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The use of low-emissivity and solar control glass for thermal insulation in transportation and architecture poses a problem for communications, since the metallic coatings used in this glass attenuate radiofrequency (RF) signals. One solution to this problem is to define Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS) on the coatings to ensure the transmission of RF signals while maintaining the thermal properties of the glazing. On windows with multiple coated panes, the interaction between the different surfaces grows more complex, as the dimensions of the structure are in the order of the wavelength of the signals involved. This is also an opportunity for the design of windows with specific transmission properties. The aim of this work is to present a design method for windows with multiple low-e coatings and multiple FSS based on the optimization of the RF transmission using an equivalent transmission line model. As a validation of our method, we show designs for windows with attenuation minima at 1, 1.8 and 5.8 GHz. Window samples according to these designs have been fabricated and measured, showing good correlation between simulation and experiment.

How to model the effect of reflection is crucial for single image reflection removal (SIRR) task. Modern SIRR methods usually simplify the reflection formulation with the assumption of linear combination of a transmission layer and a reflection layer. However, the large variations in image content and the real-world picture-taking conditions often result in far more complex reflection. In this paper, we introduce a new screen-blur combination based on two important factors, namely the intensity and the blurriness of reflection, to better characterize the reflection formulation in SIRR. Specifically, we present Screen-blur Reflection Networks (SRNet), which executes the screen-blur formulation in its network design and adapts to the complex reflection on real scenes. Technically, SRNet consists of three components: a blended image generator, a reflection estimator and a reflection removal module. The image generator exploits the screen-blur combination to synthesize the training blended images. The reflection estimator learns the reflection layer and a blur degree that measures the level of blurriness for reflection. The reflection removal module further uses the blended image, blur degree and reflection layer to filter out the transmission layer in a cascaded manner. Superior results on three different SIRR methods are reported when generating the training data on the principle of the screen-blur combination. Moreover, extensive experiments on six datasets quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the efficacy of SRNet over the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clinical studies have proved significant improvements in hand motor function in stroke patients when assisted by robotic devices. However, there were few studies on neural activity changes in the brain during execution. This study aimed to investigate the brain activation pattern caused by soft rehabilitation glove and virtual reality scenes. Twenty healthy subjects and twenty stroke patients were recruited to complete three controlled trials: grasping passively with robotic glove assistance (RA), watching grasping movement video in virtual reality (VR), and the joint use of robotic glove and virtual reality (VRA). Neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, motor cortex and occipital lobe was synchronously collected by the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) device. Activation level and functional connectivity of these brain regions were subsequently calculated and statistically analyzed. For both groups, the VR and VRA tasks induced activation of larger cortical areas. Stroke group had higher average cortical activation in all three tasks compared to healthy group, especially in the prefrontal cortex (${P} \lt 0.05$). Functional connectivity was weaker in the stroke group than in the healthy group across most regions, but was significantly stronger across some regions of the right hemisphere. These findings suggest significant differences in activation patterns across three tasks. In addition, multi-sensory stimulation can promote functional communication between more brain regions in patients. It has potential for neuromodulation in rehabilitation training by setting up different sensory stimulation modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glass has unique properties that make it attractive for many applications. Combining glass with Si fabrication process would create new possibilities not only in device performance and form factor, but also scale economies. Key challenges in using glass wafers in a Si fab include lack of opacity and electrical conductivity as well as metallic and particle contamination. These challenges can be overcome through a suitable coating on the glass wafer and rigorous particle removal throughput the fabrication and use process. For applications that demand high precision to support direct wafer bonding and lithography, glass wafers can be engineered to deliver the required surface smoothness and flatness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new glass segmentation method utilizing paired RGB and thermal images. Due to the large difference between the transmission property of visible light and that of the thermal energy through the glass where most glass is transparent to the visible light but opaque to thermal energy, glass regions of a scene are made more distinguishable with a pair of RGB and thermal images than solely with an RGB image. To exploit such a unique property, we propose a neural network architecture that effectively combines an RGB-thermal image pair with a new multi-modal fusion module based on attention, and integrate CNN and transformer to extract local features and non-local dependencies, respectively. As well, we have collected a new dataset containing 5551 RGB-thermal image pairs with ground-truth segmentation annotations. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on fusing RGB and thermal data for glass segmentation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Dong-Huo/RGB-T-Glass-Segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a need to develop appropriate balance training interventions to minimize the risk of falls. Recently, we found that intermittent visual occlusions can substantially improve the effectiveness and retention of balance beam walking practice (Symeonidou & Ferris, 2022). We sought to determine how the intermittent visual occlusions affect electrocortical activity during beam walking. We hypothesized that areas involved in sensorimotor processing and balance control would demonstrate spectral power changes and inter-trial coherence modulations after loss and restoration of vision. Ten healthy young adults practiced walking on a treadmill-mounted balance beam while wearing high-density EEG and experiencing reoccurring visual occlusions. Results revealed spectral power fluctuations and inter-trial coherence changes in the visual, occipital, temporal, and sensorimotor cortex as well as the posterior parietal cortex and the anterior cingulate. We observed a prolonged alpha increase in the occipital, temporal, sensorimotor, and posterior parietal cortex after the occlusion onset. In contrast, the anterior cingulate showed a strong alpha and theta increase after the occlusion offset. We observed transient phase synchrony in the alpha, theta, and beta bands within the sensory, posterior parietal, and anterior cingulate cortices immediately after occlusion onset and offset. Intermittent visual occlusions induced electrocortical spectral power and inter-trial coherence changes in a wide range of frequencies within cortical areas relevant for multisensory integration and processing as well as balance control. Our training intervention could be implemented in senior and rehabilitation centers, improving the quality of life of elderly and neurologically impaired individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augmented reality-based brain-computer interface (AR-BCI) system is one of the important ways to promote BCI technology outside of the laboratory due to its portability and mobility, but its performance in real-world scenarios has not been fully studied. In the current study, we first investigated the effect of ambient brightness on AR-BCI performance. 