This study is focused on optimizing electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) sensors for enhanced ultrasonic guided wave signal generation in steel cables using CAD and modern manufacturing to enable contactless ultrasonic signal transmission and reception. A lab test rig with advanced measurement and data processing was set up to test the sensors’ ability to detect cable damage, like wire breaks and abrasion, while also examining the effect of potential disruptors such as rope soiling. Machine learning algorithms were applied to improve the damage detection accuracy, leading to significant advancements in magnetostrictive measurement methods and providing a new standard for future development in this area. The use of the Vision Transformer Masked Autoencoder Architecture (ViTMAE) and generative pre-training has shown that reliable damage detection is possible despite the considerable signal fluctuations caused by rope movement.

Für die nicht-invasive Durchflussmessung werden meist Ultraschallsensoren verwendet, die reversibel an das zu untersuchende Rohrsystem angebaut werden. Die Messgenauigkeit dieser Sensoren wird durch mögliche Ablagerungen im Rohrinneren beeinflusst.

In dem hier vorgestellten Forschungsvorhaben, soll es mit Hilfe eines ultraschallbasierten Messverfahren möglich sein, sowohl die Materialeigenschaften und Wandstärke des Rohres direkt zu ermitteln als auch eventuell vorhandene Schichten im Rohrinneren zu detektieren und zu charakterisieren. Mit Hilfe dieser zusätzlichen Messgrößen soll zukünftig eine präzisere Durchflussmessung von klemmbaren Ultraschalldurchflusssensoren ermöglicht werden. Um die Algorithmen zur Charakterisierung der Materialeigenschaften zu erproben, wurden zunächst Simulationen zur Wellenausbreitung der geführten akustischen Wellen und deren Interaktion mit Schichten durchgeführt. Es erfolgte die Auswertung der beiden Grundmoden, A0 und S0, in einem definierten Frequenzbereich. Im Anschluss erfolgte die experimentelle Überprüfung auf einer ebenen Platte mit definierten Schichten von 415 μm und 780 μm. Die bisherigen Messergebnisse zeigen, dass es möglich ist mit dem entwickelten Algorithmus das Material und die Schichten zu charakterisieren. Die noch vorhandene Abweichung der Materialdaten von den Literaturwerten ergibt sich u. a. aus dem Schwingungsverhalten der Piezokeramik. Zukünftig soll die Auswertung durch direkte Messung der Schwingungseigenschaften der Piezokeramik weiter optimiert werden.

Optoacoustics is a metrology widely used for material characterisation. In this study, a measurement setup for the selective determination of the frequency-resolved phase velocities and attenuations of longitudinal waves over a wide frequency range (3-55 MHz) is presented. The ultrasonic waves in this setup were excited by a pulsed laser within an absorption layer in the thermoelastic regime and directed through a layer of water onto a sample. The acoustic waves were detected using a self-built adaptive interferometer with a photorefractive crystal. The instrument transmits compression waves only, is low-contact, non-destructive, and has a sample-independent excitation. The limitations of the approach were studied both by simulation and experiments to determine how the frequency range and precision can be improved. It was shown that measurements are possible for all investigated materials (silicon, silicone, aluminium, and water) and that the relative error for the phase velocity is less than 0.2%.

Blood oxygen saturation is an important clinical parameter, especially in postoperative hospitalized patients, monitored in clinical practice by arterial blood gas (ABG) and/or pulse oximetry that both are not suitable for a long-term continuous monitoring of patients during the entire hospital stay, or beyond. Technological advances developed recently for consumer-grade fitness trackers could-at least in theory-help to fill in this gap, but benchmarks on the applicability and accuracy of these technologies in hospitalized patients are currently lacking. We therefore conducted at the postanaesthesia care unit under controlled settings a prospective clinical trial with 201 patients, comparing in total >1,000 oxygen blood saturation measurements by fitness trackers of three brands with the ABG gold standard and with pulse oximetry. Our results suggest that, despite of an overall still tolerable measuring accuracy, comparatively high dropout rates severely limit the possibilities of employing fitness trackers, particularly during the immediate postoperative period of hospitalized patients.

Among the many acid-base concepts, the theory of Usanovich is one of the least known despite the most general scope including almost all chemical reaction types and even redox chemistry. Published 1939 in a Soviet journal in Russian language, it gained little immediate attention, and was later criticized mainly as being too broad in scope. Although several articles recently remembered Usanovich and his acid–base theory, one major inconsistency again was overseen: the electron is put in a row along with anions. Chemical history probably correctly puts this concept aside, also because it added little explanation capabilities beyond the elaborated considerations of the simultaneously published acid–base theory of Gilbert N. Lewis which was later refined by Pearson (hard and soft acids and bases, “HSAB”). A modified version of the core of Usanovich' concept is finally discussed. It combines the classic protic and aprotic acid–base concepts on the foundations of Lewis’ and Pearsons ideas.

