Design Goals Research Articles

Inverse design of promising electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction via generative models and bird swarm algorithm

Directly generating material structures with optimal properties is a long-standing goal in material design. Traditional generative models often struggle to efficiently explore the global chemical space, limiting their utility to localized space. Here, we present a framework named Material Generation with Efficient Global Chemical Space Search (MAGECS) that addresses this challenge by integrating the bird swarm algorithm and supervised graph neural networks, enabling effective navigation of generative models in the immense chemical space towards materials with target properties. Applied to the design of alloy electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction (CO2RR), MAGECS generates over 250,000 structures, achieving a 2.5-fold increase in high-activity structures (35%) compared to random generation. Five predicted alloys— CuAl, AlPd, Sn2Pd5, Sn9Pd7, and CuAlSe2 are synthesized and characterized, with two showing around 90% Faraday efficiency for CO2RR. This work highlights the potential of MAGECS to revolutionize functional material development, paving the way for fully automated, artificial intelligence-driven material design.

Variable-Length Coding with Zero and Non-Zero Privacy Leakage

A private compression design problem is studied, where an encoder observes useful data Y, wishes to compress them using variable-length code, and communicates them through an unsecured channel. Since Y are correlated with the private attribute X, the encoder uses a private compression mechanism to design an encoded message C and sends it over the channel. An adversary is assumed to have access to the output of the encoder, i.e., C, and tries to estimate X. Furthermore, it is assumed that both encoder and decoder have access to a shared secret key W. In this work, the design goal is to encode message C with the minimum possible average length that satisfies certain privacy constraints. We consider two scenarios: 1. zero privacy leakage, i.e., perfect privacy (secrecy); 2. non-zero privacy leakage, i.e., non-perfect privacy constraint. Considering the perfect privacy scenario, we first study two different privacy mechanism design problems and find upper bounds on the entropy of the optimizers by solving a linear program. We use the obtained optimizers to design C. In the two cases, we strengthen the existing bounds: 1. |X|≥|Y|; 2. The realization of (X,Y) follows a specific joint distribution. In particular, considering the second case, we use two-part construction coding to achieve the upper bounds. Furthermore, in a numerical example, we study the obtained bounds and show that they can improve existing results. Finally, we strengthen the obtained bounds using the minimum entropy coupling concept and a greedy entropy-based algorithm. Considering the non-perfect privacy scenario, we find upper and lower bounds on the average length of the encoded message using different privacy metrics and study them in special cases. For achievability, we use two-part construction coding and extended versions of the functional representation lemma. Lastly, in an example, we show that the bounds can be asymptotically tight.

PSR-GAN: a product concept sketch rendering method based on generative adversarial network and colour tags

Looking for the fit of colour and form is an important goal of product design, but conceptual visualisation based on hand-drawn sketches, a necessary way in the early stage, consumes a lot of designers’ time and energy, resulting in missing fleeting design inspirations and clues. We propose a product concept sketch rendering method based on generative adversarial network and colour tags to assist designers in quickly capturing the harmony and balance between product colour and form, and improving design efficiency. This method encodes colour semantic information as the condition and combines ACGAN to achieve controllable rendering of line sketches based on specified colour tags. The generator is a hybrid of CNN and Transformer, further guided to optimise by combining pixel-wise loss and perceptual loss, while the discriminator adopts a convolution-based spatial-channel attention structure. Results show that PSR-GAN outperforms existing methods in terms of generation quality, and it also demonstrates excellent rendering results compared to professional manuscripts. Designers can use this method not only to obtain real-time comprehensive conceptual feedback but also to effectively narrow the colour search space for product details, accelerating the convergence of their design ideas during the sketch phase.