5 different light intensities were set as experimental conditions to simulate typical brightness in real scenes, while the same steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) stimulus was displayed in the AR glass. The data analysis results showed that SSVEP can be evoked under all 5 light intensities, but the response intensity became weaker when the brightness increased. The recognition accuracies of AR-SSVEP were negatively correlated to light intensity, the highest accuracies were 89.35% with FBCCA and 83.33% with CCA under 0 lux light intensity, while they decreased to 62.53% and 49.24% under 1200 lux. To solve the accuracy loss problem in high ambient brightness, we further designed a SSVEP recognition algorithm with iterative learning capability, named ensemble online adaptive CCA (eOACCA). The main strategy is to provide initial filters for high-intensity data by iteratively learning low-light-intensity AR-SSVEP data. The experimental results showed that the eOACCA algorithm had significant advantages under higher light intensities ($>$ 600 lux). Compared with FBCCA, the accuracy of eOACCA under 1200 lux was increased by 13.91%. In conclusion, the current study contributed to the in-depth understanding of the performance variations of AR-BCI under different lighting conditions, and was helpful in promoting the AR-BCI application in complex lighting environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to stimuli gives rise to sensory and affective experiences. Computing the relationships between these experiences is instrumental to designing affectively appealing products and understanding human experiences. Hierarchical structures of sensory and affective responses, which can be built through adjective rating tasks, are regarded as an effective means for expressing relationships between sensory and affective responses. Naturally, these hierarchical structures depend on the type of stimulus; however, so far, their dependencies on material categories have yet to be examined. We therefore investigated how hierarchical structures of affective and sensory responses depend on seven material categories: fabric, leather, wood, paper, foliage, stone, and glass. Each material category had 100 visual representations selected from the Flickr Material Database. Thirty-nine participants were asked to rate 368 pictures across a set of materials. The questionnaire adjectives included visually- and haptically-centered items although the stimuli were purely visual. We found that the structures differed substantially among the material categories, although there were some commonalities. Particularly, the positions of polysemic or multimodal adjectives such as “light” and “uncomfortable” in the hierarchy were highly dependent on the material category. For example, “light” has both physical (lightweight) and psychological (e.g., non-solemn, cheerful) meanings. For stone and glass (generally considered to be of heavy weight), the psychological meanings were primarily considered. Conversely, the physical meanings were predominant for fabric, leather, wood, paper, and foliage, for which weight is a factor in judging quality. The present study helps interpret affective descriptors whose meanings vary among types of stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pressure sensors based on microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology have been employed for measuring the pressure inside the human body due to their small size, lightweight, and low energy consumption. Hermetic packages are necessary to protect the implants from body fluid corrosion. Materials such as metal and glass are usually considered to be hermetic and can ensure several years of lifetime. Materials with low permeability, such as liquid crystal polymers and parylene, are also supposed to be short-term hermetic when the expected lifetime is not too long (less than a year). Water penetration and interface adhesion determine whether the package fails. Helium leakage tests and water concentration tests can be used to predict when the package fails. In addition, for more short-term implantable devices (several days or weeks), bioabsorbable packages can be helpful. The main advantage is that the self-degradation of the packaging material can avoid tissue damage caused by long-term implantation or infection caused by secondary removal surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A miniaturized pneumatic finger allows for safer grasping without damaging the surface of an object. A flexible strain sensor was developed and embedded in a miniaturized pneumatic finger to sense the finger’s self-deformation as a feedback control signal. The proposed flexible strain sensor comprised a Zr-based metallic glass sensing material and a flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) substrate. The properties of fabricated strain sensors with different patterns and with metallic glass thin films of different thicknesses were measured. The miniaturized pneumatic finger was fabricated from a highly elastic polymer by demolding. To integrate the flexible strain sensor and the miniaturized pneumatic finger, surface treatment was performed to improve the bonding strength. Measurements of the contact angle and peel-off force reveal that the treated surfaces have lower contact angles and higher bonding strength. This higher bonding strength between the flexible strain sensor and the miniaturized pneumatic finger prevented the destruction of the finger during bending. The developed flexible strain sensor embedded in the miniaturized pneumatic finger could sense the finger’s self-deformation by measuring changes in resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor includes three main parts, an FBG, a sensor substrate, and a packaging material. The most commonly used packaging material is epoxy resin adhesive, which is prone to aging and failure, which further affects the performance and life of a sensor. This research provides an innovative approach that enables all-silicon sensor fabrication, where the substrate and packaging material are prepared by silicon glass, which is consistent with silicon optical fiber. In the packaging process, there are three main bottleneck problems, which are considered in this study: 1) highly elastic processing of glass used in the sensor elastic element; 2) thermal fixation between the silicon packaging material and substrate; and 3) selecting appropriate FBG parameters and fixing methods. In the proposed approach, an elastic glass cantilever beam and an FBG are packaged with molten glass powder. The proposed approach is verified by tests, and the test results show that the packaged FBG has good package quality and sensing performance. The theoretical analysis of the wavelength drift phenomenon during the packaging is presented. Finally, the introduced packaging method is applied to the fabrication of an FBG tilt sensor. The sensor shell, cantilever beam, temperature compensation beam, mass block, and other components are designed and made of silicon glass. The sensing principle and performance tests of the tilt sensor have been described in detail. The tilt sensor shows good linearity and repeatability. The presented packaging technology shows good applicability and has promising applications in the fabrication of high-performance FBG sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calibration of a multicamera system is a prerequisite for high-accuracy measurement. In this study, a method for calibrating a ring multicamera system with a transparent target combined with digital image correlation (DIC) technology is proposed to achieve panoramic dynamic and static measurement of the object. The transparent target is placed in the middle of the ring camera array, and the target can be driven by the turntable to calibrate multiple cameras simultaneously. A complete refraction correction model is built on the transparent side of the target, and the corrected calibration data are integrated into the multicamera DIC system. The global optimization further improves the overall calibration accuracy