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Additive manufacturing (AM) of metals is stimulating the tool making industry. Moreover, besides the production of lost forms, AM processes are now being used to directly generate tools, molds or parts, leading to massive time savings. In the case of material development for AM, the challenge is to operate with carbon-containing iron-based materials distinguished by high strength and hardness, as well as high corrosion resistance and thermal conductivity. Often, those materials are susceptible to crack formation during processing. Using Electron Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-EB), the challenge of crack formation can be overcome by using high process temperatures in the range 800–900 °C. In this paper, results on the processing of a cold-working tool steel (X65MoCrWV3-2) and a hot-working steel (X37CrMoV5-1) will be presented. These include the processing window, processing strategies to minimize the density of cracks and properties with respect to microstructure and hardness.

Screening programs may be useful to reduce the rate of undetected glaucoma. Compass (CMP, CenterVue, Padova, Italy) Standard Suprathreshold strategy (SST) analyses the visual function at 52 retinal locations. A new Quick Suprathreshold strategy (QST) reduces the number of tested locations to 24. With both tests, the CMP also provides an image of the central retina and a detail of the optic nerve head. The aim of this paper is to measure the performances of SST and QST compared with clinical diagnosis. 63 consecutive healthy subjects and 60 consecutive patients with perimetric defects from glaucoma in both eyes were recruited. They received one test per eye (SST or QST in randomized order), results were classified into normal, suspect and abnormal according to a global index provided in the report and called SupraThreshold Response (STR). Agreement between clinical diagnosis and test output were calculated, and test time was also measured. The agreement with the clinical diagnosis was 95.7% for SST and 95.1% for QST. When two suspect tests were excluded, agreement for QST increased to 96.7%. Test duration was 164 ± 82 s for SST and 71 ± 41 s for QST (p &lt, 0.0001). Such a difference was similar in both glaucoma patients (respectively 231 ± 65 s vs 105 ± 33 s, p&nbsp, &lt, 0.0001) and normal subjects (98 ± 17 and 39 ± 9 s, p &lt, 0.0001). In conclusion, SST and QST showed similar, high agreement with clinical judgement. Morphological analysis is potentially helpful in further improving the clinical usefulness of suprathreshold tests. QST is characterized by a strong time saving compared with SST.

Traditionally, beers are made with gluten-containing cereals. It is crucial to have rapid analytical methodologies that allow gluten content control of the beers for celiac consumers. We assess the content of gluten in 65 conventional and 41 gluten-free labeled beers commercialized in Europe and compare the results in a subgroup of 71 beers with three ELISA kits. This research allows gathering information on the potential complementary utility of NIR analysis applied to gluten analysis of gluten-free beers in terms of time saving. Results obtained with the ELISA technique identified competitive R5 to be the most sensitive in detecting the prolamins, by eliciting a higher number of beers containing gluten above 20 mg/kg. The gluten content in conventional beers tested increased with the presence of wheat as raw material and with the use of ale-type yeasts. By using competitive R5, 3 out of the 41 gluten-free labeled beers appeared to contain gluten above 20 mg/kg, and conversely, 15 out of 65 of the conventional beers showed a gluten content below this threshold. According to our approaches, NIR did not achieve a suitable correlation with ELISA results, neither for gluten quantification nor for discrimination, and therefore, it cannot be proposed as a complementary technique. This research was funded by the Associació SMAP—Celíacs Catalunya. The GLUTEN3S research group is supported by a grant (GIU 18/78) from the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU.

In an era of smart cities and digitalisation, there has been a noticeable increase in the development and application of planning support systems (PSS). However, a significant challenge in the broader adoption of these PSS can be attributed to the user experience, which includes the efforts required in pre-processing data. It has been observed that typically 80% of the PSS usage time goes into pre-processing, cleaning, and loading data&mdash, a significant barrier for new users. This research focuses on improving user experience by developing and evaluating a new workflow tool called EasyUAZ. This workflow tool directly supports the iterative data preparation needs of scenario planning with the Online WhatIf?&mdash, a widely used PSS to develop land-use suitability, demand and land-allocation scenarios. A comparative evaluation has been conducted to quantify the time taken for data preparation with ArcGIS, QGIS, and the EasyUAZ. The study found that EasyUAZ offers a time saving of 30%&ndash, 35% when compared with other options.

