To realize smart grids, there is a need for flexible supply and demand of electricity. Conventional heating systems in the Netherlands are based on gas, but new innovative systems, such as heat pumps and micro-CHPs, consume or produce electricity. If the demand for heat and the production/consumption of electricity is decoupled by using a hot water buffer, these heating systems provide the flex...

Micromanipulation and micro-assembly represent a field of technology that is gaining more and more importance. Performing microoperations manually with special tools like tweezers is very time intensive and exhausting. The precision of the human hand is also very limited. Therefore, it is of great interest to automate such processes. At the University of Karlsruhe, a microrobot with piezoelectr...

Model-based design constructs physical systems in two stages. First, a ea~al friction network (CRN) of quantities that entails the desired behavior is constructed from a domain model. Second, a physical system is designed by assembling components such that all the causal relations specified by the CRN are imposed. The Compositional Model-based Design method, CMD, simplifies the design of comple...

This document introduces a novel access control architecture for publicly accessible wireless overlay networks. The architecture is designed to address the problems of ubiquitous Internet service provisioning within the city of Lancaster. The proposed access control mechanism is based on the concepts of secure user authentication, packet marking, and network-level packet filtering. The novelty ...

Model-based design constructs physical systems in two stages. First, a causal relation network (CRN) of quantities that entails the desired behavior is constructed from a domain model. Second, a physical system is designed by assembling components such that all the causal relations specified by the CRN are imposed. The Compositional Model-based Design method, CMD, simplifies the design of compl...

Station-keeping and reorientation control of a cluster of fully-actuated low-thrust micro-satellites is considered in this paper. We propose a very general optimization based control methodology to solve constrained trajectory generation problems for stationkeeping and reorientation. By taking advantage of the fully-actuated structure of the micro-satellite, it is possible to compute the contro...

Besides assembling, processes like drilling, cutting and pasting are required in various operations to human bodies or micro-machines. Force control is essential to those dexterous operations even in the micro world. For this purpose, a prototype micro operation hand with two fingers constrained to parallel motion linkages was developed. It uses magnetic suspension technology so that fine force...

UltraSTEEL material has been reported to have higher yield and ultimate strengths than plain mild steel under quasi-static loads. This project aims to study the energy absorption characteristics of UltraSTEEL thin-walled structures when subjected to axial impact loads. The numerical modelling starts from duplicating the UltraSTEEL dimpling process and defining the resultant material properties ...

A 43-year-old female noticed hematochezia and lower-right abdominal pain during menstruation. Her family doctor detected a mass by computed tomography at the ileocecum. She was referred to our hospital and colonoscopy was performed. We observed extrinsic pressure resulting in mucosal change at the ileocecum. We also observed a submucosal tumor-like lesion at the rectosigmoid. We performed biops...