Optical fiber sensors have been successfully implemented in aeronautics, mechanical systems, and medical applications. Civil structures pose further challenges in monitoring mainly due to their large dimensions, diversity and heterogeneity of materials involved, and hostile construction environment. This article provides a summary of basic principles pertaining to practical health monitoring of civil engineering structures with optical fiber sensors. The issues discussed include basic sensor principles, strain transfer mechanism, sensor packaging, sensor placement in construction environment, and reliability and survivability of the sensors.

Laminated object manufacturing (LOM) is one of the commercialized rapid prototyping (RP) processes, where a focused laser is usually used to cut the cross-section contours of a 3 D part and the grid hatchings of the part-exterior region on a sheet paper stack-wise. Using a laser beam as a cutter can be costly, and the thermal burning of a sheet paper along a laser scanning path can also cause an environment-polluting smoke. This paper presents a paper laminating RP system using a knife as the paper cutter instead of a laser beam. The knife holder is mounted through a radial bearing on the X-Y positioning mechanism in such a way that the knife tip is eccentric to the bearing axis by a small distance (so-called offset). Therefore, the knife tip, which engages into the sheet paper during cutting, tends to follow the path of the XY-driven bearing axis by the error that depends on the path tangential and the eccentricity of the knife tip. A tractrix model is applied to describe the kinetic motion of the knife tip and a method is formulated to compensate for the tracing error of the eccentric knife tip by modifying the original cross-section contours of the part for each layer based on the tractrix equation. A study has also been performed regarding the effect of the knife tip geometry on the cutting notch of the sheet paper and on the roughness of the finished part.

Soft-PLC with open architecture is the direction of development in industrial automation. This paper discusses the method of communication between the interface functions of LinSERCANS under RTLinux and the external library of Soft-PLC under Windows. Based on the API HOOK theory, the communication between the interface functions of LinSERCANS and the external libraries of Soft-PLC is set up and it solves the calling functions of dynamic link libraries in different operation systems. It is able to combine LinSERCANS with the Soft-PLC, and a run-time system is developed based on the interface technology of the serial real-time communication system (SERCOS) and technology of soft-PLC. This run-time system has been used in all electronic injection molding machines and works very well.

Kansei Engineering is an important research approach and has become the hotspot of research in design fields. The concept of Kansei Engineering is introduced based on the investigation of related literatures. The working process and the key technology of computer-aided Kansei Engineering systems are discussed. Finally, the development trend of Kansei Engineering is outlined according to the development of computer and networking technology.

Magnetic fluid is first introduced into the traditional cantilever-beam senor. Based on the property of the cantilever-beam and the novel controllable mag-viscosity of magnetic fluid, the output of cantilever-beam sensors is under control so that the controllable output of the sensors can be realized. The mathematical model of the sensors is established and analyzed. The dynamic control function and the following educational results, which include the two curves of the displacement ratio and phase function with the different damping ratio and frequency ratio, are obtained based on the model. The result shows that it is valid to realize the controllable output of the sensors by controlling the viscosity of the magnetic fluid, and finally the expanded measurement range can be realized.

When welding steel with aluminum, the appearance of intermetallic compounds of Fe and Al will decrease tenacity and increase rigidity, which leads to bad joint performance. A new type of low energy input (LEI) welding technology is introduced which can be used to weld steel with aluminum. Using the technology, brazing was located on the steel side and arc fusion welding on the aluminum side. The less heat input reduces the thickness of intermetallic compounds to 3-4 μm. Tensile strength tests prove that the joint breaks at the heat-affected zone and the strength is higher than 70% of the aluminum’s. Thus, the method can lead to a good performance joint.

Based on the analysis of the principle and flame movement of a pipe cutting machine tool, a retrofit NC flame pipe cutting machine tool (NFPCM) that can meet the demands of cutting various pipes is proposed. The paper deals with the design and implementation of an open architecture CNC system for the NFPCM, many of whose aspects are similar to milling machines; however, different from their machining processes and control strategies. The paper emphasizes on the NC system structure and the method for directly creating the NC file according to the cutting type and parameters. Further, the paper develops the program and sets up the open and module NC system.

This paper investigates and compares the efficiencies of four different interfaces for vibration-based energy harvesting systems. Among those four circuits, two circuits adopt the synchronous switching technique, in which the circuit is switched synchronously with the vibration. In this study, a simple source-less trigger circuit used to control the synchronized switch is proposed and two interface circuits of energy harvesting systems are designed based on the trigger circuit. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed circuits, an experimental system was established and the power harvested by those circuits from a vibration beam was measured. Experimental results show that the two new circuits can increase the harvested power by factors 2.6 and 7, respectively, without consuming extra power in the circuits.