3D city models are a useful tool to analyze the solar potential of neighborhoods and cities. These models are built from buildings footprints and elevation measurements. Footprints are widely available, but elevation datasets remain expensive and time-consuming to acquire. Our hypothesis is that the GIS cadastral data can be used to build a 3D model automatically, so that generating complete cities 3D models can be done in a short time with already available data. We propose a method for the automatic construction of 3D models of cities and neighborhoods from 2D cadastral data and study their usefulness for solar analysis by comparing the results with those from a hand-built model. The results show that the accuracy in evaluating solar access on pedestrian areas and solar potential on rooftops with the automatic method is close to that from the hand-built model with slight differences of 3.4% and 2.2%, respectively. On the other hand, time saving with the automatic models is significant. A neighborhood of 400,000 m2 can be built up in 30 min, 50 times faster than by hand, and an entire city of 967 km2 can be built in 8.5 h. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Do private transport services complement or compete against public transit? As transit agencies scramble to adjust to the new transport landscape of mobility services, this has become an important question. This study focuses on New York&rsquo, s commuter vans (also known as &ldquo, dollar vans&rdquo, ), private vans that have operated alongside public transit for decades. We use original survey and observational data collected in the summer of 2016 to document basic ridership characteristics and to provide insight into whether the commuter vans complement or compete against city buses. Commuter van ridership in Eastern Queens is high, it is roughly equivalent to city bus ridership on parallel routes at approximately 55,000 per day. Further, more than 60% of van riders surveyed would have had a free trip on a city bus, through either a transit pass or transfer. Time savings was an important motivation for these riders to pay extra for the vans, the vans are faster than city buses, and van wait times are shorter. These results suggest that New York&rsquo, s commuter vans complement public transit by serving as a feeder system. This conclusion, however, is highly context-dependent. As private transport services proliferate, continued research is needed to ascertain their relationships with public transit.

A Differential Evolution (DE) is introduced to predict the parameters of the soil water retention curve (SWRC) and it is configured for reliability and efficiency with the Unsaturated Soil Hydraulic Property Database (UNSODA). The main investigated dataset is 235 samples from lab_drying_h-t table and the testing shows that the data resource is reliable and steady. Some specific statistical computations are designed to investigate the convergence speed and the fitness precision of DE, different measurements of hydraulic data, and parametric characteristics of textural groups. The statistical results on UNSODA show that DE has higher performance in parameter fitness and time saving than some previous optimization methods and the statistical values of soil water retention parameters (SWRP) can be directly applied in the agricultural research and practice.

Large vertical metal tanks are the primary vessels for the storage and turnover of crude oil, and the accuracy of their capacity calibrations are of great significance. The optical reference line method (ORLM) is used for capacity calibration and is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and hazardous, because of the elevated work. This paper aims to present a robot to overcome the problems above. We propose a tracked wall-climbing robot (TWCR) with permanent magnetic adhesion tracks, a collapsible scale, and an optional shovel-like rust remover that enable the TWCR to move stably on tank surfaces and perform the ORLM. Two sets of field tests (internal ORLM and external ORLM) indicate that capacity calibration by the TWCR is time saving, convenient, and safe, in addition to being accurate and reliable.

This research aims to ascertain the determinants of effective Lean Manufacturing (LM). In this research, Covariance-based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM) analysis will be used in order to analyze the determinants. Through CB-SEM analysis, the significant key determinants can be determined and the direct relationships among determinants can be analyzed. Thus, the findings of this research can act as guidelines for achievement of LM effectiveness, not only providing necessary steps for successful implementation of lean, but also helping lean companies to achieve higher level of lean cost and time savings.