In this paper, some elegant extended finite element method (XFEM) schemes for level set method structural optimization are proposed. Firstly, two- dimension (2D) and three-dimension (3D) XFEM schemes with partition integral method are developed and numerical examples are employed to evaluate their accuracy, which indicate that an accurate analysis result can be obtained on the structural boundary. Furthermore, the methods for improving the computational accuracy and efficiency of XFEM are studied, which include the XFEM integral scheme without quadrature sub-cells and higher order element XFEM scheme. Numerical examples show that the XFEM scheme without quadrature sub-cells can yield similar accuracy of structural analysis while prominently reducing the time cost and that higher order XFEM elements can improve the computational accuracy of structural analysis in the boundary elements, but the time cost is increasing. Therefore, the balance of time cost between FE system scale and the order of element needs to be discussed. Finally, the reliability and advantages of the proposed XFEM schemes are illustrated with several 2D and 3D mean compliance minimization examples that are widely used in the recent literature of structural topology optimization. All numerical results demonstrate that the proposed XFEM is a promising structural analysis approach for structural optimization with the level set method.

In this paper, operation analysis of a Chebyshev-Pantograph leg mechanism is presented for a single degree of freedom (DOF) biped robot. The proposed leg mechanism is composed of a Chebyshev four-bar linkage and a pantograph mechanism. In contrast to general fully actuated anthropomorphic leg mechanisms, the proposed leg mechanism has peculiar features like compactness, low-cost, and easy-operation. Kinematic equations of the proposed leg mechanism are formulated for a computer oriented simulation. Simulation results show the operation performance of the proposed leg mechanism with suitable characteristics. A parametric study has been carried out to evaluate the operation performance as function of design parameters. A prototype of a single DOF biped robot equipped with two proposed leg mechanisms has been built at LARM (Laboratory of Robotics and Mechatronics). Experimental test shows practical feasible walking ability of the prototype, as well as drawbacks are discussed for the mechanical design.

Carbon fibre reinforced carbon (CFC) materials are increasingly applied as sample carriers in modern furnaces. Only their tendency to react with different metals at high temperatures by C-diffusion is a disadvantage, which can be solved by application of diffusion barriers. Within this study the feasibility of plasma sprayed Al₂O₃ coatings as diffusion barrier was studied. Al₂O₃ coatings were prepared by air plasma spraying (APS). The coatings were investigated in terms of their microstructure, bonding to CFC substrates and thermal stability. The results showed that Al₂O₃ could be well deposited onto CFC substrates. The coatings had a good bonding and thermal shock behavior at 1060°C. At higher temperature of 1270°C, crack network formed within the coating, showing that the plasma sprayed Al₂O₃ coatings are limited regarding to their application temperatures as diffusion barrier on CFC components.

This article is dedicated to present a review on existing challenges and latest developments in surgical robotics in attempts to overcome the obstacles lying behind. Rather than to perform an exhaustive evaluation, we would emphasize more on the new insight by digesting the emerging bio-inspired surgical technologies with potentials to revolutionize the field. Typical approaches, possible applications, advantages and technical challenges were discussed. Evolutions of surgical robotics and future trends were analyzed. It can be found that, the major difficulties in the field of surgical robots may not be properly addressed by only using conventional approaches. As an alternative, bio-inspired methods or materials may shed light on new innovations. While endeavors to deal with existing strategies still need to be made, attentions should be paid to also borrow ideas from nature.

The study of cylindrical particulate internal flows has wide industrial applicability hence received much attention. This article reviews the cylindrical particulate internal flows over the past twenty years. The research is related to the cylindrical particulate flows in the straight channel, curved channel and rotational channel. Finally, several open research issues have been identified.

Experiments and simulations are carried out to investigate the optical properties of Morpho rhetenor butterfly wing scales. The upper surface of a male Morpho rhetenor butterfly wing presents a single-layer of scales, the microstructures of which are responsible for the brilliant blue color. The color varies from cyan blue to yellow green and soon afterwards returns back to cyan blue when some ethanol is dropped on the upper surface. At the start of the ethanol volatilization process, the reflection spectrum remains stable. As the ethanol further volatilizes, the peak reflectance decreases slightly, then increases dramatically. Meanwhile, the peak wavelength keeps approximately constant, then decreases, and keeps almost stable at the end of the process. Therefore, the optical properties depend strongly on the varying ambient conditions, including the refractive index and the thickness of the packing medium. Moreover, the possible causes for the scales in dark green region after several dropping ethanol experiments are clarified. This research benefits our understanding of the color variation mechanisms of the wing scales, and provides inspiration for further studies and applications.