of the system. Special markers are attached to the target surface to automatically identify the refractive and nonrefractive surfaces of the target. This type of camera can establish a coordinate relationship with the cameras on the other side of the target although no overlapping field of view exists between adjacent cameras on the same side of the target. The calibration data are analyzed, and dynamic and static experiments are implemented to verify the measurement accuracy of the system. All experimental results show that the calibration and measurement accuracies of the proposed method are high, and the system can be fully used for high-precision panoramic dynamic and static measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents a novel sensor packaging and a novel transition concept for radar applications above 150 GHz based on glass material. By using laser induced deep etching (LIDE) technology, glass vias and cavities are fabricated without degrading the mechanical stability of glass, as micro-cracks are completely avoided. Especially at high millimeter wave (mm-wave) frequencies, precise structuring on low dielectric loss materials and a high integration density are essential for low loss transitions. In this paper, an ultra compact FMCW radar monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) at 160 GHz is used to demonstrate this packaging technology. In addition, the high frequency signal is guided by a low loss transition to a deposed antenna via a dielectric waveguide (DWG) providing the antenna front end with mechanical flexibility. Thus, using plated through glass vias (TGVs) and a circulating solder ring, the package is hermetically sealed. The optical transparent glass package has a size of only ${5.8}\,\rm {mm}\times {4.4}\,\rm {mm}\times {0.9}\,\rm {mm}$. A minimum measured insertion loss of 2.85 dB at 162 GHz from chip to DWG is achieved. The complete radar system with a range resolution of 12 mm is demonstrated via radar measurement.

Accurately estimating vegetation productivity in the forest areas is important for studying the terrestrial ecosystem and carbon cycles. Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) vegetation production datasets provide new long-term basic products of gross primary production (GPP) and net primary production (NPP) for monitoring the issues related with carbon exchange and carbon storage. But the coarse spatial resolution of the GLASS GPP/NPP products have limited their application in ecosystem service assessment in regional scales. In this paper, a spatial downscaling method based on GLASS vegetation production datasets and four typical deep learning methods (deep neural network, convolutional neural network, back propagation neural network and recurrent neural network) was proposed to generate high resolution GPP/NPP in the forest areas in the upper Luanhe River basin in the north of Hebei Province in China. Then the downscaled GPP/NPP were validated with ground measurement data and reference high resolution GPP/NPP data, and the accuracy of downscaled GPP/NPP from different deep learning methods was compared. Results of this paper indicated the applicability and feasibility of deep learning methods in downscaling GPP/NPP. Direct validation and cross validation demonstrated that downscaled GPP/NPP using convolutional neural network obtained the highest accuracy.

An optical refractive index sensor with a metal-multilayer dielectric film structure based on Fano resonance (FR) is proposed to solve the low sensitivity of traditional surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors. The sensor’s performance can be optimized, and a plasmon-induced reflection (PIR) of incident light can also be achieved by adjusting the thickness of each layer. Through an innovative experimental design, the practical measurement phase sensitivity of the sensor based on FR is achieved for the first time, which provides a reference for subsequent theoretical research and experimental preparation. The wavelength sensitivity and the phase sensitivity can reach 345 nm/RIU and $4.00\times 10^{{5}\circ }$ /RIU, which experimentally proves that phase interrogation has higher sensitivity than traditional wavelength interrogation. The sensor can be a promising candidate for exploiting novel plasmonic sensors with ultrahigh sensitivity and resolution for biosensing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report solid-phase crystallization (SPC) of amorphous silicon (a-Si) using blue laser annealing (BLA) and its application to thin film transistor (TFT). The a-Si film on glass was crystallized by exposure of blue laser for short duration of $50~\mu \text{s}$. The temperature of Si increases up to ~1100 °C and induces fast SPC. A 100 nm poly-Si on glass has full width at half maximum of Raman intensity 5.53 cm−1 and atomic force microscopy (AFM) root mean square surface roughness of 1.18 nm, indicating high quality poly-Si with smooth surface morphology without grain boundary. The coplanar SPC TFT using BLA exhibits the field effect mobility of ~27.0 cm2 / $\text{V}\cdot \text{s}$ , on/off current ratio of >107 and excellent stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter presents the first demonstration of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) filters in glass interposers for $D$ -band (110–170 GHz). The material stack-up consists of 100- $\mu \text{m}$ -thick Asahi Glass Company (AGC) ENA1 glass with 15- $\mu \text{m}$ -thick Ajinomoto Build-up Films (ABF GL102) laminated on both sides. To demonstrate different frequency responses, cavities with two different shapes (square and rectangle) are used to design the filters. The cavities are fed using center coupled microstrip lines. Semi-additive process (SAP) is used to fabricate the filters. The diameter and pitch of the via side wall are designed to be 70 and $170 ~\mu \text{m}$ , respectively. The measured results are in excellent agreement with the simulation models. At ~130 GHz, first-, second-, and third-order square SIW filters show 1.54-, 2.7-, and 4.2-dB insertion loss, respectively. The relative bandwidth for the square filters is 12.8%, 9%, and 8.8%, respectively. The first- and second-order rectangular SIW filters show 1.65- and 2.85-dB insertion loss, respectively, and the relative bandwidth for these filters is 9.5% and 9%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of an experiment designed to study creeping discharges on a solid insulating surface immersed in palm kernel oil methyl ester (PKOME) compared with those produced from mineral oil (MO). The investigation takes place under standard negative lightning impulse voltage application, and for the three following solid insulating surfaces: hardened glass (HG), porcelain (PO), and simple glass (SG). The distributions of the radial discharge occupancy densities as a function of the thickness of the solid material and the insulating liquid are evaluated. A statistical study of the total and final length of the branches produced by the discharges is presented, as well as the current amplitudes and the charge produced by this phenomenon. A fractal analysis of the phenomenon is also presented. The experimental results show that the distribution of the average radial density of the discharge, the total and final lengths of the branches, and fractal dimension depend strongly on the physicochemical characteristics of the insulation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparent objects, such as glass walls and doors, constitute architectural obstacles hindering the mobility of people with low vision or blindness. For instance, the open space behind glass doors is inaccessible, unless it is correctly perceived and interacted with. However, traditional assistive technologies rarely cover the segmentation of these safety-critical transparent objects. In this paper, we build a wearable system with a novel dual-head Transformer for Transparency (Trans4Trans) perception model, which can segment general- and transparent objects. The two dense segmentation results are further combined with depth information in the system to help users navigate safely and assist them to negotiate transparent obstacles. We propose a lightweight Transformer Parsing Module (TPM) to perform multi-scale feature interpretation