This paper presents an application of topology optimization and response surface method to optimize the geometry of a bicycle crank arm and the experimental validation of it. This is purposely to reduce the crank arm mass and create a preliminary design of a lightweight structure necessary for the high-performance bicycle development. A three-dimensional bike crank arm model was made in the SpaceClaim software followed by a static finite element analysis using ANSYS Workbench 2019 R1. A multiple cycling load was applied simultaneously in seven crank angles of 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, 135, and 150° relative to the horizontal position to create the multiple loads to the crank. From there, topology optimization was then conducted to investigate the effect of mass constraint, stress constraint, angle of cycling, and crank materials on the topological pattern result. To minimize stress concentration at corners, a shape optimization using the response surface method was conducted and obtained the final geometry. From the result, it is shown that both optimization methods not only successfully reduce the crank arm mass and provide several optimum design options but also are able to reduce the maximum stress in the crank arm up to 20% after the optimization process. The experimental validation using a newly developed wireless measurement system shows a considerable agreement to the numerical results.

The growing number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased the necessity for processing IoT data from multiple heterogeneous data stores. IoT data integration is a challenging problem owing to the heterogeneity of data stores in terms of their query language, data models, and schemas. In this paper, we propose a multi-store query system for IoT data called MusQ, where users can formulate join operation queries for heterogeneous data sources. To reconcile the heterogeneity between source schemas of IoT data stores, we extract a global schema from local source schemas semi-automatically by applying schema-matching and schema-mapping steps. In order to minimize the burden on the user to understand the finer details of various query languages, we define a unified query language called the multi-store query language (MQL), which follows a subset of the Datalog grammar. Thus, users can easily retrieve IoT data from multiple heterogeneous sources with MQL queries. As the three MQL query-processing join algorithms are based on a mediator–wrapper approach, MusQ performs efficient data integration over significant volumes of IoT data from multiple stores. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the MusQ system using a synthetic and large real IoT data set for three different types of data stores (RDBMS, NoSQL, and HDFS). The experimental results demonstrate that MusQ is suitable, scalable, and efficient query processing for multiple heterogeneous IoT data stores. Those advantages of MusQ are important in several areas that involve complex IoT systems, such as smart city, healthcare, and energy management.

In this article, a design sensitivity analysis method is developed for topology optimization of steady-state conductive thermal problems subject to design-dependent thermal loads using density gradients–based boundary detection. In a real physical heat conduction problem, a design-dependent thermal load through the convective boundary is an important factor; however, it is not easy to impose boundary conditions in heat conduction problem due to the difficulties of exact boundary representation. Here, the detection of convection boundaries is available by the density distinction between void and materials, which is similar to a gradient operator in image processing. Applying density gradients and Dirac delta function of densities, we impose a design-dependent load effect on thermal analysis and perform the design sensitivity analysis for topology optimization. At each optimization process, it is noted that the results of thermal analysis and the design sensitivities are influenced by the design-dependent thermal load. Through demonstrative numerical examples, the proposed approach using density gradients is proven to work yielding meaningful optimization results. The developed approach is applicable to the plant engineering and nuclear industries where thermo-mechanical coupling occurs inevitably by the thermal convection.