in this domain and provide a glimpse into the future directions of wearable sensors for the detection of these crucial signals. Importantly, it is evident that the integration of modern fabricating techniques, stretchable electronic devices, the Internet of Things and the application of artificial intelligence algorithms has significantly improved the capacity to efficiently monitor and leverage these signals for human health monitoring, including disease prediction.

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors have attracted great attention worldwide for a variety of applications in measuring physical, chemical and biological parameters. However, stability has been one of the key issues which have limited their effective commercial applications. To fully understand this challenge of operation stability, this paper aims to systematically review mechanisms, stability issues and future challenges of SAW sensors for various applications.

This review paper starts with different types of SAWs, advantages and disadvantages of different types of SAW sensors and then the stability issues of SAW sensors. Subsequently, recent efforts made by researchers for improving working stability of SAW sensors are reviewed. Finally, it discusses the existing challenges and future prospects of SAW sensors in the rapidly growing Internet of Things-enabled application market.

A large number of scientific articles related to SAW technologies were found, and a number of opportunities for future researchers were identified. Over the past 20 years, SAW-related research has gained a growing interest of researchers. SAW sensors have attracted more and more researchers worldwide over the years, but the research topics of SAW sensor stability only own an extremely poor percentage in the total researc topics of SAWs or SAW sensors.

Although SAW sensors have been attracting researchers worldwide for decades, researchers mainly focused on the new materials and design strategies for SAW sensors to achieve good sensitivity and selectivity, and little work can be found on the stability issues of SAW sensors, which are so important for SAW sensor industries and one of the key factors to be mature products. Therefore, this paper systematically reviewed the SAW sensors from their fundamental mechanisms to stability issues and indicated their future challenges for various applications.

The aim of this review is to present together the studies on textile-based moisture sensors developed using innovative technologies in recent years.

The integration levels of the sensors studied with the textile materials are changing. Some research teams have used a combination of printing and textile technologies to produce sensors, while a group of researchers have used traditional technologies such as weaving and embroidery. Others have taken advantage of new technologies such as electro-spinning, polymerization and other techniques. In this way, they tried to combine the good working efficiency of the sensors and the flexibility of the textile. All these approaches are presented in this article.

The presentation of the latest technologies used to develop textile sensors together will give researchers an idea about new studies that can be done on highly sensitive and efficient textile-based moisture sensor systems.

In this paper humidity sensors have been explained in terms of measuring principle as capacitive and resistive. Then, studies conducted in the last 20 years on the textile-based humidity sensors have been presented in detail. This is a comprehensive review study that presents the latest developments together in this area for researchers.

Firefighter Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is the only barrier between the firefighter and hazardous environment. Gloves are a crucial component of the multi-component PPE. Over time the gloves have reduced the intensity of hand injuries, yet further improvement in terms of material selection and glove design is required to strike the balance between protection and comfort. Focusing on the material aspect, the purpose of this study is to present literature analysis on material selection and testing for firefighter gloves.

The study conducted a literature analysis on material selection and characterization of firefighter PPE. The review summarizes and evaluates past work addressing the characterization of firefighter gloves in accordance with NFPA 1971 requirements and points out found research gaps to aid with foundation of future research.

The study summarizes several research works to inform readers about the material selection and characterization of firefighter gloves. Based on the analyzed literature, the study resulted in material specification sheets for firefighter gloves. The developed material specification sheets provide information in terms of crucial material properties to be incorporated for accurate functioning of firefighter gloves, testing methods to validate those material properties and materials from analyzed literature exhibiting desired properties.

With large research addressing firefighter PPE, only limited studies focus specifically on gloves. Thus, this study provides a literature analysis covering material selection and testing for gloves. A consolidated firefighter gloves material specification document, which does not appear to be available in the literature, will provide a foundation for the development and characterization of firefighter gloves to better serve the functions along with ensuring user comfort.

This paper aims to realize the vertical interconnection in 3D radio frequency (RF) circuit by coaxial transitions with broad working bandwidth and small signal loss.

An advanced packaging method, 12-inch wafer-level through-mold-via (TMV) additive manufacturing, is used to fabricate a 3D resin-based coaxial transition with a continuous ground wall (named resin-coaxial transition). Designation and simulation are implemented to ensure the application universality and fabrication feasibility. The outer radius R of coaxial transition is optimized by designing and fabricating three samples.