Design and Analysis of Combined Vibration Absorbers for Ship Propulsion Shaft Systems

The vibration of a ship’s propulsion shaft system directly affects the ship’s lifespan, and many studies have designed vibration absorbers only for one of the natural frequencies of a ship’s propulsion shaft system without considering the influence of multiple low-order resonance frequencies. In this paper, a vibration absorber combined with a magnetorheological elastomer vibration absorber and a rubber vibration absorber in series is designed, and it can cover two torsional natural frequency band ranges to achieve better vibration reduction performances in multiple different torsional natural frequencies. The torsional natural frequency of the propulsion shafting of a 45 m fishing vessel is determined based on a multiple-degrees-of-freedom equivalent discretization model. Two natural frequencies, 22.4 Hz and 131.4 Hz, of a ship propulsion shaft system are selected as the design goal parameters of the combined vibration absorber. The magnetic field is simulated to ensure that the magnetic field generated by an energized coil can meet requirements. Then, a dynamic simulation of the ship propulsion shaft system with a combined vibration absorber is conducted via co-simulation. Afterward, the device is installed on the intermediate shaft of the ship propulsion shaft system for simulation, and the vibration reduction effect of the device is analyzed at different frequencies by controlling the current. When the device is controlled to operate at the optimal frequency point, the results show that the angular acceleration vibration amplitude reduction around the first and third torsional natural frequencies of the propulsion shaft system reaches 90% and 18%, respectively. This study provides new ideas for the intelligent and controllable vibration damping of ship propulsion shaft systems, especially for the development trend of intelligent ship equipment under complex working conditions.

Analytical and numerical investigations of metal square origami foam-filled tube under axial compression

It is widely known that thin-walled structures are expected for numerous engineering devices, due to lightweight, high specific strength, and excellent energy absorption capacity. Thus, the new high-efficiency energy absorbing (EA) device is the eternal pursuit goal of designers. A novel high-efficiency energy-absorbing device of the metal square origami foam-filled tube (MSOFT) under axial compression is designed in this article, and axial crushing of the MSOFT is investigated analytically and numerically. An analytical model for axial crushing of MSOFT is established based on the conservation of energy and the hyper-folded unit theory, considering the energy absorbed by the deformation of metal origami tube, foam compression, and the interaction between foam and origami tube. Then, the finite element (FE) simulation of MSOFTs under axial compression are conducted by Abaqus/Explicit software, and found that theoretical results are in good consistency with the FE results. Then, the influences of yield strength, wall thickness, height and cross-section width of the tube, and foam strength of MSOFT under axial compression are discussed, and found that the force and energy increases when the above parameters increase. Finally, the mean crushing force (MCF) and the crushing force efficiency (CFE) among MSOFT, origami tube and square tube are compared. Compare with the origami tube and square tube, the MCF of MSOFT increases by 40.8–106.9% and 12.1–49.8%, and the CFE of MSOFT increases by 101.2–266.3% and 1.1–12.4%. It is indicated that for a wide range of geometric and material parameters the MSOFT exhibits predictable and stable collapse behavior.

Phenomenological Modeling of Antibody Response from Vaccine Strain Composition.

The elicitation of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) is a major goal of vaccine design for highly mutable pathogens, such as influenza, HIV, and coronavirus. Although many rational vaccine design strategies for eliciting bnAbs have been devised, their efficacies need to be evaluated in preclinical animal models and in clinical trials. To improve outcomes for such vaccines, it would be useful to develop methods that can predict vaccine efficacies against arbitrary pathogen variants. As a step in this direction, here, we describe a simple biologically motivated model of antibody reactivity elicited by nanoparticle-based vaccines using only antigen amino acid sequences, parametrized with a small sample of experimental antibody binding data from influenza or SARS-CoV-2 nanoparticle vaccinations. Results: The model is able to recapitulate the experimental data to within experimental uncertainty, is relatively insensitive to the choice of the parametrization/training set, and provides qualitative predictions about the antigenic epitopes exploited by the vaccine, which are testable by experiment. For the mosaic nanoparticle vaccines considered here, model results suggest indirectly that the sera obtained from vaccinated mice contain bnAbs, rather than simply different strain-specific Abs. Although the present model was motivated by nanoparticle vaccines, we also apply it to a mutlivalent mRNA flu vaccination study, and demonstrate good recapitulation of experimental results. This suggests that the model formalism is, in principle, sufficiently flexible to accommodate different vaccination strategies. Finally, we show how the model could be used to rank the efficacies of vaccines with different antigen compositions. Conclusions: Overall, this study suggests that simple models of vaccine efficacy parametrized with modest amounts of experimental data could be used to compare the effectiveness of designed vaccines.

