SUMMARY: Biological fish can create high forward swimming speed due to change of thrust/drag area of pectoral fins between power stroke and recovery stroke in rowing mode. In this paper, we proposed a novel type of folding pectoral fins for the fish robot, which provides a simple approach in generating effective thrust only through one degree of freedom of fin actuator. Its structure consists of two elemental fin panels for each pectoral fin that connects to a hinge base through the flexible joints. The Morison force model is adopted to discover the relationship of the dynamic interaction between fin panels and surrounding fluid. An experimental platform for the robot motion using the pectoral fin with different flexible joints was built to validate the proposed design. The results express that the performance of swimming velocity and turning radius of the robot are enhanced effectively. The forward swimming velocity can reach 0.231 m/s (0.58 BL/s) at the frequency near 0.75 Hz. By comparison, we found an accord between the proposed dynamic model and the experimental behavior of the robot. The attained results can be used to design controllers and optimize performances of the robot propelled by the folding pectoral fins.

Ventilators are drawn to many researchers during the Covid-19 pandemic because it's essential equipment that's accustomed to treat severe Covid-19 patients. In low-income countries, there's a shortage of pricy respiratory devices resulting in exceeding the provision of taking care of Covid-19's patients in ICU. This paper attempts to design and implement an appropriate respiratory device referred to as a bag valve mask (BVM) ventilator for those who are Covid-19 patients in medical care, those patients have a requirement of safe transport and also palliative care. The BVM ventilator comprises a man-made manual breath unit (AMBU) bag and paddles for squeezing the AMBU bag which is popular in medical aid settings. The BVM ventilator is required to travel airflow through the system to the patient's lung with the specified volume for every breath cycle within a threshold air pressure. Since the AMBU bag is straightforward to be deformed over time, it's difficult to get mathematical modelling for constructing a reliable controller. Therefore, a model-free control (MFC) control approach is utilized successfully to style a controller for our BVM ventilator model with a PEEP valve and a HEPA filter. Some experimental scenarios are administered to gauge the effectiveness of the proposed controller for the BVM ventilator to control the airflow and control air pressure mode.

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) CO ₂ reduction using a photocathode is an attractive method for making valuable chemical products due to its simplicity and lower overpotential requirements. However, previous PEC processes have often been diffusion‐limited leading to low production rates of the CO ₂ reduction reaction, due to inefficient gas diffusion through the liquid electrolyte to the catalyst surface, particularly at high current densities. In this study, a gas‐permeable photocathode in a continuous flow PEC reactor is incorporated, which facilitates the direct supply of CO ₂ gas to the photocathode‐electrolyte interface, unlike dark reaction‐based flow reactors. This concept is demonstrated using Ag‐TiO ₂ on carbon paper, illuminated through a quartz window and flowing liquid electrolyte. CO ₂ supply is managed via pressure and flow control on the non‐illuminated side of the carbon paper. The photocurrent density is significantly influenced by the flow rates and pressure of CO ₂ gas, and the electrolyte flow rates. Compared to the traditional H‐cell, the continuous PEC flow reactor achieves ≈10‐fold increase in CO faradaic efficiency, 30‐fold increase in production rate and 16‐fold increase in stability without catalyst modifications. This work provides essential insights into the design and application of continuous gas‐liquid flow PEC reactor systems, highlighting their potential for other PEC reactions.

Airborne infection isolation (AII) rooms are used to accommodate patients with highly infectious diseases and keep the released pathogens to limit the risk of cross-infection. This paper proposes a concept for an AII room made from two shipping containers to handle the scarcity of hospital beds when the COVID-19 disease spreads over the world. The proposed system consists of the main isolation room, anteroom, and toilet as well as other functional areas. In addition, the main isolation room was modeled with important components such as a supply air vent, exhaust air, a patient, and a bed. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach based on the finite volume method (FVM) is used to solve the three-dimensional governing equations. The CO₂ concentration was used to determine the infectious contaminant concentration of the air in the room. Therefore, the infectious control could be evaluated by the air change per hour (ACH). The numerical results show that the room temperature is maintained at 24°C, which is appropriate for people in the room. The laminar airflow extends downward to the floor after leaving the supply air vent on the ceiling, creating circulating patterns throughout the room. When evaluating the effectiveness of ventilation systems to remove airborne contaminants based on different ACH numbers, the CO₂ concentration in the room was reduced to 581ppm, 477ppm, and 438ppm in the cases of 12 ACH, 24 ACH, and 48 ACH, respectively. As a result, the greater the number of air change per hour, the greater the performance for contaminant removal. It served as the foundation for assessing and optimizing the ventilation system of the portable negative pressure room.

The demand for renewable energy sources is growing fast because of the negative impact of the utilization of fossil energy, nuclear energy, and hydroelectricity. One of the renewable energy sources, known as solar energy, which uses the photovoltaic panel (PV) to generate electricity from the sun, is a promising alternative that has great potential to deal with the power crisis. However, the power productivity and efficiency conversion are affected significantly by dust accumulation on PVs. Many researchers investigated PV panel dust cleaning methods to improve performance, yield, and profitability. Various dust cleaning and mitigation methods such as rainfall, labor-based, and mechanized cleaning are explored, and we demonstrated that dust removal could be automated with cleaning robots effectively. Due to the specified geographical site of PV panel installation, cleaning robots might work on the misalignment and uneven PV arrays, presenting huge challenges for an autonomous cleaning robot. Thus, a rubber wheel crawler robot with semi-autonomous handling provides a flexible motion that is a well-suited solution to clean rooftop PV arrays. Nevertheless, the rubber wheel crawler robot might suffer slippage on the wet glass of tilted PV arrays. This paper studies the anti-slip effect of the rubber wheel crawler equipped with a cleaning robot under the wet surface of tilted PV panels. First, a theoretical model consisting of several parameters is established to validate the slippage of the rubber wheel crawler on the wet tilted PV. Then, some parameters of the theoretical model are approximated through experimental tests. Finally, simulation results of the theoretical model are conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed theoretical model in comparison to the experimental results under the same working conditions. The merits provide the efficient design of rubber wheel crawlers, enabling the anti-slip ability of robots.

Mobile robots have played a vital role in the transportation industries, service robotics, and autonomous vehicles over the past decades. The development of robust tracking controllers has made mobile robots a powerful tool that can replace humans in industrial work. However, most of the traditional controller updates are time-based and triggered at every predetermined time interval, which requires high communication bandwidth. Therefore, an event-triggered control scheme is essential to release the redundant data transmission. This paper presents a novel parameter-adaptive event-trigger sliding mode to control a two-wheeled mobile robot. The adaptive control scheme ensures that the mobile robot system can be controlled accurately without the knowledge of physical parameters. Meanwhile, the event trigger sliding approach guarantees the system robustness and reduces resource usage. A simulation in MATLAB and an experiment are carried out to validate the efficiency of the proposed controller.