Aircraft fuel tank leakage is a very common maintenance problem. A continuum robot is designed for troubleshooting of leaks for fuel tank which has strong constraints and is also explosive. The biomimetic robot with several flexible sections applies actuation redundancy through pulling its four independent driving cables to realize bending motion of two degrees of freedom (DOF). The forward kin...

This paper studies power management in a grid-tied hybrid energy system consisting of photovoltaic array, wind turbine, fuel cell, electrolyzer, hydrogen storage tank and a combinational heating system to supply the thermal and electrical demand of a building. Moreover, the hybrid system is capable of exchanging power with local grid. Thus, variable daily buying and selling tariffs are also tak...

The inspection of a storage tank floor is a time consuming and expensive procedure, mainly due to necessity to empty and to clean the tank before an inspection. For this purpose a long range ultrasonic technique based on Lamb waves may be applied. Such an approach is used for inspection of pipes and can cover the distances up 100m. However the storage tanks are much more complicated structures ...

a r t i c l e i n f o The fixed-route vehicle-refueling problem (FRVRP) is a mathematical problem widely used in the U.S. trucking industry. The FRVRP seeks the best refueling policy (sequence of fuel stations to use, along with the fueling quantity at each station) for a given (fixed) origin–destination route that minimizes a vehicle's refueling cost. While effective, the current FRVRP methods...