Chinese herbal medicine recognition network based on knowledge distillation and cross-attention

In order to reduce the number of parameters in the Chinese herbal medicine recognition model while maintaining accuracy, this paper takes 20 classes of Chinese herbs as the research object and proposes a recognition network based on knowledge distillation and cross-attention – ShuffleCANet (ShuffleNet and Cross-Attention). Firstly, transfer learning was used for experiments on 20 classic networks, and DenseNet and RegNet were selected as dual teacher models. Then, considering the parameter count and recognition accuracy, ShuffleNet was determined as the student model, and a new cross-attention mechanism was proposed. This cross-attention model replaces Conv5 in ShuffleNet to achieve the goal of lightweight design while maintaining accuracy. Finally, experiments on the public dataset NB-TCM-CHM showed that the accuracy (ACC) and F1_score of the proposed ShuffleCANet model reached 98.8%, with only 128.66M model parameters. Compared with the baseline model ShuffleNet, the parameters are reduced by nearly 50%, but the accuracy is improved by about 1.3%, proving this method’s effectiveness.

Exploring Engagement Opportunities for Autistic Children: Using AAC as a Controller in a Wizard-of-Oz Coloring Game

Autistic children face significant challenges in vocal communication and social interaction, often leading to social isolation. There is evidence that Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) offers support to mitigate these challenges, enabling them to communicate with non-vocal means through forms of AAC, such as speech-generation devices (SGDs). However, the adoption and use of SGDs are hindered by several factors, including the large amount of practice required to learn to use SGDs and the limited options for highly engaging social learning contexts. Our study introduces the novel approach of using SGDs as game controller for digital and interactive games. With three design goals guiding our work, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz formative case study with five participants aged 3-5 years, who were learning to use their SGD. We simulated a digital coloring game, integrating the speech-generated output of the participant's SGD to function as the game's controller. From this case study, we observed that all participants engaged with the game using their SGD for at least one turn, and two participants also engaged in emerging joint attention responses with the game and game's facilitator. This paper discusses these findings and contributes directions for future research, with suggestions for the design of future SGD-controlled games and exploration of social connection and collaboration between autistic children who use AAC and their caregivers, siblings, and peers.

A New Age of SAR: How Can Commercial Smallsat Constellations Contribute to NASA's Surface Deformation and Change Mission?

AbstractIn response to the 2017 Decadal Survey, NASA conducted a five‐year study on the Surface Deformation and Change (SDC) designated observable to study potential mission concepts. As part of the SDC mission study, the Commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (ComSAR) subgroup was tasked with evaluating the current landscape of the SAR and interferometric SAR (InSAR) industry to assess whether NASA could leverage commercial smallsat products to meet the needs of the SDC science mission. The assessment found that although the commercial SAR industry is growing rapidly, off‐the‐shelf products can currently only make a small—albeit distinct—contribution to SDC mission goals. This gap is due to different design goals between current commercial systems (which prioritize targeted high‐resolution, non‐interferometric observations at short wavelengths with a daily or faster revisit) and a future SDC architecture (which focuses on broad, moderate‐resolution, and interferometric observations at long wavelengths). Even by 2030, planned commercial constellations are expected to only cover 65% of the area needed to match NISAR coverage. Still, high‐resolution and rapid‐repeat capabilities can augment scientific findings from a future SDC mission, as demonstrated by recent contributions from commercial data to applied sciences, cryosphere, and volcanology. Future innovations on smallsat constellation concepts could further contribute to SDC science and applications. Although current constellation designs are not fully able to satisfy desired SDC science capabilities, initial positive feedback to a request for information indicates a potential future path for a customized SDC commercial architecture; more studies will be needed to determine the feasibility of these approaches.