in the transformer-based decoder. Benefiting from TPM, the double decoders can perform joint learning from corresponding datasets to pursue robustness, meanwhile maintain efficiency on a portable GPU, with negligible calculation increase. The entire Trans4Trans model is constructed in a symmetrical encoder-decoder architecture, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the test sets of Stanford2D3D and Trans10K-v2 datasets, obtaining mIoU of 45.13% and 75.14%, respectively. Through a user study and various pre-tests conducted in indoor and outdoor scenes, the usability and reliability of our assistive system have been extensively verified. Meanwhile, the Tran4Trans model has outstanding performances on driving scene datasets. On Cityscapes, ACDC, and DADA-seg datasets corresponding to common environments, adverse weather, and traffic accident scenarios, mIoU scores of 81.5%, 76.3%, and 39.2% are obtained, demonstrating its high efficiency and robustness for real-world transportation applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two robust temperature-insensitive magneto-optical current sensor prototypes, based on double polarimetric processing schemes and single light way methods, were constructed using light reflection and light transition, respectively. A diamagnetism TeO2-PbO-ZnO-BaF2 bulk glass was fabricated as a sensing head which, with/without a silver layer, acts as a mirror sputtered by RF sputtering. The Verdet constant of the TPZBF glass was measured using the self-made optical bench. The current sensors were evaluated under various currents and different temperatures. Results indicated that the constructed low-cost current sensor prototypes are accurate and stable for current sensing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar energy is widely used for electricity generation, heating systems, and indoor environment daytime illumination. Indeed, large amounts of sunlight energy remain insufficiently used. In this work, we aim at employing sunlight energy for data transmission as a green option for wireless communications. Being emitted by an uncontrollable source, taming the sunlight is a challenging task that requires appropriate technologies to manipulate incident light. Liquid crystal devices are switchable glass technologies that have adequate response time and contrast characteristics for such an application. In this regard, we design a novel dual-cell liquid crystal shutter (DLS) by stacking two liquid crystal cells that operate in opposite manners, and we build our sunlight modulator with an array of DLSs. Then, we adopt time division multiplexing and polarization-based modulation to boost the data rate and eliminate the flickering effect. In addition, we provide mathematical modeling of the system and study its performance in terms of communication and energy consumption. Finally, we introduce some numerical results to examine the impact of multiple parameters on the system's performance and compare it with the state-of-the-art, which showed that our system features higher data rates and extended link ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrated an all-fiber chirped-pulse amplifier with a stretcher stage based on a triple-cladding fiber and a final amplification stage based on a newly-developed highly Yb-doped large-mode area fiber with a Ge-doped pedestal. The stretcher fiber was designed to match a diffraction grating compressor in the third-order dispersion and allowed the stretching of 6 ps 1026 nm chirped pulses up to ~500 ps. These pulses were amplified in the developed Yb-doped fiber and then compressed using a transmission grating compressor down to 670 fs duration with 3.5 W average power and $61.8~\mu \text{J}$ pulse energy, corresponding to a record-high peak power of 92 MW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glass has been shown to be a capable core substrate material for high-frequency applications. In this article, we examine the capabilities of ultra-thin glass as a material that can be used for high-frequency flexible applications. The two stack-ups discussed in the work presented are 60 $\mu \text{m}$ in total thickness with a core glass substrate (Schott AF32) of 30 $\mu \text{m}$ thickness. One stack-up uses 15 $\mu \text{m}$ JSR GT-N01 as a buildup dielectric on each side of the glass and the other uses 15 $\mu \text{m}$ Taiyo Ink photo imageable dielectric (PID). Both stack-ups have been characterized to 110 GHz and have shown to have comparable performance to materials used in this frequency range. This work then focuses on the mechanical characterization of these stack-ups using free arc bending. The free arc bending tests show that both ultra-thin glass stack-ups are suitable for bending applications as the tested samples can bend to a panel separation below 33% of the sample’s total length. This article concludes that the ultra-thin glass stack-ups are suitable for high-frequency flexible applications because the electrical performance is comparable to other high-frequency rigid materials while exhibiting their flexible capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phosphor-converted white laser diode (WLD) is considered as a promising light source in next-generation high-brightness lighting. However, the WLD suffers from low optical quality in luminous efficacy and color rendering. In this work, we fabricated a high-quality WLD by a blue laser-driven a tricolor phosphor-in-glass (PiG) film-on-sapphire (PIGS). The tricolor PiGS was prepared by sintering a green/yellow/red phosphor glass film on a sapphire substrate. The optical quality of tricolor PiGS-WLDs were optimized by adjusting the phosphor ratio. At the phosphor ratio of 9:6:1, the PiGS-WLD achieves high optical quality with a luminous flux of 362.1 lm, a color rendering index (CRI) of 80.3, and a correlated color temperature (CCT) of 4590 K at a laser power of 2.4 W. The PiGS-WLD has the highest luminous efficacy of 154.5 lm/W at 3.15 W. Furthermore, the PiGS-WLD displays excellent color stability with small CCT and CRI deviation under various laser powers and continuous excitation. The surface temperature of PiGS-WLD is stable at 104 °C due to the high thermal conductivity of sapphire substrate. Therefore, this study provides a stable and high-quality laser-driven white light source for high-brightness lighting and display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dust accumulation on PV modules, influenced by a variety of environmental parameters, such as relative humidity, wind speed, and particulate matter (PM) concentration, is one of the most common detrimental factors in reducing the power output. An investigation is conducted to quantify the impact of dust accumulation on power generation and bifacial gain in this work. Based on the experiments, the daily dust deposition rate as well as its correlation with relative humidity, wind speed, PM concentration, and ambient temperature is determined. Furthermore, the soiling loss (SL%) and soiling rate (SR) are analyzed over the period of the study. At the end of the test period, the SL% and SR are reported to be 6.86% and 0.233, respectively. This percentage loss is further used to simulate the annual energy yield and bifacial gain. A clean bifacial PV system recorded a higher performance ratio (0.83) and lower collection loss LC (0.8 kWh/kWp/day) compared to the lower performance ratio (0.78) and greater collection loss LC (1.12 kWh/kWp/day) of a soiled bifacial PV system. The yield of the monofacial PV system is far lower under the soiled state, and this discrepancy allows for greater bifacial gain (BG) (7.11%) to be realized under the soiled state of the modules. Although a bifacial module under soiled state will generate lower output than its cleaner counterpart, BG under soiled state is governed by the difference in yield from a monofacial system at a greater extent than a bifacial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In outer space’s extreme electron radiation environment, the insulating medium will experience a deep dielectric charging effect. As an excellent insulating medium, polyimide is widely used in spacecraft. In practical use, glass microspheres and glass fibers are often added to increase its mechanical strength. However, the influence of glass