Humidity, salt content, and migration in building materials lead to weathering and are a common challenge. To understand damage phenomena and select the right conservation treatments, knowledge on both the amount and distribution of moisture and salt load in the masonry is crucial. It was shown that commercial portable devices addressing moisture are often limited by the mutual interference of these values. This can be improved by exploiting broadband radar reflectometry for the quantification of humidity in historic masonry. Due to the above-mentioned limitations, today’s gold standard for evaluating the moisture content in historic buildings is still conducted by taking drilling samples with a subsequent evaluation in a specially designed laboratory, the so-called Darr method. In this paper, a new broadband frequency approach in the range between 0.4 and 6 GHz with improved artificial-intelligence data analysis makes sure to optimize the reflected signal, simplify the evaluation of the generated data, and minimise the effects of variables such as salt contamination that influence the permittivity. In this way, the amount of water could be determined independently from the salt content in the material and an estimate of the salt load. With new machine learning algorithms, the analysis of the permittivity is improved and can be made accessible for everyday use on building sites with minimal intervention by the user. These algorithms were trained with generated data from different drying studies on single building bricks from the masonries. The findings from the laboratory studies were then validated and evaluated on real historic buildings at real construction sites. Thus, the paper shows a spatially resolved and salt-independent measurement system for determining building moisture.

The loosening of an artificial joint is a frequent and critical complication in orthopedics and trauma surgery. Due to a lack of accuracy, conventional diagnostic methods such as projection radiography cannot reliably diagnose loosening in its early stages or detect whether it is associated with the formation of a biofilm at the bone–implant interface. In this work, we present a non-invasive ultrasound-based interferometric measurement procedure for quantifying the thickness of the layer between bone and prosthesis as a correlate to loosening. In principle, it also allows for the material characterization of the interface. A well-known analytical model for the superposition of sound waves reflected in a three-layer system was combined with a new method in data processing to be suitable for medical application at the bone–implant interface. By non-linear fitting of the theoretical prediction of the model to the actual shape of the reflected sound waves in the frequency domain, the thickness of the interlayer can be determined and predictions about its physical properties are possible. With respect to determining the layer’s thickness, the presented approach was successfully applied to idealized test systems and a bone–implant system in the range of approx. 200 µm to 2 mm. After further optimization and adaptation, as well as further experimental tests, the procedure offers great potential to significantly improve the diagnosis of prosthesis loosening at an early stage and may also be applicable to detecting the formation of a biofilm.

Introduction: Distributed ledger networks, chiefly those based on blockchain technologies, currently are heralding a next-generation of computer systems that aims to suit modern users’ demands. Over the recent years, several technologies for blockchains, off-chaining strategies, as well as decentralised and respectively self-sovereign identity systems have shot up so fast that standardisation of the protocols is lagging behind, severely hampering the interoperability of different approaches. Moreover, most of the currently available solutions for distributed ledgers focus on either home users or enterprise use case scenarios, failing to provide integrative solutions addressing the needs of both.

Methods: Herein, we introduce the OpenDSU platform that allows to interoperate generic blockchain technologies, organised–and possibly cascaded in a hierarchical fashion–in domains. To achieve this flexibility, we seamlessly integrated a set of well conceived components that orchestrate off-chain data and provide granularly resolved and cryptographically secure access levels, intrinsically nested with sovereign identities across the different domains. The source code and extensive documentation of all OpenDSU components described herein are publicly available under the MIT open-source licence at https://opendsu.com.

Results: Employing our platform to PharmaLedger, an inter-European network for the standardisation of data handling in the pharmaceutical industry and in healthcare, we demonstrate that OpenDSU can cope with generic demands of heterogeneous use cases in both, performance and handling substantially different business policies.

Discussion: Importantly, whereas available solutions commonly require a pre-defined and fixed set of components, no such vendor lock-in restrictions on the blockchain technology or identity system exist in OpenDSU, making systems built on it flexibly adaptable to new standards evolving in the future.

For the investigation of moisture and salt content in historic masonry, destructive drilling samples followed by a gravimetric investigation is still the preferred method. In order to prevent the destructive intrusion into the building substance and to enable a large-area measurement, a nondestructive and easy-to-use measuring principle is needed. Previous systems for moisture measurement usually fail due to a strong dependence on contained salts. In this work, a ground penetrating radar (GPR) system was used to determine the frequency-dependent complex permittivity in the range between 1 and 3 GHz on salt-loaded samples of historical building materials. By choosing this frequency range, it was possible to determine the moisture in the samples independently of the salt content. In addition, it was possible to make a quantitative statement about the salt level. The applied method demonstrates that with ground penetrating radar measurements in the frequency range selected here, a salt-independent moisture determination can be carried out.

Guided acoustic waves (GAW) have proven to be a useful tool for structural health monitoring (SHM). However, the dispersive nature of commonly used Lamb waves compromises the spatial resolution making it difficult to detect small or weakly reflective defects. Here we demonstrate an approach that can compensate for the dispersive effects, allowing advanced algorithms to be used with significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution. In this paper, the sign coherence factor (SCF) extension of the total focusing method (TFM) algorithm is used. The effectiveness is examined by numerical simulation and experimentally demonstrated by detecting weakly reflective layers with a highly dispersive A0 mode on an aluminum plate, which are not detectable without compensating for the dispersion effects.