Prompting for products: investigating design space exploration strategies for text-to-image generative models

Abstract Text-to-image models are enabling efficient design space exploration, rapidly generating images from text prompts. However, many generative AI tools are imperfect for product design applications as they are not built for the goals and requirements of product design. The unclear link between text input and image output further complicates their application. This work empirically investigates design space exploration strategies that can successfully yield product images that are feasible, novel and aesthetic – three common goals in product design. Specifically, users’ actions within the global and local editing modes, including their time spent, prompt length, mono versus multi-criteria prompts, and goal orientation of prompts, are analyzed. Key findings reveal the pivotal role of mono versus multi-criteria and goal orientation of prompts in achieving specific design goals over time and prompt length. The study recommends prioritizing the use of multi-criteria prompts for feasibility and novelty during global editing while favoring mono-criteria prompts for aesthetics during local editing. Overall, this article underscores the nuanced relationship between the AI-driven text-to-image models and their effectiveness in product design, urging designers to carefully structure prompts during different editing modes to better meet the unique demands of product design.

The Golden Goal of Entatic State Model Design: Lowering the Internal Reorganization Energy Leads to Exponential Increase in Electron Transfer Rate

The Golden Goal of Entatic State Model Design: Lowering the Internal Reorganization Energy Leads to Exponential Increase in Electron Transfer Rate

Research on Green and Low-Carbon Design of Hainan Rural Residences Based on VR Technology

In order to realize the goal of green and low-carbon design of Hainan rural residence, this paper, based on VR technology, researches and designs the Hoppe algorithm of scattered point cloud data, bidirectional reflective distribution function (BRDF) of data processing and real-time realistic rendering technology in the process of structured mesh generation, and real-time realistic rendering technology in the indoor visualization design system of residential house. Secondly, by screening the experimental scenes, the differences in the perception of the screened scenes are analyzed from the perspectives of public gender, education and profession. Finally, the application effect of VR technology in Hainan rural residential design is compared and analyzed. The results show that the ratings of males on the four indicators in the LP group are 3.08, 3.37, 3.23 and 3.49, respectively, and the ratings of females are 3, 3.68, 3.51 and 3.78, respectively.The ratings of undergraduates on each indicator are higher than those of postgraduates and above in the PP group, the DP group and the SE group. The scores of all indicators on the LP group of the professional population were lower than those of the non-professional population. The use of VR technology can allow users to produce visual, auditory, and tactile changes at the same time, but also to display static and dynamic space, and to do the interaction of the scene. Its display effect is better than other programs. The average satisfaction of the public with the 8 aspects of VR technology design residential houses is greater than 80%. Obviously, VR technology has advantages in the green and low-carbon design of Hainan rural residence.

BASICS OF DESIGNING CHEMICAL EQUIPMENT FOR ENERGY-EFFICIENT CHEMICAL PRODUCTIONS – GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND CAPABILITIES

The materials of the article consider the possibilities for studying the goals and objectives of the discipline in order to form in students the necessary knowledge about the basics of designing equipment for energy-saving chemical productions: detailed consideration of the scientific justification; analysis, general characteristics and features of equipment design; selection of types of analysis methods for solving problems using innovative methods and programs, their features; study of possible causes of equipment inconsistency with the design goal and methods for their prediction. When writing the article, the experience of teaching the discipline “Fundamentals of Designing Chemical Production Equipment” at the National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute” at the Department of Integrated Technologies, Processes and Devices in 2022-2024 was used. Complex systems for determining the components of the discipline have determined the competence and quality of the material, and the issues considered are overlooked through the prism of one's own creative perception, which makes the material especially valuable. Examples and some features of possible learning solutions are presented, which are based on experimental data on the development of mechanisms for identifying and classifying processes and their scientific justification in the form of intellectual property objects.

