Enhancing the student experience in pre‐ and mid‐COVID‐19 pandemic period by upgrading the power electronics laboratory practice curriculum

Laboratory practices, which represent a vital part of electrical engineering education, have especially in the last few years been subjected to numerous challenges. The paper presents a concept of upgrading the laboratory practice curriculum in power electronics by introducing computer simulations. Due to the recognized shortcomings of the previous approach, the curriculum was closely reviewed, compared to the concepts from existing literature, and intensively upgraded by the introduction of the Ansys Simplorer computer program. The intensity of the process upgrade was enhanced by the COVID‐19 pandemic and related lockdowns. The introduced curriculum changes enabled the students to approach individual topics more gradually, reducing the gaps between the behavior of ideal and real power electronics circuits. The results of student feedback, obtained by a web‐based survey and a pre‐exam quiz, demonstrate that students recognize the new approach as being more gradual and beneficial, enabling them to improve their understanding of specific phenomena and to master the topics of power electronics with ease and satisfaction.

Fashion CAD education during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea: comparison of online and offline learning achievements

The 2019 Coronavirus Infectious Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic has maximized interest in the need for and the effectiveness of e-learning classes as an alternative to face-to-face classes in schools. This study aimed to identify the factors that determine the successful implementation of e-learning classes. In this study, 99 fashion majors who attended the computer-aided design (CAD) programming classes held in the spring semesters of 2019 and 2020 participated. This study analyzed and evaluated the students' achievement process to see how self-motivated learning and interactive learning affected the process in face-to-face classes and real-time online Zoom classes. The results demonstrated the potential of creating an efficient e-learning environment for fashion CAD education where students could learn concepts and achieve academic competence even in the absence of face-to-face introduction.

Report on the 28th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference

The 28th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC 2023) was held at Miraikan, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Tokyo, Japan, 16 char6319 January 2023. ASP-DAC, started in 1995, is a high-quality and premium conference on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) like other sister conferences such as Design Automation Conference (DAC);Design, Automation Test in Europe (DATE);International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD);and Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK). ASP-DAC 2023 adopted an in-person conference style with online features which is the first time in ASP-DAC. Even though the last two ASP-DAC conferences were held as virtual conferences due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ASPDAC 2023 provided opportunities for face-to-face communication not only at sessions, but also at coffee breaks, banquet, and so on for in-person attendees. Online access mainly for participants who were difficult to physically attend was also provided as much as possible.

Investigating structural features of dimeric SARS-CoV-2 Mpro catalytic site with bound covalent ligands at physiological temperature

The SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) plays an important role in the viral transcription and replication of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. Therefore, it represents a very attractive target for drug development for treatment of this disease. It is a cysteine protease because it has in the active site the catalytic dyad composed of cysteine (C145) and histidine (H41). The catalytic site represents the binding site for inhibitors, many of them bind to Mpro with a covalent bond. In this research, structural and physiochemical characteristics of the Mpro binding site are investigated when the ligand 11a is covalently and non-covalently bound. All-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were run for 500 ns at physiological temperature (310 K). It is found that conformations of both the Mpro protein and the ligand are stable during the simulation with covalently bound complex showing stronger stability. When the ligand is covalently bound (its final state), residues that stably interact with the ligand are H41, C145, H163, H164 and E166. The optimal conformation of these residues is stabilized also via the Hbond interactions with the catalytic water present in the Mpro binding site. In the case of the non-covalently bound ligand (state before the covalent bond is formed), the binding site residues retain their conformations similar to the covalent binding site, and they still form Hbonds with the catalytic water, except H41. This residue, instead, adopts a different conformation and looses the Hbond with the catalytic water, leaving more freedom to move to the ligand. We hypothesize that H41 could play a role in guiding the ligand to the optimal position for final covalent bonding. Further analyses are in process to check this hypothesis. These results represent an important basis for studying drug candidates against SARS-CoV-2 by means of computer aided drug design.

Simulation and Development of an Autonomous Drone for Delivery of Medicines during COVID-19

The main goal of this research paper is to develop an autonomous medicine delivery quadcopter and validate a simulator model for it. It is intended to use this drone in crisis of COVID-19 due to restriction of social distancing and unavailability of regular hospital facilities. A simulator is then modified and used as a pre-mission tool to predict mission outcome and after validation, it will be used to predict complex missions without actually risking the expensive drone. An efficient payload system is designed and constructed for the quadcopter to fulfill its delivery purpose. Once the drone is assembled along with the payload mechanism, its physical parameters are calculated using SolidWorks. The same parameters such as performance coefficients and moments of inertia are then updated in the simulator's quadcopter properties. The equations of motions model used is improved by including physical theoretical effects. In the end, same autonomous delivery mission tests have been done for the real quadcopter and the simulator in order to compare the results and show the effect of improved equations of motion and physical parameters. © 2022 IEEE.