microspheres and glass fibers on deep dielectric charging effects has often been ignored in previous studies. Therefore, the work in this article established a 3-D deep dielectric charging model of glass microsphere and glass fiber reinforced polyimide. Using the model, the effects of glass microsphere and glass fiber volume fraction, glass microsphere spacing, glass fiber orientation, and 3-D glass fiber structure were investigated. The results show that the larger the volume fraction of glass fiber or glass microsphere, the more obvious the decrease of polyimide composite media’s average electric field strength. Under the same volume fraction, glass fibers are more favorable to reduce the average electric field strength than glass microspheres. The surface of glass microspheres will form charge accumulation, increasing local maximum electric field intensity, which is greater than the maximum electric field value of pure polyimide under electron radiation. When the spacing of glass microspheres decreases, the degree of electric field distortion increases, but the electric field value decreases when the microspheres contact each other. When the glass fiber orientation is perpendicular to the ground plane, it can better provide the electronic release channel, thereby reducing the deep dielectric charging effect. Using 3-D glass fiber structures can reduce the polyimide’s average electric field value and reduce the maximum local electric field distortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater camera calibration has attracted much attentions due to its significance in high-precision three-dimensional (3-D) pose estimation and scene reconstruction. However, most existing calibration methods focus on calibrating the underwater camera in a single scenario [e.g., air-glass-water], which can not well formulate the geometry constraint and further result in the complex calibration process. Moreover, the calibration precision of these methods is low, since multilayer transparent refractions with unknown layer orientation and distance make the task more difficult than that in air. To address these challenges, we develop a novel and efficient medium-driven method for underwater camera calibration (MedUCC), which can calibrate the underwater camera parameters, including the orientation and position of the transparent glass accurately. Our key idea of this article is to leverage the light-path changes formed by medium refractions between different media to acquire calibration data, which can better formulate the geometry constraint, and estimate the initial value of the underwater camera parameters. To improve the calibration accuracy of the underwater camera system, a quaternion-based solution is developed to refine the underwater camera parameters. To the end, we evaluate the calibration performance on an underwater camera system. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain a better performance in comparison to the existing works. We also validate our proposed MedUCC method on our designed 3-D scanner prototype, which illustrates the superiority of our proposed calibration method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A varifocal concave–convex lens using ultrasound and transparent viscoelastic gel is reported. The configuration of the lens is simple and thin, consisting of four pieces of a piezoelectric ultrasound transducer, a glass disk, and a transparent silicone gel film. It uses a combination of the ultrasound resonant flexural standing- and traveling-wave modes excited by in-phase and four-phase drives so that the lens can change its shape to both concave and convex by switching the resonance mode with the same structure. The acoustic radiation force (ARF) originated from the resonant flexural vibration modes changed the surface profile of the gel. Convex and concave deformation were generated at the center of the lens at the resonance frequencies of 38 and 60 kHz, respectively, indicating that a varifocal concave–convex lens could be fabricated by controlling the driving frequency, voltage amplitude, and phase differences among the ultrasound transducers. The deformational displacement on the lens surface and the change in the focal length increased with the input voltage amplitude. The optical microscopic images observed through the lens were enlarged $1.28\times $ (reduced $0.92\times $) in the convex (concave) mode with 20 ${V}_{\text {pp}}$. The response time for focusing and the temperature stability under operation were evaluated. By switching the resonance vibration modes of the lens through the input signals to multiple ultrasound transducers, the variable-focus function with both concave and convex lenses was achieved in the same configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparent ultrasound transducer (TUT) technology allows easy co-alignment of optical and acoustic beams in the development of compact photoacoustic imaging (PAI) devices with minimum acoustic coupling. However, TUTs suffer from narrow bandwidth and low pulse-echo sensitivity due to the lack of suitable transparent acoustic matching and backing layers. Here, we studied translucent glass beads (GB) in transparent epoxy as an acoustic matching layer for the transparent lithium niobate piezoelectric material-based TUTs (LN-TUTs). The acoustic and optical properties of various volume fractions of GB matching layers were studied using theoretical calculations, simulations, and experiments. These results demonstrated that the GB matching layer has significantly enhanced the pulse-echo sensitivity and bandwidth of the TUTs. Moreover, the GB matching layer served as a light diffuser to help achieve uniform optical fluence on the tissue surface and also improved the photoacoustic (PA) signal bandwidth. The proposed GB matching layer fabrication is low cost, easy to manufacture using conventional ultrasound transducer fabrication tools, acoustically compatible with soft tissue, and minimizes the use of the acoustic coupling medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red micro light-emitting diodes (micro-LEDs) on silicon substrates are important components for realizing large-scale and low-cost micro-LED displays. Recently, InGaN red micro-LEDs have received enormous attention because their external quantum efficiency (EQE) is not significantly affected by size effect and they are compatible with existing green and blue LED material systems. Here, taking advantage of the easy removal of silicon substrates, we successfully achieved the transfer printing of InGaN red micro-LEDs. By removing the light-absorbing Si substrate and introducing a metal mirror, the transfer printed micro-LEDs exhibited better color purity, higher optical power, and higher EQE. At 0.5 A/cm2, the optical power of micro-LEDs on glass was 300% higher than that of micro-LEDs on silicon. And the peak EQE of transfer printed micro-LEDs was 2.3 times that of micro-LEDs on native substrate. This work is applicable to most transfer printing techniques requiring PDMS stamps, and shows the potential to realize InGaN-based full-color micro-LED displays by mass transfer in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unique characteristics of hollow core fibers lead to low non-linearity and reduced sensitivity to environmental influences, making them attractive platform for designing inline fiber optic devices. Among these, an inline fiber polarizer would be most desired for applications such as gyroscopes, interferometric sensors and telecommunication. Hollow-core fiber polarizers, demonstrated to date, suffer from high insertion loss (>5 dB) for the pass polarization, and typically require tens of meters long nested antiresonant fiber to achieve a meaningful polarization extinction ratio (PER) >20 dB. We report a novel approach that makes use of intricate modal loss spectrum within a resonant band of single-ring antiresonant fiber to realize the first high-performance, discrete hollow-core fiber polarizer. The compact device comprising only 6 cm long fiber offers a high PER of >25 dB with <1 dB transmission loss for the pass polarization. In the present form, the polarizing action takes place over 14 nm and 7 nm bandwidth in the 2 μm and 1 μm wavelength range, but the simplicity of design principles makes it straightforward