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Fretting wear is a kind of material damage in contact surfaces caused by microrelative displacement between two bodies. It can change the profile of contact surfaces, resulting in loosening of fasteners or fatigue cracks. Finite element method is an effective method to simulate the evolution of fretting wear process. In most studies of fretting wear, the coefficient of friction was assumed to be constant to simplify model and reduce the difficulty of solving. However, fretting wear test showed that the coefficient of friction was a variable related to the number of fretting cycles. Therefore, this paper introduces the coefficient of friction as a function of the number of fretting cycles in numerical simulation. A wear model considering variable coefficient of friction is established by combining energy consumption model and adaptive grid technique. The nodes of contact surfaces are updated through the UMESHMOTION subroutine. The effects of constant coefficient of friction and variable coefficient of friction on fretting wear are analyzed by comparing the wear amount under different loading conditions. The results show that when compared with coefficient of friction model, fretting wear is obviously affected by variable coefficient of friction and the variable coefficient of friction model has a larger wear volume when the fretting is in partial slip condition and mixed slip condition. In gross slip condition, the difference of wear volume between variable coefficient of friction model and coefficient of friction model decreases with the increase in the displacement amplitudes.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is a widely used inexpensive, non-toxic material which has many advantages. But it is generally considered that PDMS does not adhere to the other substrates without the special treatments due to its low surface energy. However, in this paper, it is the first time that we found that the PDMS adhered on the silicon dioxide substrate to form an adhesive layer only by the routine cast molding process. The mechanism of the PDMS adhesion on the silicon dioxide substrate during the process was illustrated in detail. The smooth, thin, transparent, hydrophobic and selective PDMS adhesion layer can be used as a functional coating to improve the special performances of the micro/nano devices. Finally, as an example, a facile approach is proposed to realize the superhydrophobic surfaces by combining the SiO2 microstructure with the PDMS adhesion layer.

With the aim to reduce the total structural weight, this paper presents a novel radial multilayered elastic metamaterial (EM) shaft in which the scattering layer is circumferentially discretized into several arc-shaped sections with rotational symmetry. The dispersion relations and frequency-response-functions (FRF) of a finite structure are determined numerically first with different discretized geometries. To illustrate the mechanisms of band gaps, the eigenmodes were extracted and analyzed together with dispersion relations and FRF. The results show that in contrast to conventional multi-layered EM shafts, the proposed EM shaft with the weight being reduced by 34% can still yield broadband gaps at low-frequencies and by properly selecting the discretized geometry the band gap ranging from 139 to 197Hz exists for all three elastic wave modes. The results presented in this paper demonstrate a potential design strategy in stabilized shaft engineering.

Over the last decade, many bio-inspired crawling robots have been proposed by adopting the principle of two-anchor crawling or anisotropic friction-based vibrational crawling. However, these robots are complicated in structure and vulnerable to contamination, which seriously limits their practical application. Therefore, a novel vibro-impact crawling robot driven by a dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) is proposed in this paper, which attempts to address the limitations of the existing crawling robots. The novelty of the proposed vibro-impact robot lies in the elimination of anchoring mechanisms or tilted bristles in conventional crawling robots, hence reducing the complexity of manufacturing and improving adaptability. A comprehensive experimental approach was adopted to characterize the performance of the robot. First, the dynamic response of the DEA-impact constraint system was characterized in experiments. Second, the performance of the robot was extensively studied and the fundamental mechanisms of the vibro-impact crawling locomotion were analyzed. In addition, effects of several key parameters on the robot's velocity were investigated. It is demonstrated that our robot can realize bidirectional motion (both forward and backward) by simple tuning of the key control parameters. The robot demonstrates a maximum forward velocity of 21.4 mm/s (equivalent to 0.71 body-length/s), a backward velocity of 16.9 mm/s, and a load carrying capacity of 9.5 g (equivalent to its own weight). The outcomes of this paper can offer guidelines for high-performance crawling robot designs, and have potential applications in industrial pipeline inspections, capsule endoscopes, and disaster rescues.

This work aims to make a comparative analysis of the unbalanced discharging phenomenon for battery packs with series/parallel configurations due to the temperature differences among the cells. A theoretically‐based model is developed for the battery pack and constant power discharging processes are simulated by the model. At a constant temperature difference, lowering the operating temperature increases the divergence among the cell terminal voltages for the series pack and the cell discharging currents for the parallel pack. Increasing the temperature differences decreases the dischargeable energy of the series battery pack, whereas it has little effect on that of the parallel configuration. Given the same temperature difference, the cell energy differences within the parallel battery pack are 5–10 times higher than those within the series configuration, which shows that the temperature can be maintained much more uniformly for a parallel battery pack than for series configuration.

We propose a new kind of elastic metamaterial (EM) shaft with discretized arc-shaped rubber layers, which shows excellent low-frequency vibration properties. The band gaps of the shaft structure were analyzed by employing the finite element method. The proposed EM shaft exhibits much lower band gaps than the corresponding structures with the whole rubber ring. Furthermore, the band gaps can be modulated by tuning the arc angle and the number of the arc-shaped rubbers. Additionally, we observed that the first complete band gap tends to disappear when the arc angle of each arc-shaped rubber section is decreased but the arc number remains fixed because the arc angle more strongly affects the rotational stiffness than the transverse stiffness of the rubber layers. This new type of EM shafts could find potential application as a means to control the low-frequency vibrations of rotor shafts in mechanical engineering.

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