A sample of polyvinylidene fluoride removed from a riser component was tested in laboratory to evaluate its electromechanical behavior. For this, an experimental setup was developed, after Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) results have shown through the absorption bands, that this sample had a spectrum of the piezoelectric phase β. In order to identify if such sample would be able to respond electrically to the application of external mechanical excitation applied by a shaker, measurements were made of the induced voltages by piezoelectric effect, with varying accelerations and frequencies. The results indicated that the material, although it has not been processed for this purpose, responds electrically to the applied mechanical stimulus, demonstrating a good correlation between the measured signals and the accelerations.

Rapid technological changes and disruptive innovations have resulted in a significant shift in people’s behavior and requirements. Electronic gadgets, including smartphones, notebooks, and other devices, are indispensable to everyday routines. Consequently, the demand for high-capacity batteries has surged, which has enabled extended device autonomy. An alternative approach to address this demand is battery swapping, which can potentially extend the battery life of electronic devices. Although battery sharing in electric vehicles has been well studied, smartphone applications still need to be explored. Crucially, assessing the batteries’ state of health (SoH) presents a challenge, necessitating consensus on the best estimation methods to develop effective battery swap strategies. This paper proposes a model for estimating the SoH curve of lithium-ion batteries using the state of charge curve. The model was designed for smartphone battery swap applications utilizing Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural networks. To validate the model, a system was developed to conduct destructive tests on batteries and study their behavior over their lifetimes. The results demonstrated the high precision of the model in estimating the SoH of batteries under various charge and discharge parameters. The proposed approach exhibits low computational complexity, low cost, and easily measurable input parameters, making it an attractive solution for smartphone battery swap applications.

The concept of Quality by Design (QbD) has been widely used by the pharmaceutical industry since 2004, changing the focus on inspections to embrace greater control in the manufacturing process. This new approach contributed to lower production costs and higher quality of medicines. This work discusses the first steps towards the implementation of a QbD approach aimed at ensuring the quality of a biomedical device under development. This device will be applied as a non-magnetic metallic foreign body localization system for surgical removal guidance. It should be highlighted that a new approach was used to define the Design Space, based on fuzzy logic rather than the typical statistical techniques.

Studies in the literature suggest that smartphone-based applications are not suitable for measuring illuminance levels. The measurement of this photometric quantity is useful in several sectors, including monitoring the adequacy of lighting conditions in workplaces. This work investigates the contribution of attaching a diffuser dome to the embedded light sensors of smartphones and tablets associated with different applications on their performance for measuring illuminance. Two experimental arrangements were developed using an LED lamp (294.84 lx, 475.58 lx, 880.39 lx) and a xenon arc lamp (607.94 lx, 1013.72 lx, 4012.26 lx, 23933.33 lx). In the comparative analysis, the impact of using diffusion dome attachment was evidenced, indicating its potential to enable some of the device/application combinations to achieve adequate performance for being applied in the daily assessment of illuminance.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have a preponderant role in promoting sustainability and must themselves be models for society. From this perspective, sustainability initiatives by HEIs have significantly gained importance in the last two decades, as well as the application of several tools and guidelines that focus on campus sustainability. However, one of the most frequent problems faced by the HEIs is the measurement and evaluation of efforts and results associated with their Sustainability Agendas. Therefore, this article aims to propose a multicriteria approach for selecting and hierarchizing campus sustainability indicators of an HEI (PUC-Rio, Brazil), focusing on one of the thematic axes of its Environmental Agenda. Two multicriteria methods (AHP and AHP-PROMETHEE) were applied in this institutional context, and seven evaluation criteria were considered. The results of both methods were also compared to give more robustness to the selection and hierarchization of the environmental indicators associated with the chosen thematic axis (water). The main contribution of the research to the field of environment measurement and also to HEIs that wish to achieve higher levels of sustainability is a multicriteria methodological approach aiming to improve the current practices for selecting and hierarchizing indicators that could better measure and communicate their sustainability performance.