This paper provides a safety assessment tool (SAT) for long-span bridges in China. The authors selected the Sutong Yangtze River Bridge, one of the largest long-span bridges in China, for a case study. Currently, safety assessment of long-span bridges in China is primarily based on human judgment. No effective method exists for estimating the traffic crash risk of long-span bridges under various conditions; this situation creates difficulty in providing effective safety control strategy and developing counter-measures. In this study, the Traffic Software Integrated System was used to simulate the traffic on the Sutong Bridge. A safety assessment model (SAM) was developed from four contributing factors: traffic volume, free-flow speed, percentage of heavy vehicles, and weather conditions. SAM was used as the basis for developing an SAT that could aid policy makers and traffic professionals in better understanding of traffic safety of the Sutong Bridge: (a) a risk map was created to indicate different safety levels of the bridge under various conditions and (b) a user interface was designed to allow users to identify the safety level of the bridge quickly and easily.
The design of field operation robots is a complex and comprehensive task. The external environment that changes at any time imposes strict requirements on the design. In this paper, we propose a systematic and innovative design of a honeysuckle harvesting robot using MBSE and TRIZ methods, deeply excavating the potential failure factors in 5M1E and effectively completing the robot design task through requirements analysis, functional modeling, and architecture design to ensure the integrity and comprehensiveness of the process.
This study designed a crawling mechanism that can solve the measurement problems of slender and needle pipes by detecting the heating vertical needle pipe, which is greatly applied in the petrochemical and refinery industry. The robot’s walking system uses a single driven wheel to stick on the way, with a scissor-hand structure to adapt to changes in diameter between 50 and 90 mm. This study lists the dynamic analysis equation of the robot, thereby obtaining the optimum range of Angle α between the horizontal line and the center line of the main driving wheel and the main clamping wheel. Moreover, the study uses multi-body dynamics simulation software for dynamics simulation analysis. Results indicate that the crawling system has the advantages of anti-deviation, can adapt to different pipe diameters and has a simple structure.
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