This study advances foundational knowledge regarding the impact of processing parameters and material selection on bead shape in Wire Arc directed energy deposition (Wire Arc DED) additive manufacturing. Through the collection and analysis of the largest Wire Arc DED bead shape dataset to date, this work confirms the dominant roles of the feed rate and travel speed on bead shape. Specifically, an increasing feed rate correlates with an increased bead size, while increasing the travel speed decreases the bead size. Furthermore, as the first dataset to directly compare bead shape across different wire–substrate combinations, this research identified that material selection has a smaller, but still relevant, impact on bead shape compared to the feed rate and travel speed. These insights into the roles of parameters and materials are critical for improving large-scale manufacturing efficiency and quality with Wire Arc DED. By generating a robust, multi-material dataset, this work enables applications of machine learning to optimize Wire Arc DED through quicker manufacturing, reduced material waste, and improved structural integrity.

Respiratory allergies represent an important public health problem, with increasing prevalence and severity in Europe during the last decades. The rise of pollen allergies is an issue that continues to negatively impact people’s daily lives across the globe and has become more important in the light of global warming and increasing air pollution. The aim of our paper is to evaluate the prevalence of declared atopy and the influence of lifestyle on allergic diseases, particularly on pollen allergies, in the urban environment from Romania. The study is based on the cooperation Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) called “Pollen Allergies in Romania: Optimizing Data Analysis in Raising Awareness”, agreed and carried on between a group of North-American students and teachers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a hospital-based allergy team from Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy and Colentina Clinical Hospital from Bucharest. The project aimed to evaluate the prevalence of atopy and lifestyle practices of allergic patients and to develop a data analysis tool to determine correlations between pollen counts and other environmental factors in the city of Bucharest. The lifestyle survey revealed that about one-third of allergic patients declared history of atopy. Some of the declared lifestyle practices can be considered environmental risk factors for allergies. This IQP can be considered a model of international, interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration. We concluded that Romania is facing an increasing pollen allergies trend and some actual lifestyle aspects can significantly influence the risk of pollen allergies in the big city environment.

This study investigates the relationship between metallic powders and their flowability behavior (captured in terms of Hall flow rates using Hall flowmeters). Due to the many trait dependencies of powder flowability, which have made the formulation of a physical and mechanistic generalizable model difficult to resolve, this study seeks to develop an alternative data-driven framework based on powder size and shape characteristics for Hall-flow-rate predictions. A multiple-instance regression framework was both developed for processing multiple-instance powder data and compared with standard machine learning models. Data augmentation was found to improve the overall performance of the framework, although the limited dataset was a constraint. Still, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to identify traditional, associative, and generalizable patterns between powder properties and resultant flowability behaviors. The findings show promise for real-world applications with a larger dataset, such that this initial application of multiple instance regression frameworks for metal powder Hall-flow-rate predictions as a function of powder particle size and shape data can be scrutinized in full.