Public Library Interior Design with Biophilic Concept in Sleman Regency

The Sleman Regency Library is an educational facility established by the government to provide educational services and fulfill the government's responsibility to enlighten the nation. It also reflects the vision and mission of Sleman Regency, articulated through the Smart City concept, which aims to manage resources effectively and efficiently, maximize public services, and support sustainable development. However, the library in Sleman still requires design improvements, as it currently has a rigid design, with a need for better space planning, circulation, and additional facilities to meet visitor needs and enhance their comfort. The interior design is based on David K. Ballast’s 1992 design method. This public library design incorporates the Biophilic concept, which aims to enhance human well-being both physically and mentally while fostering a positive connection between people and nature. The goal of this interior design is to improve the quality of the library as an educational space, make it appealing to the community, and optimize space planning and facilities to better meet public needs.

Tolerance allocation of mechanical assemblies including thermal deformation: A machine learning – based method

Tolerance allocation is one of the prominent tools to achieve the optimal manufacturing cost and the best performance for mechanical assemblies. Variations in dimensions and geometry shape due to different working temperatures for various components within an assembly can make initially assigned tolerances ineffective. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the component’s deformation caused by thermal gradients during the tolerance design. In this paper, a new method is presented for optimal tolerance allocation of mechanical assemblies under thermal deformation. First, the system’s temperature working conditions and tolerance design goals are specified, followed by the finite element simulation of the assembly at the desired working temperature. Then, the assembly equation is determined according to the complexity of the problem by using analytical methods and some machine learning (ML) algorithms such as XGBoost. The optimal tolerance design is formulated into a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. Then, to obtain the Pareto front of optimal tolerances, the multi-objective optimization is solved by the NSGA-II algorithm. Finally, to illustrate the capability of the proposed method, two case studies are considered, and obtained results from the presented method and conventional approaches are compared.

Building epsilon near zero materials from layered uniaxial metamaterials.

Recently, there has been an explosion of activity in the fields of optics and photonics with the advent of fabrication techniques which enable the design of metamaterials which possess properties not encountered in the natural world. In this work, we are concerned with zero permittivity materials and a new scheme to design metamaterials for which all components of the dielectric tensor are approximately zero. Our approach involves the alternate layering of many, very thin, slices of two constituent metamaterials, a uniaxial layered medium and a uniaxial nanowire array. With a simple optimization strategy we demonstrate a candidate configuration which very nearly satisfies our design goal of zero permittivity.

A 2x2 Mimo Microstrip Patch Antenna Design For X-Band Applications Using Inverted Array Orientation Approach

Objective: The main goal of this research is to design and simulate a unique 2x2 multiple-input and multiple-output, (MIMO) Rectangular Microstrip Patch antenna (RMPA) using an inverted array orientation approach with keen interest in improving the radiation efficiency and performance characteristics of the X- band based antenna. Theoretical Framework: This work integrates principles from Electromagnetic theory, communication theory, and basic Microstrip antenna design concepts. The framework is built upon crucial design goals such as radiation efficiency, reliability, element orientation and compactness of the antenna elements. Method: This research adopted a design and simulation approach. All the antenna design modules and analysis were conducted using MATLAB R2023b simulator. Firstly, this work modelled and designed a unique single-element RMPA after iterations and optimisations of the antenna parameters to achieve enhanced performance. The achieved single element was used to model a 2x2 MIMO antenna with specified element spacing. The design applied an inverted element array orientation and streamlined feed trace mechanism to achieve a high gain and enhanced radiation efficiency. Results and Discussion: The unique antenna design recorded a return loss of -15.2 dB, directivity of 7.33 dB, bandwidth of 484.8 MHz, gain of 7.16 dB, VSWR of 1.41, and radiation efficiency of 96.2%. Further analysis on the designed MIMO antenna to ascertain the mutual coupling effect showed that Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC) values remained below 0.2 within the 10 GHz frequency band, representing good diversity and significantly reducing the mutual coupling effect between array elements. The Diversity Gain (DG) of 9.87 and 9.84 dB were obtained. These values are near the optimal value of 10 dB, which is diversity for MIMO applications. Research Implications: The findings show the viability of the proposed design based on the performance metrics considered when compared to the previously designed Microstrip Patch Antennas (MPA). Thus, the designed MIMO antenna is suggested for use in embedded wireless communication devices within 8-12 GHz frequency bands for X-band applications such as radar systems and WiMAX. Originality/Value: This study presents an innovative approach to improving the radiation efficiency of a designed 2x2 MIMO antenna. The work showed that enhancement of the radiation efficiency has a direct effect on the mutual coupling, which this work applied inverted orientation and streamlined feed trace method to minimise.

