A STUDY OF DESIGN FLEXIBLE FORCE OUTPUT OF COMPLIANT BISTABLE MECHANISM WITH LIMITED SPACE

This paper reports a new compliant bistable micromechanism (BM) with the flexibility of force output under a space constraint. The mechanism has four Bézier curved beams and a shuttle mass at its center. Bézier curves offer high flexibility for design of beam shapes of BMs. Compared to the conventional BMs with cosine curved beams and slanted straight beams, the BM with Bézier curved beam can be designed to have smaller switching forces under the same device area and thickness.

A Feature Space Constraint-Based Method for Change Detection in Heterogeneous Images

With the development of remote sensing technologies, change detection in heterogeneous images becomes much more necessary and significant. The main difficulty lies in how to make input heterogeneous images comparable so that the changes can be detected. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end heterogeneous change detection method based on the feature space constraint. First, considering that the input heterogeneous images are in two distinct feature spaces, two encoders with the same structure are used to extract features, respectively. A decoder is used to obtain the change map from the extracted features. Then, the Gram matrices, which include the correlations between features, are calculated to represent different feature spaces, respectively. The squared Euclidean distance between Gram matrices, termed as feature space loss, is used to constrain the extracted features. After that, a combined loss function consisting of the binary cross entropy loss and feature space loss is designed for training the model. Finally, the change detection results between heterogeneous images can be obtained when the model is trained well. The proposed method can constrain the features of two heterogeneous images to the same feature space while keeping their unique features so that the comparability between features can be enhanced and better detection results can be achieved. Experiments on two heterogeneous image datasets consisting of optical and SAR images demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Hydraulic Sheet Metal Bending System

Due to increasing Globalization it is very much essential for manufacturers to produce goods having highest reliability and in required time. This is achieved by using various manufacturing methods. The transformers which are currently assembled for Welding Machines require hammering of the extruded Metal plate. This method requires large Human effort in form of Hammering. Hence the safety of the operator is also at a risk. The main purpose of this system is to automate the bending process so that almost negligible amount of Human Effort is required and the process becomes completely safe. This paper concentrates on the basic factors which should be considered while designing bending machine especially when sheet metal can’t be bent separately and having space constraint. Factors considered are force required, punch radius, reduction of spring back,

Evaluation of 3 Alcohol-based Agents for Presurgical Skin Preparation in Mice

Appropriate aseptic technique is a crucial component of rodent survival surgery. Ease of technique, surgical space constraint, batch surgery, and cost are factors that may affect researcher compliance with appropriate aseptic technique. The first part of this study compared 3 antiseptic preparation agents with the standard triplicate application of povidone-iodine and alcohol. Euthanized mice (n = 40) were shaved on the dorsum, and culture swabs were taken for RODAC plating and bacterial identification. Shaved sites were prepared by using one of the 4 antiseptic preparation agents. Culture samples were obtained immediately and at 20 min after antiseptic preparation. In the 2nd part of the study, 8 mice (n = 2 per group) were prepared for a survival surgical procedure by using one of the 4 antiseptic preparation agents to evaluate whether the antiseptic preparation agents caused skin irritation or impaired healing. Results from this study indicated that all 3 of the antiseptic agents evaluated were equally effective at reducing bacterial populations immediately and at 20 min after preparation. Histopathologic examination of the incision sites revealed signs of normal healing without lesions adjacent to the incision site. We conclude that all 3 of the products evaluated are comparable to traditional povidone–iodine and alcohol as agents for aseptic preparation of surgical sites.