INTI International University

Vehicles left in open parking areas are continuously exposed to sunlight, which accelerates degradation of both exterior and interior components. This study presents the design and evaluation of a semi-automatic portable car cover intended to protect vehicles from ultraviolet radiation and other environmental factors, particularly for online-taxi drivers who typically do not have access to a private garage. The development process comprised several stages: concept design, technical calculation of frame strength and motor capacity, component selection, assembly, and functional testing of the open–close mechanism. A simplified structural check of the main C-channel/hollow-iron frame indicated an estimated bending stress of approximately 81.7 MPa under an idealized midspan load, corresponding to a safety factor of about 3.0 against the yield strength of mild steel; a torque-balance check likewise showed that the installed 0.63 N•m AC gear motor provides only a narrow margin (estimated safety factor of 1.03–1.09) over the torque required to overcome rail friction, indicating limited but adequate capacity under the assumed conditions. Functional testing showed that the prototype opens in an average of 34.8 s and closes in an average of 36.94 s, both within the 40 s design target, over a limited set of three trials; a larger sample size is recommended to statistically confirm repeatability. The system extends up to 4 m in length and operates through a semi-automatic AC-motor-driven controller, offering a practical and comparatively low-cost alternative to commercial products such as Lanmodo and Krisbow's Prestige cover line.

MXene quantum dots (MQDs) provide a chemically versatile platform for metal-ion sensing because their surface coordination environments, defect-associated states, and size-dependent electronic structure can couple molecular recognition to measurable optical responses. This review develops a mechanism-centered framework for understanding that coupling rather than treating sensing performance as a collection of isolated analytical metrics. It first examines how surface terminations, coordination-site accessibility, electronic-state organization, solvation, and interfacial binding thermodynamics define the recognition landscape of MQDs. It then analyzes how recognition events are translated into fluorescence or electrochemiluminescence responses through charge transfer, energy transfer, static or dynamic quenching, inner-filter effects, and related excited-state perturbations. Particular emphasis is placed on structure–property–signal relationships, mechanistic distinguishability, and trade-offs among sensitivity, selectivity, reversibility, and robustness. Evidence from reported metal-ion sensing systems is comparatively assessed to identify recurring design trends and limitations in mechanistic validation, cross-platform benchmarking, and real-matrix translation. The analysis indicates that future progress depends less on maximizing signal magnitude than on establishing reproducible coordination environments, experimentally resolved transduction pathways, and standardized performance criteria. This perspective positions MQD sensing as a recognition-to-signal engineering problem governed by coupled surface chemistry and excited-state dynamics.

The current study numerically investigates the impact of twist angle on the performance of a twisted double-tube latent heat storage (LHS) system, evaluating first- and second-law efficiencies during melting and solidification. Water serves as the heat transfer fluid (HTF) circulating within the inner tube, while the phase change material (PCM) RT35 is situated in the annular space. Performance is evaluated by examining the PCM temperature, liquid fraction, and the rates of thermal and frictional entropy generation over time. The findings indicate that lower twist angles result in reduced melting and solidification durations. A notable exception is the 360° case during melting, which achieves the shortest melting time among all configurations due to the dominance of vortex-enhanced convective heat transfer over the minor stagnation-zone penalty at this twist angle. Frictional entropy generation is consistently negligible compared to thermal entropy generation. Thermal entropy generation exhibits an increasing-then-decreasing trend during solidification, with peak values of 7.8 W/m3/K and 1.8 W/m3/K recorded during solidification and melting, respectively. At higher twist angles, both phase-change durations are extended.

Peptic ulcer disease remains clinically important despite effective Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) eradication and acid-suppressive therapy. Gastric injury reflects an imbalance between aggressive factors, including acid-pepsin activity, H. pylori, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), ethanol, oxidative stress, inflammation, apoptosis, and microvascular disturbance and protective mechanisms such as mucus-bicarbonate secretion, prostaglandin signaling, nitric oxide-regulated blood flow, epithelial restitution, and endogenous antioxidant defenses. Bixa orellana L. (annatto or achiote) is a tropical medicinal plant whose seed arils are rich in the apocarotenoids bixin and norbixin, whereas its leaves contain variable phenolics, flavonoids, tannins, terpenoids, alkaloids, and other constituents depending on geography, maturity, and extraction method. This critical narrative review uses a structured search and qualitative evidence-appraisal framework to evaluate extract-specific phytochemistry, direct gastric evidence, indirectly relevant gastrointestinal and vascular evidence, mechanistic plausibility, safety, quality control, and translational readiness. The available literature supports B. orellana as a biologically plausible preclinical mucosal-protective candidate, particularly for prevention of acute chemical injury; however, it does not establish clinical efficacy or chronic ulcer-healing activity. Confidence is limited by the small number of direct gastric studies, incomplete chemical characterization, inconsistent separation of leaf and seed evidence, limited dose-response testing, narrow model selection, and insufficient mechanistic and histological endpoints. Future studies should use authenticated plant material, voucher specimens, chromatographic fingerprints, quantitative markers, complementary prevention and healing models, acute and repeated-dose toxicology, mucus and prostaglandin measurements, oxidative and inflammatory biomarkers, and blinded histological scoring before human investigation is justified.

This paper presents a robust co-design framework for differential spiral electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) biosensors, developed as an in silico methodological study for urine-sensing applications in bladder cancer surveillance. The objective is to improve parameter identifiability in label-free differential urine sensing when nuisance effects, fabrication tolerances, and reference mismatch reduce estimation reliability. The framework combines differential sensing to suppress shared common-mode nuisance with joint optimization of sensor geometry and frequency selection. The design is formulated as a minimax Fisher-information problem to improve worst-case identifiability. The primary co-design evaluation uses an application-motivated synthetic protocol with matched budgets and multiple baselines. The proposed method improves worst-case identifiability and Cram & eacute;r-Rao lower-bound proxy metrics at the same frequency budget, with consistent gains under budget variation, uncertainty amplification, and reference mismatch. To examine transfer beyond the synthetic model family at component level, we additionally analyzed an independent measured EIS dataset using grouped hold-out validation and training-only empirical minimax frequency selection. At a four-frequency budget, the measured-data analysis achieved a balanced accuracy of 79.6%+/- 11.6%, compared with 70.4%+/- 14.0% for log-uniform selection and 74.1%+/- 8.5% for the full 101-frequency spectrum. This independent analysis supports the differential sparse-frequency design principle outside the synthetic generator, but it does not validate the optimized spiral geometry, urine sensing, bladder-cancer diagnosis, or clinical readiness.