In this study, the concept of Output Frequency Response Functions (OFRFs) is applied to represent the transmissibility of nonlinear isolators in frequency domain. With the OFRFs estimated from numerical simulation responses, an explicit analytical relationship between the transmissibility and the nonlinear characteristic parameters is derived for a wide class of nonlinear isolators that have nonlinear anti-symmetric damping characteristics and a comprehensive pattern about how the nonlinear damping characteristic parameters might affect the force and displacement transmissibility is built for the vibration isolators. The results reveal that it is reasonable to analyze the force and displacement transmissibility of the nonlinear isolators by simply investigating the fundamental harmonic components of the force and displacement outputs of the nonlinear isolators, and the introduction of a nonlinear anti-symmetric damping into vibration isolators can significantly suppress both the force and displacement transmissibility over the resonant frequency region, but has almost no effect on the transmissibility at non-resonant regions. These conclusions are of significant importance in the analysis and design of the nonlinear vibration isolators with nonlinear anti-symmetric damping.

Recently, the concept of hard turning has gained considerable attention in metal cutting as it can apparently replace the traditional process cycle of turning, heat treating, and finish grinding for assembly of hard wear resistant steel parts. The present investigation aims at developing a magneto rheological (MR) fluid damper for suppressing tool vibration and promoting better cutting performance during hard turning. The magneto rheological Fluid acts as a viscoelastic spring with non-linear vibration characteristics that are controlled by the composition of the magneto rheological fluid, the shape of the plunger and the electric parameters of the magnetizing field. Cutting experiments were conducted to arrive at a set of electrical, compositional and shape parameters that can suppress tool vibration and promote better cutting performance during turning of AISI 4340 steel of 46 HRC with minimal fluid application using hard metal insert with sculptured rake face. It was observed that the use of MR fluid damper reduces tool vibration and improves the cutting performance effectively. Also commercialization of this idea holds promise to the metal cutting industry.

Glass fiber reinforced plastics (GFRPs) composite is considered to be an alternative to heavy exortic materials. According to the need for accurate machining of composites has increased enormously. During machining, the obtaining cutting force is an important aspect. The present investigation deals with the study and development of a cutting force prediction model for the machining of unidirectional glass fiber reinforced plastics (UD-GFRP) composite using regression modeling and optimization by simulated annealing. The process parameters considered include cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut. The predicted values radial cutting force model is compared with the experimental values. The results of prediction are quite close with the experimental values. The influences of different parameters in machining of UD-GFRP composite have been analyzed.

This article presents an application of numerical simulation technique for the generation and analysis of the grinding wheel surface topographies. The ZETA 20 imaging and metrology microscope is employed to measure the surface topographies. The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to transform the measured non-Gaussian field to Gaussian fields, and the simulated topographies are generated. Some numerical examples are used to illustrate the viability of the method. It shows that the simulated grinding wheel topographies are similar with the measured and can be effective used to study the abrasive grains and grinding mechanism.

On the basis of plane elasticity theory (PET), the displacement and stress components in a thick-walled spherical pressure vessels made of heterogeneous materials subjected to internal and external pressure is developed. The mechanical properties except the Poisson’s ratio are assumed to obey the parabolic variations throughout the thickness. Effect of material inhomogeneity on the elastic deformations and stresses is investigated. The analytical solutions and the solutions carried out through the FEM have a good agreement. The values used in this study are arbitrary chosen to demonstrate the effect of inhomogeneity on displacements, and stresses distributions.

Abrasive waterjet cutting is a novel machining process capable of processing wide range of hard-to-cut materials. Surface roughness of machined parts is one of the major machining characteristics that play an important role in determining the quality of engineering components. This paper shows the influence of process parameters on surface roughness (R_a) which is an important cutting performance measure in abrasive waterjet cutting of aluminium. Taguchi’s design of experiments was carried out in order to collect surface roughness values. Experiments were conducted in varying water pressure, nozzle traverse speed, abrasive mass flow rate and standoff distance for cutting aluminium using abrasive waterjet cutting process. The effects of these parameters on surface roughness have been studied based on the experimental results.

This paper investigates optimization problem of the cutting parameters in high-speed milling on NAK80 mold steel. An experiment based on the technology of Taguchi is performed. The objective is to establish a correlation among spindle speed, feed per tooth and depth of cut to the three directions of cutting force in the milling process. In this study, the optimum cutting parameters are obtained by the grey relational analysis. Moreover, the principal component analysis is applied to evaluate the weights so that their relative significance can be described properly and objectively. The results of experiments show that grey relational analysis coupled with principal component analysis can effectively acquire the optimal combination of cutting parameters and the proposed approach can be a useful tool to reduce the cutting force.