Modal analysis and lightweight design of key components of the anchor windlass

To improve the rationality of the mechanical design of traditional ship anchor windlass, based on modal analysis, lightweight research was conducted on key components. Taking the first-order natural frequency as the constraint condition, topological optimization design was carried out for the base, and size optimization design based on the response surface algorithm was carried out for the anchor chain wheel. On the premise of meeting the overall structural strength and stiffness requirements of the anchor windlass, its weight was reduced as much as possible. Through the finite element analysis and strength check of the optimized model, it was verified that the optimization results met the design requirements. The research shows that the weight reduction rate of the base reached 13.34 %, and the weight reduction rate of the anchor sprocket reached 10.5 %. After analysis and verification, the optimized structure can still meet the overall mechanical performance of the anchor windlass and achieve the expected design goal, which also provides an important reference for the structural optimization and lightweight research of other ship equipment.

Epihiper-A high performance computational modeling framework to support epidemic science.

This paper describes Epihiper, a state-of-the-art, high performance computational modeling framework for epidemic science. The Epihiper modeling framework supports custom disease models, and can simulate epidemics over dynamic, large-scale networks while supporting modulation of the epidemic evolution through a set of user-programmable interventions. The nodes and edges of the social-contact network have customizable sets of static and dynamic attributes which allow the user to specify intervention target sets at a very fine-grained level; these also permit the network to be updated in response to nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as school closures. The execution of interventions is governed by trigger conditions, which are Boolean expressions formed using any of Epihiper's primitives (e.g. the current time, transmissibility) and user-defined sets (e.g. people with work activities). Rich expressiveness, extensibility, and high-performance computing responsiveness were central design goals to ensure that the framework could effectively target realistic scenarios at the scale and detail required to support the large computational designs needed by state and federal public health policymakers in their efforts to plan and respond in the event of epidemics. The modeling framework has been used to support the CDC Scenario Modeling Hub for COVID-19 response, and was a part of a hybrid high-performance cloud system that was nominated as a finalist for the 2021 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for high performance computing-based COVID-19 Research.

HeritageSite AR: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Augmented Reality Exploration Game for a Chinese Heritage Site

This article explores the use of a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) exploration game to enhance immersive storytelling and enrich cultural experiences. Specifically, we present the prototype design and evaluation of HeritageSite AR, an AR exploration game for a Chinese heritage site known as the Relics of Arhat Monastery and Twin Pagoda , or Shuangta . To develop the AR game for use in heritage sites, we employed a holistic approach, beginning with a review of technical means for cultural application development. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with domain experts and administered an online survey to identify user requirements and design goals, which informed our prototype design. An evaluation study showed positive feedback regarding the impact of game design on meaningful and playful cultural heritage site experience and identified areas for potential refinements in future iterations. We discuss the implications and lessons learned for our future work, which may also interest researchers and practitioners exploring the use of AR technologies and game design in heritage site contexts.