A cantilevered piezoelectric beam with a tip mass at its free end is a common energy harvester configuration. This paper introduces a new principle of designing such a harvester which increases the generated voltage without changing the natural frequency of the harvester: The attraction force between two permanent magnets is used to add stiffness to the system. This magnetic stiffening counters the effect of the tip mass on the natural frequency. Three setups incorporating piezoelectric bimorph cantilevers of the same type in different mechanical configurations are compared theoretically and experimentally to investigate the feasibility of this principle. Theoretical and experimental results show that magnetically stiffe

Vibration analysis plays a vital role in understanding and analyzing the behavior of the structure. Where, it can be utilized from this analysis in the design process of the structures in different engineering applications, check the quality and safety of the structure under different working conditions. This work presents experimental measurements and numerical solutions to an out of plane vibration of a rectangular plate with a circular hole. Free edges rectangular plates with different circular holes diameters were studied. The effects of hole location on the plate natural frequencies were also investigated. A finite element modeling (using ANSYS Software) has been used to analyze the vibration characteristics of the plates. A good agree

The robot arm is the most popular robotic form used in industry. Thus, it is crucial to make a system programming which could controlled the movement of each part in the industrial robot to make it works properly. One of the simplest models of the robot arm is EDARM ED-7100 which has a controller to control the movement of the robot arm manually. In this study, the robot controller has been redesigned in order to improve this robot's function. The new controller system used AT89S52 microcontroller which has wire connected to the robot hand. A function has been added with this controller to improve the system of controlling and becomes better than the previous system (only manually). The functions of the new system include three mo

Water scarcity is one of the most important problems facing humanity in various fields such as economics, industry, agriculture, and tourism. This may push people to use low-quality water like industrial-wastewater. The application of some chemical compounds to get rid of heavy metals such as cadmium is an environmentally harmful approach. It is well-known that heavy metals as cadmium may induce harmful problems when present in water and invade to soil, plants and food chain of a human being. In this case, man will be forced to use the low quality water in irrigation. Application of natural materials instead of chemicals to remove cadmium from polluted water is an environmental friendly approach. Attention was drawn in this research wor

          In the present research, a crane frame has been investigated by using finite element method. The damage is simulated by reducing the stiffness of assumed elements with ratios (10% and 20 %) in mid- span of the vertical column in crane frame. The cracked beam with a one-edge and non-propagating crack has been used. Six cases of damage are modeled for crane frame and by introducing cracked elements at different locations with ratio of depth of crack to the height of the beam (a/h) 0.1, 0.20. A FEM program coded in Matlab 6.5 was used to model the numerical simulation of the damage scenarios. The results showed a decreasing in the five natural frequencies from undamaged beam which means

Buildings such as malls, offices, airports and hospitals nowadays have become very complicated which increases the need for a solution that helps people to find their locations in these buildings. GPS or cell signals are commonly used for positioning in an outdoor environment and are not accurate in indoor environment. Smartphones are becoming a common presence in our daily life, also the existing infrastructure, the Wi-Fi access points, which is commonly available in most buildings, has motivated this work to build hybrid mechanism that combines the APs fingerprint together with smartphone barometer sensor readings, to accurately determine the user position inside building floor relative to well-known lan

An experimental study on a KIA pride (SAIPA 131) car model with scale of 1:14 in the wind tunnel was made beside the real car tests. Some of the modifications to passive flow control which are (vortex generator, spoiler and slice diffuser) were added to the car to reduce the drag force which its undesirable characteristic that increase fuel consumption and exhaust toxic gases. Two types of calculations were used to determine the drag force acting on the car body. Firstly, is by the integrating the values of pressure recorded along the pressure taps (for the wind tunnel and the real car testing), secondly, is by using one component balance device (wind tunnel testing) to measure the force. The results show that, the avera

Palm vein recognition is a one of the most efficient biometric technologies, each individual can be identified through its veins unique characteristics, palm vein acquisition techniques is either contact based or contactless based, as the individual's hand contact or not the peg of the palm imaging device, the needs a contactless palm vein system in modern applications rise tow problems, the pose variations (rotation, scaling and translation transformations) since the imaging device cannot aligned correctly with the surface of the palm, and a delay of matching process especially for large systems, trying to solve these problems. This paper proposed a pose invariant identification system for contactless palm vein which include three main