Design methodology for an air-lubricated seal

A methodology to design an air-lubricated piston seal for pneumatic actuators is described. Such a seal permits a small air leakage through a very narrow gap between the seal lip and the counterpart; this air film both avoids contact and ensures lubrication at the seal-counterpart interface thus permitting reduced friction and wear. Subsequently the use of grease could be limited or avoided. A seal geometry equipped with a self-pressurized balancing chamber was designed to make leakage as insensitive as possible to the supply pressure and to the barrel machining tolerances. A prototype was manufactured and tests were carried ou

A new conceptual approach for systematic error correction in CNC machine tools minimizing worst case prediction error

A new artifact-based method to identify the systematic errors in multi-axis CNC machine tools minimizing the worst case prediction error is presented. The closed loop volumetric error is identified by simultaneously moving the axes of the machine tool. The physical artifact is manufactured on the machine tool and later measured on a coordinate measuring machine. The artifact consists of a set of holes in the machine tool workspace at locations that minimize the worst case prediction error for a given bounded measurement error. The number of holes to be drilled depends on the degree of the polynomials used to model the systematic error and the number of axes of the machine tool. The prediction error is also function of the number and location of the holes. The feasibility of the method is first investigated for a two-axis machine to find the best experimental setting. Finally based on the two-axis case study, we extend the results to machine tools with any number of axes. The obtained results are very promising and require only a short time to produce the artifac

High-performance device for air interlacing of a yarn and corresponding method

Abstract A device for air interlacing of a yarn , comprising an interlacing chamber , a first entrance channel for receiving the yarn at the device entrance and feeding it to the interlacing chamber , and a second exit channel for receiving the yarn from the interlacing chamber and releasing it at the device exit, in which the interlacing chamber is delimited by a first emitting wall bearing a nozzle for the emission of a continuous jet of compressed air , and a second deflecting wall , opposite the first wall , suitable for receiving and deflecting the jet of compressed air emitted by the nozzle and intersecting the yarn to be interlaced, and in which the second deflecting wall is concave in shape both on a transversal plane and on a longitudinal plane with respect to the feeding path of the yarn through the device

Lattice QCD on Small Computers

We demonstrate that lattice QCD calculations can be made $10^3$--$10^6$ times faster by using very coarse lattices. To obtain accurate results, we replace the standard lattice actions by perturbatively-improved actions with tadpole-improved correction terms that remove the leading errors due to the lattice. To illustrate the power of this approach, we calculate the static-quark potential, and the charmonium spectrum and wavefunctions using a desktop computer. We obtain accurate results that are independent of the lattice spacing and agree well with experiment.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figs incl as LaTex pictures Minor additions to tables and tex

Preliminary structural analysis of an active exoskeleton for robotic neuro-rehabilitation

In this paper the exoskeleton P.I.G.R.O. (Pneumatic Interactive Gait Rehabilitation Orthosis), developed in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS) Politecnico di Torino with the important co-operation with doctors, is presented. It was preliminary designed for a completely unloaded walking gait cycle in order to treat the first steps of the neurorehabilitation trainings. An initial FEM evaluation of P.I.G.R.O. structure is here presented. It underlines a lot of important aspects and techniques to analyse the structural characteristics of P.I.G.R.O. legs rigid parts using a commercial software but analysing both the actions of the pneumatic actuators and of the patients muscles and/or movements. The results obtained are good and allow to verify the P.I.G.R.O. legs structure and to establish a procedure to study its characteristics also with the presence of the patien

Search for resonant production of strongly coupled dark matter in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV

The first collider search for dark matter arising from a strongly coupled hidden sector is presented and uses a data sample corresponding to 138 fb−1, collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC, at s = 13 TeV. The hidden sector is hypothesized to couple to the standard model (SM) via a heavy leptophobic Z′ mediator produced as a resonance in proton-proton collisions. The mediator decay results in two “semivisible” jets, containing both visible matter and invisible dark matter. The final state therefore includes moderate missing energy aligned with one of the jets, a signature ignored by most dark matter searches. No structure in the dijet transverse mass spectra compatible with the signal is observed. Assuming the Z′ boson has a universal coupling of 0.25 to the SM quarks, an inclusive search, relevant to any model that exhibits this kinematic behavior, excludes mediator masses of 1.5–4.0 TeV at 95% confidence level, depending on the other signal model parameters. To enhance the sensitivity of the search for this particular class of hidden sector models, a boosted decision tree (BDT) is trained using jet substructure variables to distinguish between semivisible jets and SM jets from background processes. When the BDT is employed to identify each jet in the dijet system as semivisible, the mediator mass exclusion increases to 5.1 TeV, for wider ranges of the other signal model parameters. These limits exclude a wide range of strongly coupled hidden sector models for the first time. [Figure not available: see fulltext.

Measurement of the Drell-Yan forward-backward asymmetry at high dilepton masses in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV

A measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry of pairs of oppositely charged leptons (dimuons and dielectrons) produced by the Drell-Yan process in proton-proton collisions is presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb(-1) collected with the CMS detector at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The asymmetry is measured as a function of lepton pair mass for masses larger than 170 GeV and compared with standard model predictions. An inclusive measurement across both channels and the full mass range yields an asymmetry of 0.612 +/- 0.005 (stat) +/- 0.007 (syst). As a test of lepton flavor universality, the difference between the dimuon and dielectron asymmetries is measured as well. No statistically significant deviations from standard model predictions are observed. The measurements are used to set limits on the presence of additional gauge bosons. For a Z' boson in the sequential standard model the observed (expected) 95% confidence level lower limit on the Z' mass is 4.4 TeV (3.7 TeV)

Constraints on anomalous Higgs boson couplings using production and decay information in the four-lepton final state

A search is performed for anomalous interactions of the recently discovered Higgs boson using matrix element techniques with the information from its decay to four leptons and from associated Higgs boson production with two quark jets in either vector boson fusion or associated production with a vector boson. The data were recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of and correspond to an integrated luminosity of . They are combined with the data collected at center-of-mass energies of 7 and , corresponding to integrated luminosities of 5.1 and , respectively. All observations are consistent with the expectations for the standard model Higgs boson