This paper first presents a comprehensive comparison of the established radio telescope near Arecibo, Puerto Rico vs. the designed Chinese Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) that includes a six-degrees-of-freedom (dof) underconstrained cable-suspended robot to position and orient its focus cabin. Then a straight-line cable model is presented for the FAST robot kinematics and...

Aeolian vibration in bare and iced cable was simulated using the theory of cable vibration. High frequency vibration creates stresses in the cable and consequently in the ice covering that cable, which may result in ice failure and eventually ice shedding. These stresses were estimated in this study. Displacement of the cable during vibration was determined; furthermore, instantaneous wind load...

Cable System Management requires an assessment of the health of the cable systems. It is increasingly common for the assessment of aged cable systems to be made through the application of diagnostics measurements. Papers and standards have established benchmarks for diagnostic measurements that help utility engineers to reach a condition assessment. Generally, extremes of healthy and non-health...

Structures consisting of cables and membranes have been of interest to engineers due to their higher ratio of strength to weight and lower cost compared to other structures. One of the challenges in such structures is presence of holes in membranes, which leads to non-uniform stress and strain distributions, even under uniform far-field deformations. One of the approaches suggested for controll...

In order to detect distributed ground surface deformation, an elastic helical structure Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) sensing cable is shown in this paper. This special sensing cable consists of three parts: a silicone rubber rope in the center; a couple of parallel wires coiling around the rope; a silicone rubber pipe covering the sensing cable. By analyzing the relationship between the impe...

Welding is a major industrial process used for joining metals. Occupational exposure to welding fumes is a serious occupational health problem all over the world. The degree of risk to welder's health from fumes depends on composition, concentration, and the length of exposure. The aim of this study was to investigate workers' welding fume exposure levels in some industries in Jeddah, Saudi Ara...

The Virtual Factory is a job shop scheduling tool that was developed at NC State. It has been found to provide nearoptimal solutions to industrial-sized problems in seconds. Recently, the Virtual Factory was expanded to include interfactory transportation operations which enabled the detailed scheduling of entire multi-factory manufacturing supply chains. Separately, a rolling horizon procedure...

Time domain reflectometry (TDR) technology is an ideal cable length measurement method. The traveling wave propagation velocity is the key to the measuring accuracy of the TDR cable length measurement system. The cable crimp levels effect on traveling wave propagation velocity is analyzed theoretically, and the corresponding experiment is done. The experimental results are match to the theoreti...

This paper presents a reconfigurable cable parallel robot, which spatial topology can be reconfigured through managing the branch numbers and the hoisting points of the end-effector. An experimental prototype of the reconfigurable cable parallel robot is designed and developed. A typical configuration of the reconfigurable cable parallel robot is analyzed as a case study. The finite element ana...

F or a shielded cable, an approximate relationship valid from few kHz up to the first cable resonance can be derived from its Transfer Impedance (Zt ) allowing to predict the cable shielding factor. This Cable Shielding factor, as a figure of merit, is often preferred by engineers dealing with product specifications and early design. Being not necessarily EMC specialists, they can relate it dir...