The fabricated coaxial transition possesses an inner radius of 40 µm and a length of 200 µm. The optimized sample with an outer radius R of 155 µm exhibits S11 < –10 dB and S21 > –1.3 dB at 10–110 GHz and the smallest insertion loss (S21 = 0.83 dB at 77 GHz) among the samples. Moreover, the S21 of the samples increases at 58.4–90.1 GHz, indicating a broad and suitable working bandwidth.

The wafer-level TMV additive manufacturing method is applied to fabricate coaxial transitions for the first time. The fabricated resin-coaxial transitions show good performance up to the W-band. It may provide new strategies for novel designing and fabricating methods of RF transitions.

The purpose of this paper is to study the correlation between different topographies and the reaction of Ulva Linza fouling species.

In this research, topographies with a different method, such as hot embossing and hot pulling, were achieved, and biological analyses were done with macroalgae Ulva Linza cells. The effect of topography via local binding geometry (honeycomb size gradients) and Wenzel roughness on the settling of Ulva microorganisms was tested.

As a result, Ulva spores confirmed different reactions to a similar set of tapered microstructures that was in agreement with the results on distinct honeycombs. The local binding geometry and the Wenzel roughness factor “r” were dominant on settling of Ulva Linza spores.

The reaction of an organism at the interface of vehicles’ substrate is powerfully affected by surface topographies.

The best embedment occurred on structures with bigger sizes than Ulva Linza’s spores. The density of settled spores was proportional to Wenzel roughness and the spores favour to attach to “kink sites” positions.

Unfortunately, unpleasant aggregation of marine biofouling on marine vehicles’ surfaces, generate terrific difficulties in the relevant industry.

There was a sharp relationship between Wenzel roughness and settle of Ulva Linza spores. The local binding geometry and the Wenzel roughness factor “r” were dominant on settling of Ulva Linza spores.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as a fiber molding polymer is widely used in aerospace, electrical and electronic, clothing and other fields. The purpose of this study is to improve the thermal insulation performance of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the SiO₂ aerogel/PET composites slices and fibers were prepared, and the effects of the SiO₂ aerogel on the morphology, structure, crystallization property and thermal conductivity of the SiO₂ aerogel/PET composites slices and their fibers were systematically investigated.

The mass ratio of purified terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol was selected as 1:1.5, which was premixed with Sb₂O₃ and the corresponding mass of SiO₂ aerogel, and SiO₂ aerogel/PET composites were prepared by direct esterification and in-situ polymerization. The SiO₂ aerogel/PET composite fibers were prepared by melt-spinning method.

The results showed that the SiO₂ aerogel was uniformly dispersed in the PET matrix. The thermal insulation coefficient of PET was significantly reduced by the addition of SiO₂ aerogel, and the thermal conductivity of the 1.0 Wt.% SiO₂ aerogel/PET composites was reduced by 75.74 mW/(m · K) compared to the pure PET. The thermal conductivity of the 0.8 Wt.% SiO₂ aerogel/PET composite fiber was reduced by 46.06% compared to the pure PET fiber. The crystallinity and flame-retardant coefficient of the SiO₂ aerogel/PET composite fibers showed an increasing trend with the addition of SiO₂ aerogel.

The SiO₂ aerogel/PET composite slices and their fibers have good thermal insulation properties and exhibit good potential for application in the field of thermal insulation, such as warm clothes. In today’s society where the energy crisis is becoming increasingly serious, improving the thermal insulation performance of PET to reduce energy loss will be of great significance to alleviate the energy crisis.

In this study, SiO₂ aerogel/PET composite slices and their fibers were prepared by an in situ polymerization process, which solved the problem of difficult dispersion of nanoparticles in the matrix and the thermal conductivity of PET significantly reduced.

This study aims to investigate the effects of nano or inorganic fillers on unsaturated polyester’s (UPE) thermal, mechanical, and physical properties. UPE reinforced with nanoparticles shows better properties than the pure polymer itself. Nano or inorganic fillers are used in the polymeric matrix to improve thermal, mechanical and physical properties.

To improve thermal, mechanical and physical properties, UPE resin was modified with silica (S), boron nitride (BN) and S/BN hybrid nanoparticles at different ratios. Viscosity and solids content measurement, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, contact angle measurement, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and thermal conductivity coefficient tests were performed on the samples.

In the SEM analysis, the UPE sample showed a smooth appearance, while all samples containing additives showed phase separation and overall heterogeneous distribution. TGA results demonstrated that the thermal stability of the resin increased in the presence of S and BN additives. According to the results, it was observed that the presence of S and BN additives in the UPE resin and the use of certain ratios improved the resin properties.

As a result of the literature search, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study was found in which BN nanoparticles were included in the UPE resin together with S.