The dynamic properties of a numerical control (NC) table directly interfere with the accuracy and surface quality of work pieces machined by a computer numerical control (CNC) machine. Phase space reconstruction is an effective approach for researching dynamic behaviors of a system with measured time series. Based on the theory and method for phase space reconstruction, the correlation dimension, maximum Lyapunov exponent, and dynamic time series measured from the NC table were analyzed. The characteristic quantities such as the power spectrum, phase trajectories, correlation dimension, and maximum Lyapunov exponent are extracted from the measured time series. The chaotic characteristic of the dynamic properties of the NC table is revealed via various approaches. Therefore, an NC table is a nonlinear dynamic system. This research establishes a basis for dynamic system discrimination of a CNC machine.

A location system is very important for solder paste printing in the process of surface mount technology (SMT). Using machine vision technology to complete the location mission is new and very efficient. This paper presents an integrated visual location system for solder paste printing based on machine vision. The working principle of solder paste printing is introduced and then the design and implementation of the visual location system are described. In the system, two key techniques are completed by secondary development based on VisionPro. One is accurate image location solved by the pattern-based location algorithms of PatMax. The other one is camera calibration that is achieved by image warping technology through the checkerboard plate. Moreover, the system can provide good performances such as high image locating accuracy with 1/40 sub-pixels, high anti-jamming, and high-speed location of objects whose appearance is rotated, scaled, and/or stretched.

The robustness of mechanical systems is influenced by various factors. Their effects must be understood for designing robust systems. This paper proposes a model for describing the relationships among functional requirements, structural characteristics, design parameters and uncontrollable variables of nonlinear systems. With this model, the sensitivity of systems was analyzed to formulate a system sensitivity index and robust sensitivity matrix to determine the importance of the factors in relation to the robustness of systems. Based on the robust design principle, an optimization model was developed. Combining this optimization model and the Taguchi method for robust design, an analysis was carried out to reveal the characteristics of the systems. For a nonlinear mechanical system, relationships among structural characteristics of the system, design parameters, and uncontrollable variables can be formulated as a mathematical function. The characteristics of the system determine how design parameters affect the functional requirements of the system. Consequently, they affect the distribution of system performance functions. Nonlinearity of the system can facilitate the selection of design parameters to achieve the required functional requirements.

After a heat preservation cover is installed on the main rolling line, the heat dissipation environment of the transfer roller working on the heat preservation cover is changed. To ensure the normal production, a reasonable working jet capacity of the roller neck is derived. First, a globe model of the transfer roller is built for finite element analysis. Second, the sub-model of the fixed end bearing is built and the boundary condition of the sub-model is supplied by the results of the globe model. The analysis result of the sub-model shows that the temperature of the transfer roller bearing exceeds 85°C a rolling periodicity later. With finite element analysis, the heat flux is obtained and the minimum working jet capacity is derived.

Based on structures and characteristics of traditional hydraulic pumps, this paper proposes a novel high-temperature and high-pressure hydraulic pump (HHHP) that can work under 150°C and 28 MPa to overcome problems of traditional high-temperature plunger pumps. The HHHP is designed with the structure of mechanical division and double cylinder parallel. The control signals of two cylinders are two separate triangle waveforms with 90° phase difference. Because the output waveforms of two cylinders have the same characteristics as the control signals, the HHHP can obtain a stable output after two separate waveforms are superposed. A mononeuron self-adaptive PID control algorithm is also improved by modifying parameters K and η. Two improved controllers are used to control the two cylinders, respectively, making two displacements of plungers match each other. Therefore, reduced fluctuations and stable pressure output is obtained. Besides simulation, tests on the built prototype test system are carried out to verify the performance of HHHP. Results show that the improved control approach can limit fluctuations to a lower level and the HHHP system attains good outputs under different signal periods and different pressures.

An algorithm is presented for detecting transverse corner cracks at a steel plate surface using wavelet transform. According to characteristics of transverse corner crack images, the wavelet transform is used for the multi-scale analysis of detecting the image edges and disintegrating the image into four directions at the same time. The proper threshold value is chosen to segment the image into vertical components to obtain the final detection result. The experiment shows that transverse corner cracks of steel plates can be more effectively extracted by the proposed method than the other two common methods.