Evaporation of a sessile droplet is a complex, nonequilibrium phenomenon. Although evaporating droplets upon superhydrophobic surfaces have been known to exhibit distinctive evaporation modes such as a constant contact line (CCL), a constant contact angle (CCA), or both, our fundamental understanding of the effects of surface roughness on the wetting transition remains elusive. We show that the onset time for the CCL-CCA transition and the critical base size at the Cassie-Wenzel transition exhibit remarkable dependence on the surface roughness. Through global interfacial energy analysis we reveal that, when the size of the evaporating droplet becomes comparable to the surface roughness, the line tension at the triple line becomes important in the prediction of the critical base size. Last, we show that both the CCL evaporation mode and the Cassie-Wenzel transition can be effectively inhibited by engineering a surface with hierarchical roughness.
The paper presents a two-level learning method for radial basis function (RBF) networks. A regularized orthogonal least squares (ROLS) algorithm is employed at the lower level to construct RBF networks while the two key learning parameters, the regularization parameter and the RBF width, are optimized using a genetic algorithm (GA) at the upper level. Nonlinear time series modeling and prediction is used as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of this hierarchical learning approach.
Shearography and thermography are optical techniques, both proven to be valuable tools for material nondestructive evaluation. Papers on these topics, however, are scattered and mainly appeared in optical journals. For the convenience of the materials community, this paper aims to present a comprehensive review of shearography and active thermography and their applications in nondestructive evaluation of materials. Both techniques enjoy the merits of full-field, non-contact and allowing speedy detection of material defects in metal, non-metal as well as composites materials. However, they are fundamentally different in flaw detection mechanisms. Shearography measures materials' mechanical response to stresses, whereas active thermography measures material's heat-transfer response to an instantaneous thermal excitation. A comparison of the advantages and limitations of two techniques for nondestructive evaluation will also be presented.
Wheeled-tracked vehicles are mainly suitable for relatively flat terrain. Legged-vehicles, on the other hand, have the potential to handle wide variety of terrain. Robug IIs is a legged climbing robot designed to work in relatively unstructured and rough terrain. It has the capability of walking, climbing vertical surfaces and performing autonomous floor to wall transfer. The sensing technique used in Robug IIs is mainly tactile and ultrasonic sensing. A set of reflexive rules has been developed for the robot to react to the uncertainty of the working environment. The robot also has the intelligence to seek and verify its own foot-holds.
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