Development of novel customized pressure distribution surface for reduction of pressure ulcers using additive manufacturing technology

Purpose>This research aims to focus on developing a customized support surface using additive manufacturing (AM) for effective pressure relief for patients who are in bed or wheelchair suffering from pressure ulcers (PU).Design/methodology/approach>A novel customized support surface is developed using AM technology incorporated with magnetic levitation and ball and socket mechanisms. Magnetic levitation provides cushioning effect for the developed cushion to users who are sitting in a wheelchair and increases the rate of healing. The ball and socket mechanism provides the user body's self-adaptive mechanism and reduces shear and friction forces between the surfaces of the additive manufactured cushion and the human buttocks.Findings>From the results of ISO 16480-6 biomechanical standardized tests, the additive manufactured support surface performed better than, or on par with, the most widely available commercial cushions. It is evident that the developed cushion’s peak pressure values are lower when compared with other cushions. The overall efficiency of the developed cushion was qualitatively reported;67% of people felt it was excellent and 22% of people responded as good and 11% were satisfactory. Henceforth, the overall effectiveness of the developed support surface provides a better experience to the end-user in the view of PU reduction.Originality/value>A developed additive manufactured customized support surface will be an alternative approach for the reduction of PU, and it overcomes the drawbacks faced by the currently available cushions.

Design, Analysis and Fabrication of Ultrasonic Power Horns Used to Produce Medical (Surgical) Face Mask and Their Supplements

Due to a wide and rapid spread of Covid-19 virus, the world exposure suffering from the severe shortage not only for those personal protective equipment that are normally used in hospitals but also extended to the care homes, and because the global rollout of the harmful virus around the world, the number of cases of for pandemic covid-19 is rapidly increased in most countries. The motivation of the current work provide a design of an efficient tools that can overcome many issues concerned with the distribution of virus, and therefore to suppress the prevalence of virus through apply the health rules for quarantine and safety. Ultrasound power technique in general, specifically ultrasonic power remains one of the efficient and reliable processes that can be performed in a wide range of applications such as medical, engineering and manufacturing, which it entered directly in processing different kinds of medicals stuff such as manufacturing medical masks and other accessories beside their other applications in most engineering and industrial fields, etc. The advantage of this technique is crucial and essential in produce protect things required for general purposes like medical masks and their supplements. Design an efficient tool that can be works on the principle of ultrasonic power with providing high performance through add slots will directly leads to enhance many criteria which are benefit in producing large numbers of medical accessories such as facial masks with consuming minimum amount of materials, cost and time. This work presents a study based on design a wide block horn have double slots and an exponential stepped profile, which the horn is modelled, analysed, fabricated based on selecting of aluminium type 7075 as horn materials and their vibration characteristics such as natural frequency and displacement are successfully extracted, using finite element model. A correlation between the design variables and characteristics of the proposed block horn is obtained through perform sensitivity analysis and investigation of the horn response surface. The simulation program of commercial code ANSYS was performed successfully to characterize the mode shapes of the selected horn models and their data discussion was confirmed experimentally using Doppler effect of 3D laser vibrometer to extract horn measurements. The correlation between electrical impedance and experimental analysis were successfully identified with minimum percentage recoded a value of 2 % varied from the natural frequency of vibrating horn. Optimizing slots position of the designing block horn have been led to significant enough frequency separation measured accordingly to the exciting axial mode with sufficient uniformity of displacement amplitude and minimum stress identified far away from the horn tip;this is recommended in the field of mass production to allow sufficient ultrasonic energy transferred to the working area. This work concludes that designing an efficient horn will surely reflect on works in acceptable quantity and quality processing parts such as in producing medical masks and their supplements. In comparison with traditional processes, performing ultrasonic power results in fewer additives attain joints material with no holes from sewing, or weak strands, revoke the rise of adhesive cost and lower the glue delivery system. In contrast, the ultrasonic process has pace cycle rate which has capability in reducing of maintenance down time.

