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This paper presents reliability and availability analyses of a robot‐safety system having one robot and n‐redundant safety units with common‐cause failures. The system failure rates and the partially failed system repair rates are assumed constant, and the failed system repair time is assumed arbitrarily distributed. Markov and the supplementary variable methods were used to perform mathematical analysis of this model. Generalized expressions for state probabilities, system availabilities, reliability, mean time to failure, and variance of time to failure are developed. Some plots of these expressions are shown.

The aim of this study is to first investigate the surface integrity of cylindrical rollers under grinding process and then design a reasonable superfinishing process that improve the anti-fatigue performance of cylindrical rollers by optimization of the surface integrity.

First, the white and dark layers produced by the grinding process is analyzed by microscope. Then, the influence of oilstone pressure on the stock removal, surface precision and crowned profile are explored. Finally, an optimal superfinishing process and a novel turnaround device are designed to improve surface integrity.

The experimental results show that as the oilstone pressure increases, the stock removal first increases and then remains stable. This hints that the stock removal of a single-time superfinishing process has an upper limit. In the current conditions, the maximum stock removal is 6 µm. Double-time superfinishing process and the turnover device can effectively eliminate the white and dark layers and improve the symmetric of roller profile. In addition, the surface precision is also improved.

The surface integrity of bearing rollers is very important to the application of industry field. The findings and the methods in the study can be helpful to improve the surface integrity of the bearing rollers.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of different types of winding configurations on the distribution of leakage field and branch currents for a 330-kVA high-temperature superconducting (HTS) transformer winding.

A three-dimensional electromagnetic model coupled with a circuit model validated by an experiment is developed to calculate the leakage field and current uniformity under four different types of secondary winding configurations. The four types of gaps between secondary windings are uniform gap, arithmetic progression (AP) gap, six sections with three different gaps and eight sections with four different gaps. A coefficient named as uneven degree is used to define the current nonuniformity.

The simulation results show that the currents and leakage field of double pancakes (DPs) on both sides are larger than those of the other DPs, and the currents of several middle DPs are smaller than the average rated current with an ISOB gap and larger than the average rated current with an IBOS gap. For any one of the four types of winding configurations, the type with the ISOB gap can prohibit the current nonuniformity more effectively, whereas the IBOS gap can decrease the leakage field more. The AP with the ISOB gap is a wise choice for decreasing the uneven degree and leakage field.

There is an optimal winding configuration for decreasing the leakage field and uneven degree of branch currents. The results and numerical model are very useful for the design of a HTS transformer.

The leakage field distribution and branch currents nonuniformity for 25 parallel DPs are investigated and optimized.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid driving system that couples a motor and flywheel energy storage (FES) for a megawatt-scale superconducting direct current (DC) induction heater. Previous studies have proven that a superconducting DC induction heater has great advantages in relation to its energy efficiency and heating quality. In this heater, a motor rotates an aluminium billet in a DC magnetic field and the induced eddy current causes it to be heated. When the aluminium billet begins to rotate, a high peak load torque appears at a low rotation speed. Therefore, driving the billet economically has been a great challenge when designing the driving system, which is the focus of this paper.

A hybrid driving system based on FES is designed to provide extra torque when the peak load torque occurs at a low rotation speed, which allows the successful start-up of the aluminium billet and the operation of the motor at its rated capacity. The mechanical structure of this hybrid driving system is introduced. A simulation model was constructed using Matlab/Simulink and the dynamic start-up process is analysed. The influence of the flywheel’s inertia and required minimum engagement speed are investigated.

The results of this paper show that the hybrid driving system that couples FES and a motor can successfully be used to start the aluminium billet rotating. The flywheel’s inertia and engagement speed are the most important parameters. The inertia of the flywheel decreases with an increase in its engagement speed.

The cost of the driving system is significantly reduced, which is very important in relation to the commercial potential of this apparatus.

A novel start-up strategy for driving the aluminium billet of a superconducting DC induction heater at low speed is proposed based on FES.

The paper seeks to bridge the already familiar benefits of 3D printing (3DP) to the rehabilitation of cultural heritage, still based on the use of complex and expensive handcrafted techniques and scarce materials.

A compilation of different information on frequent anomalies in cultural heritage buildings and commonly used materials is conducted; subsequently, some innovative techniques used in the construction sector (3DP and 3D scanning) are addressed, as well as some case studies related to the rehabilitation of cultural heritage building elements, leading to a reflection on the opportunities and challenges of this application within these types of buildings.

The compilation of information summarised in the paper provided a clear reflection on the great potential of 3DP for cultural heritage rehabilitation, requiring the development of new mixtures (lime mortars, for example) compatible with the existing surface and, eventually, incorporating some residues that may improve interesting properties; the design of different extruders, compatible with the new mixtures developed and the articulation of 3D printers with the available mapping tools (photogrammetry and laser scanning) to reproduce the component as accurately as possible.

This paper sets the path for a new application of 3DP in construction, namely in the field of cultural heritage rehabilitation, by identifying some key opportunities, challenges and for designing the process flow associated with the different technologies involved.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new hybrid algorithm, named improved plant growth simulation algorithm and genetic hybrid algorithm (PGSA-GA), for solving structural optimization problems.

PGSA-GA is based on PGSA and three improved strategies, namely, elitist strategy of morphactin concentration calculation, strategy of intelligent variable step size and strategy of initial growth point selection based on GA. After a detailed formulation and explanation of its implementation, PGSA-GA is verified using the examples of typical truss and single-layer lattice shell.

