Viscoelastic blood coagulation testing system enabled by a non-contact triboelectric angle sensor.

Thromboelastography (TEG) remains a convenient and effective viscoelastic blood coagulation testing device for guiding blood component transfusion and assessing the risk of thrombosis. Here, a TEG enabled by a non-contact triboelectric angle sensor (NTAS) with a small size (∼7 cm3) is developed for assessing the blood coagulation system. With the assistance of a superelastic torsion wire structure, the NTAS-TEG realizes the detection of blood viscoelasticity. Benefiting from a grating and convex design, the NTAS holds a collection of compelling features, including accurate detection of rotation angles from -2.5° to 2.5°, high linearity (R 2 = 0.999), and a resolution of 0.01°. Besides, the NTAS exhibits merits of low cost and simplified fabrication. Based on the NTAS-TEG, a viscoelastic blood coagulation detection and analysis system is successfully constructed, which can provide a graph and parameters associated with clot initiation, formation, and stability for clinicians by using 0.36 mL of whole blood. The system not only validates the feasibility of the triboelectric coagulation testing sensor, but also further expands the application of triboelectric sensors in healthcare.

Research on Configuration Design Optimization and Trajectory Planning of Manipulators for Precision Machining and Inspection of Large-Curvature and Large-Area Curved Surfaces.

In recent years, high-quality surfaces with large areas and curvatures have been increasingly used in engineering, but the precision machining and inspection of such surfaces is a particular challenge. Surface machining equipment needs to have a large working space, high flexibility, and motion accuracy to meet the demands of micron-scale precision machining. However, meeting these requirements may result in extremely large equipment sizes. To solve this problem, an eight-degree-of-freedom redundant manipulator with one linear and seven rotational joints is designed to assist in the machining described in this paper. The configuration parameters of the manipulator are optimized by an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm to ensure that the working space of the manipulator completely covers the working surface and that the size of the manipulator is small. In order to improve the smoothness and accuracy of manipulator motion on large surface areas, an improved trajectory planning strategy for a redundant manipulator is proposed. The idea of the improved strategy is to pre-process the motion path first and then use a combination of the clamping weighted least-norm method and the gradient projection method to plan the trajectory, while adding a reverse planning step to solve the singularity problem. The resulting trajectories are smoother than those planned by the general method. The feasibility and practicality of the trajectory planning strategy are verified through simulation.

0.5 m Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Efficient Blue Energy Harvesting of All-Sea Areas.

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) to harvest ocean wave blue energy is flourishing, yet the research horizon has been limited to centimeter-level TENG. Here, for the first time, a TENG shell is advanced for ocean energy harvesting to 0.5 m and an excellent frictional areal density of 1.03 cm-1 and economies of scale are obtained. The unique structure of the multi-arch shape is adopted to untie the difficulty of fully getting the extensive friction layer contact. An inside steel plate is vertically placed in the center of every TENG block, which can activate the TENG to achieve complete contact even at a tilt angle of 7 degrees. The proposed half-meter TENG (HM-TENG) has a broad response band from 0.1 to 2 Hz, a total transferred charge quantity up to 67.2 µC, and one single TENG can deliver an open-circuit voltage of 368 V. Coupled with the self-stabilizing and susceptible features the ellipsoid shell brings, the HM-TENG can readily accommodate itself to the all-weather, all-sea wave energy harvesting. Muchmore, the HM-TENG is also applied to RF signal transmitters. This work takes the first step toward near-meter-scale enclosures and provides a new direction for large-scale wave energy harvesting.

Adaptive nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode control for uncertain robotic manipulators under actuator saturation.

This paper describes an adaptive nonsingular fixed-time sliding mode control (ANFSMC) scheme under actuator saturation that can track the trajectory of a robotic manipulator under external disturbances and inertia uncertainties. First, a novel NFSMC that offers rapid convergence and avoids singularities is proposed for ensuring robotic manipulators global approximate fixed-time convergence. An ANFSMC is then developed for which the bound of the coupling uncertainty is not necessary to know in advance. The controller exhibits small absolute tracking errors and consumes little energy. An actuator saturation compensator is designed and shown to minimize the chattering of the system while accelerating the trajectory tracking. The proposed schemes are analyzed using Lyapunov stability theory, and their effectiveness and superiority are demonstrated through numerical simulations.

A Novel Lighting OLED Panel Design.

A novel OLED (organic light emitting diode) lighting panel, which uses a special layout design, can reduce the photolithography cycles and process costs and is more reliable. It only needs two steps of photolithography cycles, which include an ITO (InSnO compound transparent oxide) pattern and insulator pattern. There is no need for the metal bus pattern of the ordinary design. The OLED device structure is a type of red-green-blue (RGB)-stacked emitting layer that has a good color index and greater adjustability, which improves the performance of the device. This novel design has the same equipment and material requirement compared to the ordinary design, and it is very beneficial in terms of high volume and low-cost production. It uses a hyper driving method because the entire OLED lighting panel is divided into many sub-emitting units; if one of the sub-emitting units is burned out, it has no effect on the adjacent sub-emitting unit, so the reliability is markedly better than the ordinary design.