COVID-19 Detection from X-ray Images Using a New CNN Approach

Detection of COVID-19 has been a very active field of research with thousands of papers published after outbreaks of COVID-19 in the world. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) based studies have a significant role in the medical field thanks to rapidly developing technology. To help radiologists speed up the diagnostic process, CAD with convolutional neural networks (CNN) can be used as decision support mechanisms. Furthermore, CNN has the power to learn various image features automatically, and it may offer an effective way for COVID-19 detection. In this paper, we propose a CNN design for COVID-19 detection. We used a data set of X-ray images collected from two publicly available sources. This data set consists of 400 images of which 200 are COVID-19 and 200 are healthy. First, we preprocessed all data sets and then divided them by randomly allocating 70 % for training and 30 % for the test. We obtained the accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity rate of our model as 96.11%, 98.89 %, and 93.33 %, respectively. © 2022 IEEE. All rights reserved

Developing an Advanced PVT System for Sustainable Domestic Hot Water Supply

Energy consumption is steadily increasing with the ever-growing population, leading to a rise in global warming. Building energy consumption is one of the major sources of global warming, which can be controlled with renewable energy installations. This paper deals with an advanced evacuated hybrid solar photovoltaic–thermal collector (PVT) for simultaneous production of electricity and domestic hot water (DHW) with lower carbon emissions. Most PVT projects focus on increasing electricity production by cooling the photovoltaic (PV). However, in this research, increasing thermal efficiency is investigated through vacuum glass tube encapsulation. The required area for conventional unglazed PVT systems varies between 1.6–2 times of solar thermal collectors for similar thermal output. In the case of encapsulation, the required area can decrease by minimizing convective losses from the system. Surprisingly, the electrical efficiency was not decreased by encapsulating the PVT system. The performance of evacuated PVT is compared to glazed and unglazed PVTs, and the result shows a 40% increase in thermal performance with the proposed system. All three systems are simulated in ANSYS 18.1 (Canonsburg, PA, USA) at different mass flow rates and solar irradiance.

The Operation of a Three-Bladed Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine under Hailstorm Conditions—A Computational Study Focused on Aerodynamic Performance

The aim of this study is the aerodynamic degradation of a three-bladed Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) under the influence of a hailstorm. The importance and originality of this study are that it explores the aerodynamic performance of an optimum wind turbine blade during a hailstorm, when hailstones and raindrops are present. The commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code ANSYS Fluent 16.0 was utilized for the simulation. The first step was the calculation of the optimum blade geometry characteristics for a three-bladed rotor, i.e., twist and chord length along the blade, by a user-friendly application. Afterwards, the three-dimensional blade and the flow field domain were designed and meshed appropriately. The rotary motion of the blades was accomplished by the application of the Moving Reference Frame Model and the simulation of hailstorm conditions by the Discrete Phase Model. The SST k–ω turbulence model was also added. The produced power of the wind turbine, operating in various environmental conditions, was estimated and discussed. Contours of pressure, hailstone and raindrop concentration and erosion rate, on both sides of the blade, are presented. Moreover, contours of velocity at various cross sections parallel to the rotor are demonstrated, to understand the effect of hailstorms on the wake behavior. The results suggest that the aerodynamic performance of a HAWT degrades due to impact and breakup of the particles on the blade.

Inkjet Printing: A Viable Technology for Biosensor Fabrication

Printing technology promises a viable solution for the low-cost, rapid, flexible, and mass fabrication of biosensors. Among the vast number of printing techniques, screen printing and inkjet printing have been widely adopted for the fabrication of biosensors. Screen printing provides ease of operation and rapid processing;however, it is bound by the effects of viscous inks, high material waste, and the requirement for masks, to name a few. Inkjet printing, on the other hand, is well suited for mass fabrication that takes advantage of computer-aided design software for pattern modifications. Furthermore, being drop-on-demand, it prevents precious material waste and offers high-resolution patterning. To exploit the features of inkjet printing technology, scientists have been keen to use it for the development of biosensors since 1988. A vast number of fully and partially inkjet-printed biosensors have been developed ever since. This study presents a short introduction on the printing technology used for biosensor fabrication in general, and a brief review of the recent reports related to virus, enzymatic, and non-enzymatic biosensor fabrication, via inkjet printing technology in particular.

3D Printed N-95 Masks During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned.

Early in 2020, the pandemic resulted in an enormous demand for personal protective equipment (PPE), which consists of face masks, face shields, respirators, and gowns. At our institution, at the request of hospital administration, the Lifespan 3D Printing Laboratory spearheaded an initiative to produce reusable N95 masks for use in the hospital setting. Through this article, we seek to detail our experience designing and 3D printing an N95 mask, highlighting the most important lessons learned throughout the process. Foremost among these, we were successful in producing a non-commercial N95 alternative mask which could be used in an era when N95 materials were extremely limited in supply. We identified five key lessons related to design software, 3D printed material airtightness, breathability and humidity dispersal, and ability for communication. By sharing our experience and the most valuable lessons we learned through this process, we hope to provide a helpful foundation for future 3D-printed N95 endeavors.