Improved PGSA-GA was implemented and optimization was carried out for two typical optimization problems; then, a comparison was made between the PGSA-GA and other methods. The results show that the method proposed in the paper has the advantages of high efficiency and rapid convergence, which enable it to be used for the optimization of various types of steel structures.

Through the examples of typical truss and single-layer lattice shell, it shows that the optimization efficiency and effect of PGSA-GA are better than those of other algorithms and methods, such as GA, secondary optimization method, etc. The results show that PGSA-GA is quite suitable for structural optimization.

Molecular dynamics is an emerging simulation technique in the field of machining in recent years. Many researchers have tried to simulate different processing methods of various materials with the theory of molecular dynamics (MD), and some preliminary conclusions have been obtained. However, the application of MD simulation is more limited compared with traditional finite element model (FEM) simulation technique due to the complex modeling approach and long computation time. Therefore, more studies on the MD simulations are required to provide a reliable theoretical basis for the nanoscale interpretation of grinding process. This study investigates the crystal structures, dislocations, force, temperature and subsurface damage (SSD) in the grinding of iron-nickel alloy using MD analysis.

In this study the simulation model is established on the basis of the workpiece and single cubic boron nitride (CBN) grit with embedded atom method and Morse potentials describing the forces and energies between different atoms. The effects of grinding parameters on the material microstructure are studied based on the simulation results.

When CBN grit goes through one of the grains, the arrangement of atoms within the grain will be disordered, but other grains will not be easily deformed due to the protection of the grain boundaries. Higher grinding speed and larger cutting depth can cause greater impact of grit on the atoms, and more body-centered cubic (BCC) structures will be destroyed. The dislocations will appear in grain boundaries due to the rearrangement of atoms in grinding. The increase of grinding speed results in the more transformation from BCC to amorphous structures.

This study is aimed to study the grinding of Fe-Ni alloy (maraging steel) with single grit through MD simulation method, and to reveal the microstructure evolution within the affected range of SSD layer in the workpiece. The simulation model of polycrystalline structure of Fe-Ni maraging steel and grinding process of single CBN grit is constructed based on the Voronoi algorithm. The atomic accumulation, transformation of crystal structures, evolution of dislocations as well as the generation of SSD are discussed according to the simulation results.

The discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DGFEM) is very suited for realizing high order resolution approximations on unstructured grids for calculating the hyperbolic conservation law. However, it requires a significant amount of computing resources. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how to solve the Euler equations in parallel systems and improve the parallel performance.

Discontinuous Galerkin discretization is used for the compressible inviscid Euler equations. The multi-level domain decomposition strategy was used to deal with the computational grids and ensure the calculation load balancing. The total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge–Kutta (RK) scheme coupled with the multigrid strategy was employed to further improve parallel efficiency. Moreover, the Newton Block Gauss–Seidel (GS) method was adopted to accelerate convergence and improve the iteration efficiency.

Numerical experiments were implemented for the compressible inviscid flow problems around NACA0012 airfoil, over M6 wing and DLR-F6 configuration. The parallel acceleration is near to a linear convergence. The results indicate that the present parallel algorithm can reduce computational time significantly and allocate memory reasonably, which has high parallel efficiency and speedup, and it is well-suited to large-scale scientific computational problems on multiple instruction stream multiple data stream model.

The parallel DGFEM coupled with TVD RK and the Newton Block GS methods was presented for hyperbolic conservation law on unstructured meshes.

This paper aims to study the localization problem for autonomous industrial vehicles in the complex industrial environments. Aiming for practical applications, the pursuit is to build a map-less localization system which can be used in the presence of dynamic obstacles, short-term and long-term environment changes.

The proposed system contains four main modules, including long-term place graph updating, global localization and re-localization, location tracking and pose registration. The first two modules fully exploit the deep-learning based three-dimensional point cloud learning techniques to achieve the map-less global localization task in large-scale environment. The location tracking module implements the particle filter framework with a newly designed perception model to track the vehicle location during movements. Finally, the pose registration module uses visual information to exclude the influence of dynamic obstacles and short-term changes and further introduces point cloud registration network to estimate the accurate vehicle pose.

Comprehensive experiments in real industrial environments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness and practical applicability of the map-less localization approach.

This paper provides comprehensive experiments in real industrial environments.

The system can be used in the practical automated industrial vehicles for long-term localization tasks. The dynamic objects, short-/long-term environment changes and hardware limitations of industrial vehicles are all considered in the system design. Thus, this work moves a big step toward achieving real implementations of the autonomous localization in practical industrial scenarios.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and improve the temperature uniformity of aluminium billets heated by superconducting DC induction heaters.

A 3D electromagnetic model coupled with a heat transfer model is developed to calculate the heating process of the billets which are rotated in uniform transverse DC magnetic field. A laboratory-scale DC induction heater prototype has been built to validate the model. The results from simulation and measurement have a good agreement. The model is used to investigate the factors affecting the temperature uniformity of aluminium billets.

The results from simulation show that lower rotation speeds always mean better temperature uniformity along the radial direction, due to the increase in power penetration. However, the situation is very different for the temperature distribution along the axial direction. When the rotation speed is low, the temperature at the ends is lower than other parts. The situation reverses as the rotation speeds increase. This phenomenon is referred to as the “ending effect” in this paper.

Because of the ending effect, a lower rotation speed does not always result in better overall temperature uniformity, especially for billets of smaller sizes.

There is an optimal rotation speed that yields the best overall temperature uniformity. Lower rotation speeds are not always preferred. The results and numerical model developed are very useful in the design of a superconducting DC induction heater.

The temperature uniformity of aluminium billets heated by DC induction heaters is investigated and optimized.