to shift the operating wavelengths to practically any wavelength band. The device can be fusion spliced with a standard antiresonant hollow-core fiber and a large mode area solid-core fiber with splice loss of 0.14 dB and 0.45 dB respectively. Complete integration of the proposed device into an all hollow-fiber setup would lead to a total insertion loss of 1.3 dB including both input and output splicing, which is the lowest for a discrete hollow-core fiber polarizer reported so far. The results encourage the development of other hollow-core fiber components by exploiting the unique characteristics cultivated in a resonant band of an antiresonant fiber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excessive heat loss in micro scale has been a long-lasting issue, affecting catalyst reactivity particularly for monopropellant thrusters and causing insufficient propellant decomposition. Various MEMS fabrication substrates and technologies were utilized for micro propulsion, but few studies on MEMS-based propulsion have reported their propulsion performance, due to not only insufficient propellant decomposition, but also difficulties of measuring high temperature and pressure in a micro scale chamber. In this work, a microthruster was fabricated using high insulation material (glass) in an optical lithography process of photosensitive glass to suppress heat loss. Chamber temperature and pressure sensing tips were integrated in a MEMS fabrication process, which were essential to evaluating propulsion performance and gaining an understanding of the insulating effects of the material on micro propulsion performance. Experimental test results showed successful propellant decomposition with 78% temperature efficiency, which is one of the highest temperature efficiencies in MEMS-based micro propulsion studies reported. The use of glass as a MEMS fabrication substrate was evaluated favorably through numerical analysis as well, in terms of suppression of thermal energy loss and superior propulsion performance.[2022-0014] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are promising candidates for not only terrestrial but also space applications. The remarkable power-per-weight of nearly 30 W/g makes them attractive to be deployed on a spacecraft. However, the high-energy radiation in outer space could damage the PSCs, making it crucial to understand their degradation mechanism. Here, we investigated the PSCs’ response to X-ray radiation, and proposed that the X-ray-induced damage was attributed to the displacement of $\text{I}^{-}$ , creating lattice defects by the radiation-generated secondary electrons. We verified the hypothesis by simulating the energy deposition of X-rays in PSCs and investigating the PSCs’ in situ electronic responses to the X-ray and electron beam. Furthermore, we studied the variation in spatial distribution of trap densities under X-ray radiation, which revealed that the defect-abundant perovskite/Poly[bis(4-phenyl)(2,4,6-trimethylphenyl)amine] (PTAA) interface was the most rapidly degraded site in PSCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The non-viral delivery of the prokaryotic clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein 9 (Cas9) nuclease system provides promising solutions for gene therapy. However, traditional chemical and physical delivery approaches for gene knock-in are confronted by significant challenges to overcome the drawbacks of low efficiency and high toxicity. An alternative method for directly delivering CRISPR components into single cells is microinjection. Here, we present the high-throughput robotic microinjection of CRISPR machinery plasmids to produce gene insertions. We demonstrate that the microinjection of CRISPR/Cas9 with an enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) donor template into single HepG2 cells can achieve reporter gene knock-in targeting the adeno-associated virus site 1 locus. Homology-directed repair-mediated knock-in can be observed with an efficiency of 41%. Assessment via T7E1 assay indicates that the eGFP knock-in cells exhibit no detectable changes at potential off-target sites. A case study of injecting the eGFP knock-in cells into zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryos to form an in vivo tumor model is conducted. Results demonstrate the efficiency of combining microinjection with the CRISPR/Cas9 system in achieving gene knock-in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a 38.5 GHz transmitarray, for the first time, embedded into laminated car glass, and indoor 5G connectivity enhanced by this transmitarray laminated glass has also been validated using a ray-tracing simulator. The transmitarray structure reduces the penetration loss and realizes a desired beam shaping function. Metallic layers of the transmitarray structure adopt the Jerusalem cross shape that minimizes opacity. A ray-tracing simulator was used to analyze electromagnetic fields in a massive space, such as the interior of a car. The proposed transmitarray laminated glass was applied to the passenger side window in the simulation, and the variation in the communication performance with and without the transmitarray was compared. This comparison confirmed that field intensity increases of up to approximately 5 dB are realized at the target area, where communication is mainly performed. In addition, the proposed transmitarray laminated glass increases the field intensity by more than 3 dB, from approximately 36 to 40 GHz. The transmitarray laminated glass has also been fabricated. The maximum field intensity increase of approximately 5 dB, which is similar to the simulation results, was successfully measured at the target area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is strong impetus by the Telecom Infra Project to exploit the 60 GHz unlicensed band for public Wi-Fi in urban environments, by installing access points on light poles. Although many 60 GHz urban channel measurements have been recorded to date, they have resulted only in path loss models or root-mean-square (RMS) delay spreads. What is needed at millimeter-wave is a spatially consistent channel model for beamtracking that embodies the characteristics of these short wavelengths—sparsity and rough surface scattering—such as the Quasi-Deterministic model. In this letter, we fit the model to channel measurements we recorded in an urban environment. The measurements were recorded at 4, 6, and 9 m antenna heights to investigate the tradeoffs between light pole heights. The large-scale channel metrics between the model and the measurements were shown to match very well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the impact of Joule heating under high current operation on multi-finger organic thin film transistors (OTFTs). The degradation was examined for a range of devices with different numbers of fingers (N = 4, 6, and 10). Due to the heat accumulation during operation, significant electrical degradation was observed at high currents. Under bias stress, with increasing number of fingers, the electrical characteristics exhibited different degrees of degradation, and an abnormal hump was observed in devices with 10 fingers. To examine the effect of self-heating, OTFTs were prepared on two substrates, polyimide and glass, and the causes of degradation were investigated at both room temperature and low temperatures. In addition, AC operation was proposed. Finally, a Silvaco TCAD simulation was made to model the device self-heating and illustrate the effect of the number of fingers on the bias stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonances in radially, thermally poled glass hetero-fibers, are investigated for the first time. Upon radially oriented thermal poling, both TE and TM polarized responses undergoing a spectral “cleaning” process, namely higher-order radial modes are being suppressed, or even fully annihilated, compared to the spectral behavior of the pristine fibers. Second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy, Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDX) and micro-Raman (μ-Raman) measurements were conducted in order to reveal the spatial profile of the structural and optical changes introduced to the thermally poled hetero-fibers, and correlate them with the WGM spectral measurements. The