Technology & Engineering - General

This Special Issue covers symmetry and asymmetry phenomena occurring in real-life problems. We invited authors to submit their theoretical or experimental research presenting engineering and economic problem solution models dealing with the symmetry or asymmetry of different types of information. The issue gained interest...

A topic of utmost importance in civil engineering is finding optimal solutions throughout the life cycle of buildings and infrastructural objects, including their design, manufacturing, use, and maintenance. Operational research, management science, and optimization methods provide a consistent and applicable groundwork for engineering decision-making....

Agriculture requires technical solutions for increasing production while lessening environmental impact by reducing the application of agro-chemicals and increasing the use of environmentally friendly management practices. A benefit of this is the reduction of production costs. Sensor technologies produce tools to achieve the abovementioned...

The Special Issue on Advances in Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) explores four important topics of research in the framework of WDNs, namely simulation and optimization modelling, topology and partitioning, water quality, and service effectiveness. With regard to the first topic, the following aspects are...

This issue of Proceedings gathers papers presented at XOVETIC2018 (A Coruña, Spain, 27-28 September 2018), a conference with the main goal of bringing together young researchers working in big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, HPC (high-performance computing), cybersecurity, bioinformatics, natural language processing, 5G,...

Micro-bioreactors offer unique opportunities to study biological systems under fluidic conditions. The concept of micro-bioreactors suggests that biological reaction conditions at a large scale can be scaled down to micro-volumes while maintaining performance and functionality. Models and operation principles can be simulated at a...

Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are considered a key enabling technology for the design and implementation of photonic circuits, subsystems, and networks. Owing to the attractive features of low power consumption, compactness, broad gain bandwidth and ability for integration with affordable cost, SOAs enjoy continuous...

The 2017 International Conference on Micro/Nanomachines (http: //www.icmnm.org/) was held in Wuhan, China, 25-28 August, 2017. Micro/nanomotors (MNMs), which are defined as micro/nanodevices capable of converting energy into autonomous motion, can be used to pick up, transport, and release various cargoes within a liquid...

A comprehensive overview of sensors technology is provided in specific leading areas. Researchers, engineers and professionals on industries can find advanced technologies, devices, insights and solutions for a broad range of applications, including: - Piezoelectric power transducers - Multisensory for veins detection for robotic-based...

The information fusion technique can integrate a large amount of data and knowledge representing the same real-world object and obtain a consistent, accurate and useful representation of that object. The data may be independent or redundant, and can be obtained by different sensors at...

Solid-state lasers offer unique qualities in terms of flexibility, robustness, efficiency, and wavelength diversity. For these reasons, they are nowadays irreplaceable tools in many scientific and industrial applications. The engineering of new materials, the advances in photonics technologies, and the increasing demand for speed,...

Heat exchange processes in steady flows have been studied extensively over the last two hundred years, and are now a part of undergraduate syllabi in most engineering courses. However, heat transfer processes in oscillatory flow conditions are still not very well understood. Their importance...

The depletion of fossil fuels, the increase of energy demands, and the concerns over climate change are the major driving forces for the development of renewable energy, such as solar energy and wind power. However, the intermittency of renewable energy has hindered the deployment...

Ultrafine-grained metallic materials produced by severe plastic deformation methods are at the cutting edge of modern materials science. UFG-metals exhibit outstanding properties which make them very interesting for structural or functional engineering applications. Fifteen articles in this special issue address a broad variety of...

The discovery of monolayer graphene led to a Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded in 2010. This has stimulated further research on a wide variety of two-dimensional (2D) layered materials. The coupling of metallic graphene, semiconducting 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) and black phosphorus...

With global urbanization rapidly rising and the increasing need of high-quality built environments, the requirement of achieving improved sound quality, both for outdoor and indoor environments, has received a lot of attention. This Special Issue collection reflects the current state of the art, with...

