Publications related to Air mediates the impact of a compliant hemisphere on a rigid smooth surface

Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Investigation of microbial community dynamics in soil during variable hydrological forcing

Simiao Wang

Climate change is expected to alter the temporal distribution of precipitation events, leading to prolonged drought periods and an increased frequency of extreme precipitation events. Changes in precipitation pattern will directly affect soil moisture dyna ...

EPFL2024

Soil warming alters tree water use and canopy stomatal conductance in a mixed subtropical forest

Charlotte Grossiord, Christoph Bachofen

As air temperature and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) increase continuously, forests are losing more water through evapotranspiration, with large consequences for local and global hydrological cycles. In regions with high vegetation cover, soil warming can b ...

Elsevier2024

Edible Soft Actuators based on Konjac Glucomannan for Underwater Operation

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Ryo Kanno, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Soft robots are being increasingly developed and deployed for underwater applications such as exploration, monitoring, and rescue owing to their innate compliance, mechanical and chemical stability, and waterproof properties. However, they are still predom ...

2024

Filiform Variable Stiffness Technologies for Medical Robotics

Yegor Piskarev

In recent years, soft robotics has surged in applications like wearables, drones, smart fabrics, and medical instruments. Due to their compliance, these devices excel in tasks demanding dexterity and adaptability, such as manipulation, locomotion, crash re ...

EPFL2024

A lunar reconnaissance drone for cooperative exploration and high-resolution mapping of extreme locations

Erik Uythoven, Thomas Pfeiffer, Daniel Tataru, David Rodriguez Martinez

An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations remains, at best, ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Flow and Hydrochemistry in Drainage Networks

Izabela Bujak-Ozga

Despite their high ecological value, non-perennial streams have received less attention than their perennial counterparts. This doctoral thesis addresses this disparity by advancing knowledge on the dynamics of the drainage density and hydrologic processes ...

EPFL2024

Testing Theories of the Glass Transition with the Same Liquid but Many Kinetic Rules

Matthieu Wyart, Carolina Brito Carvalho dos Santos

We study the glass transition by exploring a broad class of kinetic rules that can significantly modify the normal dynamics of supercooled liquids while maintaining thermal equilibrium. Beyond the usual dynamics of liquids, this class includes dynamics in ...

Amer Physical Soc2024

Permanently magnetized elastomer rotating actuator using traveling waves

Herbert Shea

We report a soft actuator that generates continuous rotation of an object placed on it by electromagnetically exciting circular travelling waves in a soft disk. The disk, that serves as the stator, is made of a stretchable composite consisting of segments ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Characteristic rupture height of the mediating air film beneath an impacting drop on atomically smooth mica

John Martin Kolinski, Ramin Kaviani

Before a droplet can contact a surface during impact, it must first displace the air beneath it. Over a wide range of impact velocities, the droplet first squeezes the air into a thin film, enhancing its resistance to drainage; this slows the progress of t ...

Amer Physical Soc2023

Data-driven 1D wave propagation for site response analysis

Jean-François Molinari, Sacha Zenon Wattel, Antonio Joaquin Garcia Suarez

Prediction of ground motion triggered by earthquakes is a prime concern for both the seismology community and geotechnical earthquake engineering one. The subfield occupied with such a problem is termed site response analysis (SRA), its one-dimensional fla ...

WILEY2023

Consider the Anoxic Microsite: Acknowledging and Appreciating Spatiotemporal Redox Heterogeneity in Soils and Sediments

Vincent Noel, Meret Aeppli

Reduction-oxidation (redox) reactions underlie essentially all biogeochemical cycles. Like most soil properties and processes, redox is spatiotemporally heterogeneous. However, unlike other soil features, redox heterogeneity has yet to be incorporated into ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Influence of a lossy ground on the lightning performance of overhead transmission lines

Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Rafael Silva Alipio

This paper investigates the impact of incorporating both displacement currents and frequency-dependent soil parameters in the calculation of the ground-return impedance for the determination of the backflashover rate of 138 kV and 230 kV overhead transmiss ...

Elsevier2023

Linking Soil Structure, Hydraulic Properties, and Organic Carbon Dynamics: A Holistic Framework to Study the Impact of Climate Change and Land Management

Sara Bonetti

Climate change and unsustainable land management practices have resulted in extensive soil degradation, including alteration of soil structure (i.e., aggregate and pore size distributions), loss of soil organic carbon, and reduction of water and nutrient h ...

2023

Improving planar optode lifetime: encapsulation and optical release of pH-sensing optodes and assessment of their lifetime in situ

Victoria Alexandrine Julia Suzanne Marthe Fay

PurposePlanar fluorescent optodes are important tools for probing key parameters, such as the soil pH, O2 level, and CO2 level, associated with the biology and biochemistry process in the rhizosphere. In this paper, we address an important limitation of ex ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2023

Global Mapping of Potential and Climatic Plant‐Available Soil Water

Dani Or, Sara Bonetti

The estimation of plant-available soil water (PASW) is essential to quantify transpiration fluxes, the onset of heatwaves, irrigation water management, land-use decisions, vegetation ecology, and land surface memory in climate models. PASW is the amount of ...

2023

Fungal Planet description sheets: 1478-1549

Michele Saba, Sanjeev Kumar, Guilhem Maurice Louis Banc-Prandi

Novel species of fungi described in this study include those from various countries as follows: Australia, Aschersonia mackerrasiae on whitefly, Cladosporium corticola on bark of Melaleuca quinquenervia, Penicillium nudgee from soil under Melaleuca quinque ...

Leiden2023

Thermal management for gas lubricated, high-speed turbomachinery

Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Luis Eric Olmedo Ocampo, Wei Liu, Wanhui Liu

High-speed turbomachinery is commonly designed to achieve high power densities. Limited space for active cooling results in a challenging thermal management. A thermal modeling approach leveraging modern declarative programming capabilities is presented, y ...

2023

Effect of wettability and textile architecture on fluid displacement and pore formation during infiltration of carbon fibrous preforms

Véronique Michaud, Baris Çaglar, Helena Luisa Teixido Pedarros

We seek to address how air entrapment mechanisms during infiltration are influenced by the wetting characteristics of the fluid and the pore network formed by the reinforcement. To this end, we evaluated the behavior of two model fluids with different surf ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

Life cycle environmental assessment of retaining walls in unsaturated soils

Alessio Ferrari, Gianluca Speranza

Retaining structures above groundwater level support soils that are usually in a state of partial saturation and subject to the actions of atmospheric agents. The current design approach considers the possible extremes of soil conditions - either totally d ...

ELSEVIER2022