Traditional shipbuilding crane manipulator is widely used in the process of block lifting and erection of ships, but there are generally problems, such as inflexible output trajectory, limited workspace and low working efficiency. In order to solve above problems, a novel hybrid shipbuilding crane manipulator with closed-chain structure and weakly-coupled characteristics based on multi-DOF (Degree-of-Freedom) mechanism is proposed. Then, a systematically structural and kinematic modeling and analysis method is presented to describe the coupling degree, singular configurations, workspace, motion trajectory, dexterity capacity and static stiffness performances of this type of closed-chain structure mechanism. Results of the numerical examples verify the correctness, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. Meanwhile, compared with the traditional shipbuilding crane manipulator, the proposed novel manipulator can finish lifting and transportation operation more efficient, which can also be applied in fields such as: innovative design of oil and gas drilling platforms, deck machinery, construction machinery and other engineering equipment.

Amid the growing adoption of electric vehicles and energy storage systems, it is imperative to address the escalating thermal management challenges associated with next-generation high-power lithium-ion batteries. Herein, the immersion phase-change cooling of cylindrical lithium-ion batteries using R141b coolant is investigated, with a focus on the effects of discharge rate, battery orientation on heat transfer performance. Experimental measurements are conducted to analyze the dynamics of bubble generation and the thermal response of the battery. Results show that R141b immersion cooling significantly suppresses the surface temperature rise compared to natural convection, with the temperature rise rate reduced by up to two orders of magnitude at 3C discharge rates. The orientation of the battery affects local boiling intensity: positioning the negative terminal downward enhances boiling due to higher thermal conductivity, while placing the positive terminal downward yields more uniform temperature distribution. The findings offer a theoretical basis and practical guidance for optimizing battery thermal management systems through phase-change cooling, eliminating the need for active external flow.

To address the difficulty of establishing unified displacement-level forward and inverse kinematics and effectively characterizing the orientation evolution of spherical-platform parallel mechanisms under pure rolling constraints, a 3-P(S) parallel mechanism based on a plane–sphere pure rolling nonholonomic constraint is proposed. The mechanism outputs a 2R1T motion with the rotation axis always parallel to the xy-plane of the fixed coordinate system. By combining the geometric constraints of the mechanism with the no-slip rolling condition, an analytical mapping between input velocities and the instantaneous platform velocity is established, yielding the forward velocity kinematic model. In view of the kinematic characteristics of the spherical output platform, a characteristic-particle method is developed to reconstruct the platform pose via particles rigidly attached to the spherical shell, and an inverse velocity kinematic model is established for a prescribed characteristic-particle trajectory. Performance analysis shows that the Jacobian matrix is constant, and the condition number, local conditioning index, and manipulability are globally constant after normalization, exhibiting an orthogonal modal decomposition. Numerical examples, numerical accuracy analysis, and workspace analysis verify the correctness of the model. A physical prototype was fabricated and experimentally tested. Gyroscope measurements agree with theoretical predictions. The results provide a theoretical basis and experimental evidence for the kinematic analysis and performance optimization of symmetric parallel mechanisms with rolling contact.