In this Special Issue, readers will find selected works pertaining to the integration and intensification methods that are currently adopted for carbon capture, stemming from the generation of waste gasses. Novel optimization methods achieved through modeling as well as numerical studies are also reported...

Tissue engineering emerged back in the 1990s as a new concept to overcome the problem of tissue and organ failure. Over recent decades, there has been incredible progress towards the regeneration of tissues such as bone, heart valves, cartilage, cornea, and retina. In terms...

The idea of an intelligent machine has fascinated humans for centuries. Intelligence can be defined as the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, or the aptitude for grasping truths, relationships, facts, or meanings. Any of these perspectives requires the capacity to acquire data from the...

To date, many challenges have been faced in the production of mineral raw materials to provide necessary supplies in almost any production chain. In addition to the traditional search for more efficient processes, cleaner and safer operations, and higher levels of social acceptance, there...

As a biocompatible semiconductor composed of abundant elements, ZnO, in the form of nanowires, exhibits remarkable properties, mainly originating from its wurtzite structure and correlated with its high aspect ratio at nanoscale dimensions. ZnO nanowires have thus received increasing interest in the community and...

Energy and power are playing an increasingly pivotal role in our modern life and are transforming the way we utilize energy and the way we live. This special issue brought together the latest innovations and knowledge in energy and power engineering such as new...

The Internet's great success has been essentially based on the simplicity and versatility of its TCP/IP architecture, as it imposes almost no restrictions on either the underlying network technology or the data being transmitted. In essence, applications built on top of TCP/IP get a...

Explore "About an Important Phenomenon-Water Hammer", a groundbreaking Special Issue featuring insights from leading experts. When pressurized pipe flow is disrupted, water hammer-a once overlooked phenomenon-creates waves of importance in engineering, driving a dangerous surge.Dedicated to modeling water hammer and experimental verification, this Special...

I am very happy to have this Special Issue of the journal Energies on the topic of Design and Control of Electrical Motor Drives published. Electrical motor drives are widely used in the industry, automation, transportation, and home appliances. Indeed, rolling mills, machine tools,...

The Special Issue "Soft Actuators and Robotics" presents a curated collection of innovative research papers that delve into the design, fabrication, and application of soft actuators and soft robotics. This issue captures the interdisciplinary nature of soft robotics, blending principles from engineering, materials science,...

The integration of information technologies with industry has marked the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution and promoted the development of industrial engineering. However, the depletion of resources and industrial waste caused by increasing amounts of industrial production pose a huge threat to nature....

This Special Issue presents computational techniques used to examine the social, spatial, and functional characteristics of buildings and cities. Focused on two renowned computational methods in architectural and urban analytics-Shape Grammar and Space Syntax-this reprint demystifies the 'grammar', 'syntax', and 'style' of space and...

This Special Issue delves into the strides made, challenges encountered, and research imperatives within the realm of Industrie 4.0 from both a scientific and practical standpoint. This publication features the voices of Industrie 4.0 pioneers Henning Kagermann and Wolfgang Wahlster, as well as leaders...

The complexity of production processes is on the rise due to evolving technology and changing lifestyles. This complexity can stem from factors within the production system or be influenced by characteristics or events external to the system. This reprint aims to conduct rigorous research...

Ultra-Precision Engineering (UPE) is a comprehensive field that concerns the design, manufacture and measurement of ultra-precision components and systems. With the progress of new solutions to UPE, the demand of advanced mechatronic systems with high-performance on freedom, stroke, resolution, accuracy and bandwidth has been...

Building decarbonization is now becoming a prerequisite for achieving the Paris Agreement objectives and many UN Sustainable Development Goals. This reprint contains a range of research articles and review articles with a foucs on energy savings, storage, and carbon emission mitigation applications in buildings...

There has been an increased interest in renewable energy sources in the last few decades. Modern power systems rely mainly on power electronic-based generation and loads, leading to the adoption of smart grids that leverage digital communication infrastructure. Smart grids have several advantages, including...