specific selective, mode cleaning behavior is attributed to refractive index changes generated in proximity to the fiber's circumference, which are associated with radially-symmetric ionic re-distribution. The thermally poled hetero-fiber WGM cavities have been rigorously simulated using the finite element method, the calculated modal eigenstates and transmission spectra, further confirm the specific mode selection mechanism, introduced by the azimuthally symmetric thermal, poling process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a study into the gas pressure and composition within a hollow core optical fiber immediately after fabrication. Results from three different experimental techniques indicate that the initial absolute pressure inside of the hollow core is significantly lower than atmospheric pressure. By measuring the equilibrium height to which water ingresses into the hollow core, we estimate the absolute internal gas pressure to be 20 kPa < ${{\boldsymbol{P}}_{\boldsymbol{i}}}$ < 29 kPa for the fibers reported here that were fabricated using standard techniques. The initial gas composition within the hollow core was studied using Raman and absorption spectroscopy and the evolution of the gas composition provides indirect information about the condition of the silica surfaces inside the fiber. The measurements indicate that these internal surfaces become saturated with atmospheric water vapor as this is drawn into the open-ended fiber, initially due to a pressure gradient post-fabrication. Our findings are an essential foundation for the study of long-term optical and mechanical performance of hollow core fibers and important for accurate characterization of these specialty fibers. The first is becoming increasingly important as commercial applications of these fibers expand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the novel 3D wafer-level vacuum packaging technology for MEMS, which only needs two masks and is realized by Au-Si eutectic bonding with a low-resistivity Si Cap wafer. Wherein, Au-Si bonding pads and rings are formed to accomplish vertical interconnects and a vacuum package respectively. Applied to resonators with two typical substrate wafers of Si and Glass, this 3D package structure has further gone through the systemic characterizations. Specifically, the high-reliable mechanic strengths of device packages are revealed from Au-Si bonding strengths measured as about 20 MPa in tensile tests. Based on analyzing parasitic capacitance networks in device packages, the feed-through effect in resonance tests can be effectively relieved by grounding on each Si layer in device package structures (i.e. the parasitic capacitance reduced from the level of pF to fF). By resonance tests, it is found that increasing the degassing duration (30 min $\to 60$ min $\to 100$ min) is beneficial for improving package vacuum degrees as well as consistencies (69% within 4–30 kPa $\to 88$ % within 0.6-1.2 kPa $\to 85$ % within 0.6-0.8 kPa), and hermetic package yields (73% $\to 86$ % $\to 100$ %). Besides, device packages are verified to have good long-term stability by monitoring quality factor variations in 6 months. Overall, this proposed 3D packaging technology has extensive application prospects in various MEMS devices due to its inherently-simple process, low capacitive feed-through effect, and fine package performances. Also, test results provide instructions on the realization of low-parasitic-capacitance signal interfaces and the optimization of wafer-level vacuum package processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of flexible electrode shows huge impact on the development of wearable organic light emitting devices (OLEDs). It is primarily come from the conductive attenuation and interface stripping of metallic electrode under continuous deformation. Inspired by the flexible structure of human vertebrae, we added the multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) into silver nanowires (AgNWs) network to act as stable and protective filler. During continuous deformation, the entwisted MWCNTs can prevent the slippage of adjacent AgNWs and decentralize stress to keep the intact of conductive network. The composite film has been applied as back electrode to replace the thick metallic electrode in skin-attachable OLEDs and the overall mechanical stability of the device has been greatly improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) filter power divider (FPD) based on glass substrate with a wide stopband. Couplings of TE101 and TE103 modes construct the passband of the FPD, which are transmitted by a T-type structure with resonators of different sizes to reduce parasitic patterns. The input and output ports are realized by electrical feeders, which penetrate into the center of resonant cavity. Combined with the lateral coupling structure, the parasitic passband caused by the even-high-order modes can be eliminated effectively. Utilizing the multimode transmission characteristics of waveguide resonators, electromagnetic waves of two modes are set to transmit in resonators of different sizes, effectively suppressing the resonance of higher order modes. In order to achieve a good isolation, an isolation resistor is introduced between two output ports to ensure the high efficiency of signal transmission. Consequently, an FPD with a center frequency of 35.5 GHz, a bandwidth of 1 GHz, and out-of-band suppression greater than six times the center frequency is designed, fabricated, and measured. Both theory and experiment have proved the effectiveness of the above method, and the simulation results are in good agreement with the measured results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dosimetry is a crucial activity in irradiation campaigns to qualify electronics and materials to operate in radiation environments. In addition, it also provides means of monitoring radiation levels in accelerator environments to prevent radiation damage to the machines and improve system lifetime. Therefore, this work provides the characterization of radio-photo-luminescence (RPL) glass dosimeters as a high-level radiation monitor to be used in the mixed radiation fields observed in CERN’s accelerator environment as well as in irradiation campaigns for the qualification of electronic components and materials. Here, two methods to improve the measured dose are presented, one for the correction due to the fading of the RPL dosimeters (RPLDs), where an improvement of over 40% of the measured to the expected dose could be achieved, and one method that corrects the measured dose in mixed-particle fields to dose in water or air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We performed TRIUMF in situ measurements of the levels and kinetics of radiation-induced attenuation (RIA) caused by protons in different bulk optical glasses. Two SCHOTT radiation-hardened glasses (doped with Cerium) and six standard optical glasses (without Cerium) have been characterized. We compared the proton RIA kinetics with those resulting from in situ X-ray irradiations performed at dose and dose rate equivalent to the proton testing ones. The RIA spectra and kinetics are quite comparable in both cases, showing that X-rays can efficiently be used to estimate the RIA caused by protons. To better discuss the differences, we performed Monte Carlo calculations with GEANT4 of the energy deposition coefficient for each glass, according to its composition, and for the different beams. We complete our experimental characterization by comparing our data with those measured by the European Space Agency on the same glasses after $\gamma $ -irradiation. Protons, X-rays and $\gamma $ -rays cause RIA with very close spectral dependences, producing the same defects at similar concentration levels. We also demonstrated that the optimized setup for the in situ RIA characterization of bulk materials is very suitable for measurements under collimated particles beam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glass is very common in the real world. Influenced by the uncertainty about the glass region and the varying complex scenes behind the glass, the existence of glass poses severe challenges to many computer vision tasks, making glass segmentation as an important computer vision task. Glass does not