This research has been conducted to design upright parts of hand-made vehicles with the purpose of reducing material and machining cost while ensuring structural safety. Aluminum knuckles were modelled with three parts in order to enhance design flexibility as well as to reduce CNC machining cost. A vehicle model was constructed in CAD program and simulated in ADAMS View in order to estimate joint forces developing during 20 degree step steering condition at 60km/h. The joint forces obtained in the vehicle dynamics simulation were used for the structural analysis in ANSYS and dimensions of knuckle parts were adjusted until the lowest safety factor reached 2.0. The weight of knuckle decreased by 50% compared to the previous version that was designed without the structural analysis. The overall manufacturing cost decreased by 33% due to the reduction in the material as well as the CNC machining effort.

Structural analyses were performed for a movable seat mechanism applied in a new type shower commode wheel chair. The wheel chair has slide rails below the wheel chair seat to help patient move to bed side. The slide rails and seat were modeled for the structural simulation. Experiments were performed to validate simulation results by using strain gage Rosettes. Student t-test was performed to the experimental data, which showed that the stresses obtained from the simulation were not significantly different from those obtained from the experiments. The slide rail structure was found to give a safety factor of 2.4 under 80Kg user weight with ten rollers used for seat support. The safety factor much increased by placing more rollers under the wheel chair seat. Our simulation revealed that rollers installed only in the central and corner regions were used as supports due to the bending deformation of the seat.

Predation, development, and ovipostion experiments were conducted to evaluate Amblyseius swirskii (Athias-Henriot) (Acari: Phytoseiidae) as a potential biological control agent for tomato russet mite, Aculops lycopersici (Massee) (Acari: Eriophyidae) which is a periodic pest of greenhouse tomatoes. Results show that A. swirskii attacked all developmental stages of A. lycopersici, and had a type II functional response on the prey densities given. The predation rates of A. swirskii on A. lycopersici in the presense of alternative food sources such as pollen, thrips first instar, or whitefly eggs were recorded as 74%, 56%, and 76%, respectively of the predation rate on A. lycopersici alone. Amblyseius swirskii successfully completed their life-cycle on either A. lycopersici or cattail pollen. At 25oC, 70% RH, development time of female A. swirskii fed on A. lycopersici or on cattail pollen took 5.0 and 6.2 days, respectively. For the first 10 days after moulting to the adult stage, A. swirskii fed on A. lycopersici had higher daily oviposition rate (2.0 eggs per day) than on pollen (1.5 eggs per day). From this laboratory study, it can be concluded that A. swirskii has promising traits as a predator against A. lycopersici and that their populations can be stably maintained using alternative food such as cattail pollen. We suggest that the effectiveness of A. swirskii against A. lycopersici under field conditions deserves to be investigated.

We measured the non-carbon content of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) in SWCNT soot using thermogravimetric analysis. The weight increased percentage by the oxidation of metal in the raw soot is well obtained by TGA graph which was confirmed with ICP-AES, XRD, and XPS. This work will be very useful for the purity precise evaluation of SWCNT with UN-vis-NIR spectroscopy.