This reprint highlights novel findings of state-of-the-art computational models based on multiscale, multiphysics, data-driven, artificial intelligence, and machine learning approaches in the field of bioengineering. Ten individual contributions from renowned research groups across the world have been published in this Special Issue.Author: Sundeep SinghISBN-10:...

Harvesting machinery has the main function of cutting, picking, or digging mature crop seeds, fruits, stalks, leaves, root parts, or the whole plant and are also necessary to complete collection, threshing, cleaning, transfer, and other operations. The characteristics of harvesting machinery are as follows:...

Taking into account the increasing general concern related to the necessity of reducing CO2 emissions, a very important aspect of this topic refers to the green energy sector. In this vein, the present Special Issue is focused on the area of Offshore Renewable Energy...

Active flow control (AFC) utilizes local active perturbations to induce changes in global flow behavior that result in aero/hydrodynamic performance improvement. It has been a vibrant research area with potential applications in a wide range of engineering fields. This Special Issue is a collection...

In this reprint, the mechanical properties and material removal behaviors of brittle crystals and ceramics are evaluated using the nanoindentation and scratch tests. Some advanced processing technologies oforf brittle crystals, ceramics, and composite materials are proposed, such as precision grinding, rotary ultrasonic milling and...

Over the last few years, many smartphones have been equipped with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology, allowing people to use their own devices for positioning and location services. After the release of the Android Nougat (version 7) operating system, raw GNSS measurements (i.e.,...

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology represents a potential alternative to classical CPUs and GPUs in the post-Moore era from edge computing to data centers. FPGAs offer performance improvements when compared with traditional processing architectures due to their spatial computation capability and energy efficiency. In...

Due to the increasing importance of considering the socio-environmental issues in recent decades, most of today's critical systems should pursue sustainability-related objectives while meeting operational goals. Furthermore, sociotechnical systems working with complex operations represent dynamic complexity, relative ignorance, and intractability, which entail interactive and...

In many semi- and arid regions, water does not flow from the middle of spring to early fall, leading to the development of vegetation patches with irregular distribution on channel beds and banks. These vegetation patches influence the characteristics of flow in rivers and...

This reprint delves into the latest research and development endeavors aimed at enhancing the metallurgical, mechanical, tribological, and corrosion performance of cast irons. It contains a review and research papers that cover various topics and demonstrate overall that cast irons are still highly relevant...

In celebration of the 70th anniversary of the University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), this Special Issue presents the electrical and mechanical engineering research of the USTB, with the aim of providing timely solutions to emerging scientific and technical challenges in key power...

Fiber lasers are key components that have attracted wide attention owing to their advantages such as compact structure, high peak power, high efficiency, and excellent beam quality. To date, considerable efforts have been undertaken to improve the emission performance of optical fiber lasers, including...

Structures subjected to human activities, strong wind, heavy machines, and adjacent traffic may experience excessive vibration, causing so-called serviceability problems. The ever-increasing living standards of a structure's occupants lead to higher demands on the structural serviceability. To prevent unpleasant structural vibration, in recent years,...

This reprint focuses on applied research for the discovery of new raw material resources, for example, raw materials that can replace animal proteins and fats, sugar and salt, gluten from bakery products etc. The use of these unconventional raw materials in manufacturing recipes is...

Today, more than ever, the world needs to be considered a finite and limited system, characterised by scarce resources and as a place where restocking is not possible in an infinite way. As such, careful resource management needs to be planned and set by...

"Advancements in Energy Technologies: Optimizing Efficiency, Control, and Sustainability" is a comprehensive collection of selected papers that highlight the latest research and innovations in the field of energy technologies. This reprint showcases cutting-edge advancements in areas such as artificial intelligence, optimization techniques, control systems,...

In modern engineering practice, more different types of concrete structures are used. Current applications in the construction of modern structures, or applications in the strengthening and reinforcement of existing structures, require the analysis of structures of different material properties and shapes exposed to different...