have its own visual appearances but only transmit/reflect the appearances of its surroundings, making it fundamentally different from other common objects. To address such a challenging task, existing methods typically explore and combine useful cues from different levels of features in the deep network. As there exists a characteristic gap between level-different features, i.e., deep layer features embed more high-level semantics and are better at locating the target objects while shallow layer features have larger spatial sizes and keep richer and more detailed low-level information, fusing these features naively thus would lead to a sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we approach the effective features fusion towards accurate glass segmentation in two steps. First, we attempt to bridge the characteristic gap between different levels of features by developing a Discriminability Enhancement (DE) module which enables level-specific features to be a more discriminative representation, alleviating the features incompatibility for fusion. Second, we design a Focus-and-Exploration Based Fusion (FEBF) module to richly excavate useful information in the fusion process by highlighting the common and exploring the difference between level-different features. Combining these two steps, we construct a Progressive Glass Segmentation Network (PGSNet) which uses multiple DE and FEBF modules to progressively aggregate features from high-level to low-level, implementing a coarse-to-fine glass segmentation. In addition, we build the first home-scene-oriented glass segmentation dataset for advancing household robot applications and in-depth research on this topic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms 26 cutting-edge models on three challenging datasets under four standard metrics. The code and dataset will be made publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medically oriented Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been proposed as a promising approach addressed to individuals suffering from severe paralysis. Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) in particular have been proven successful in many different applications, achieving high information throughput with short or even no training. However, efficient electric wheelchair navigation combining high accuracy and comfort is still not demonstrated. In this paper, we propose the use of an SSVEP-based universal control system featuring augmented reality (AR) glasses in an attempt to increase ease of use and patient acceptability without making compromises on BCI performance. The system received positive user-feedback, reaching a mean accuracy of 90%. Merits and pitfalls of the system proposed are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidently, any alternation in the concentration of the essential DNA elements, adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T), leads to several deformities in the physiological process causing various disorders. So, to realize a simple and precise technique for simultaneous determination of the DNA elements continue to remain a challenge. Microfluidic devices offer numerous advantage, such as low volume consumption, rapid response, highly sensitive and accurate real time analysis, for point of care testing (POCT). Herein, a microfluidic electrochemical device has been developed with three electrodes fabricated using a carbon-thread microelectrode (CTME) for DNA elemental detection. CTME, functionalized with graphitize mesoporous carbon (GMC), worked as a working electrode, bare CTME functioned as an auxiliary electrode while CTME coated with Ag/AgCl ink performed as a reference electrode. The developed device was used for evaluating individual DNA elemental base pairs simultaneously using various electrochemical techniques. The anodic peak current obtained for the DNA bases were 0.56 ± 0.04 V (G), 0.92 ± 0.02 V (A), 1.09 ± 0.05 V (T) and 1.24 ± 0.04 V (C) in a potential window of 0.2 V to 1.5 V. The device was corroborated for simultaneous sensing, and detection limits were found to be $36.73 ~\mu \text{M}$ (G), $20 ~\mu \text{M}$ (A), $22 ~\mu \text{M}$ (T) and $19.78 ~\mu \text{M}$ (C) in the linear range of $50 ~\mu \text{M}$ – $500 ~\mu \text{M}$. Finally, the device was successfully used for instantaneous determination of DNA bases in the human blood serum sample. Overall, this work demonstrates the use of a simple microfluidic device with CTMEs for electrochemical determination of DNA bases amenable for POCT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced functionally graded bioactive glass scaffolds have been fabricated using additive manufacturing technique. Sol-gel method was used for the synthesis of the bioactive glass. For ink preparation, Pluronic F-127 was used as an ink carrier. The CNT-reinforced scaffolds were coated with the polymer polycaprolactone (PCL) using dip-coating method to improve their properties further by sealing the micro-cracks. The CNT- reinforcement and polymer coating resulted in an improvement in the compressive strength of the additively manufactured scaffolds by 98% in comparison to pure bioactive glass scaffolds. Further, the morphological analysis revealed interconnected pores and their size appropriate for osteogenesis and angiogenesis. Evaluation of the in vitro bioactivity of the scaffolds after immersion in simulated body fluid (SBF) confirmed the formation of hydroxyapatite (HA). Further, the cellular studies showed good cell viability and initiation of osteogensis. These results demonstrate the potential of these scaffolds for bone tissue engineering applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro fabrication of tapered glass capillaries with on-demand geometry is one of the essential issues to make specific devices for electrophysiological experiments, microfluidics, pharmaceutics. Capitalizing on chemical etching and mechanical polishing, we have developed a reliable microfabrication method to make tapered glass capillaries with on-demand size. The tip ending diameter reaches from several microns to hundreds of microns within one hour fabrication time, which can meet the requirement for microfabrication of microfluidic devices. To demonstrate the performance of the hybrid microfabrication method, the effect of etching time, and etchant concentrations are proposed. Furthermore, the surface quality of fabricated device is demonstrated to show the advantages of our microfabrication method. Then two typical applications such as the soft manipulation of zebrafish embryo and the production of emulsion droplets are performed. This hybrid microfabrication method of chemical etching combined with mechanical polishing shows great advantages to obtain on-demand size of tapered glass capillaries, and these features make it highly promising for microfabrication of glass capillary devices. [2021-0229] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toughened glass insulators installed in overhead lines play a key role in maintaining the reliability and safety of power systems. The singular properties of toughened glass make this material particularly suitable for this application on account of its excellent dielectric properties, high mechanical strength and easiness of inspection. If the glass was damaged, it would shatter completely leaving the remaining part of the insulator, called “stub”, still providing mechanical connection and being easily detectable from the ground by a visual inspection. In this paper, the mechanical reliability of toughened glass insulators is investigated through the analyses of experimental data obtained from laboratory tests. First, the mechanical strength of the toughened glass in insulators and the relationship between its failing load and the geometry of the insulator are investigated by means of a novel analytical approach. Afterwards, the risk of mechanical failure of glass insulators and stubs, with the shell broken off, is analysed. The results show the mechanical reliability of glass insulators for different string configurations and for large and complex systems deployed in 220 kV and 400 kV transmission lines. Finally, the effect of the shattering rate on the reliability is studied under the most adverse conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]