Nanothinx (Greece)

The use of goods-to-person robotic systems in a warehouse enhances storage density by devoting specific areas for Automated Mobile Robots (AMRs). Nevertheless, operation in narrow aisles and confined spaces presents notable challenges. This study outlines a comprehensive approach for AMRs to autonomously navigate within narrow aisles of a warehouse, ensuring safety and streamlining order completion. The goal is to independently collect and transport bins with products referred to the order, to the workstation area, where workers finalize order packing. Precise positioning of fiducial markers on the floor, initiates a fusion-based localization system that merges information from wheel odometry and fiducial detection. The markers are organized as an undirected graph to facilitate navigation purposes and Dijkstra algorithm is employed to successfully generate both safe and optimal paths. A pipeline has been established for the retrieval and positioning of bins from shelves or workstations to optimize the order picking process. The proposed method has been tested on a simulation environment with realistic constraints stem from the development of an autonomous warehouse environment.

In the present study, the bifiller system incorporating various amount of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and 3 wt% clay in polypropylene is investigated to obtain composites with multifunctional performance. The dispersion state of two nanofillers in the polypropylene matrix was characterized by applying TEM and Raman spectroscopy. Both composites demonstrate similar rheological behavior with a rheological percolation threshold of ϕp1 = 1.5 wt% for the monofiller (MWCNTs) and ϕp2 = 2 wt% for the bifiller systems (MWCNTs and 3% clay). The effect of two nanofillers on electromagnetic and nanomechanical properties was evaluated. Above rheological percolation both type composites show considerable electromagnetic shielding efficiency at small layer thickness due mostly to the addition of MWCNTs. The nanomechanical properties improvement is strongly dependent on the structure formed by MWCNTs in the polymer. The hardness and Young's modulus, measured by nanoindentation, is higher for the bifiller systems in comparison with the monofiller one above the rheological percolation threshold. This was attributed to the continuous network structure formed by interacted MWCNTs and infiltrated fine clay stacks. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 56:269–277, 2016. © 2015 Society of Plastics Engineers

The development of low-cost carbon nanotubes is presented in this work. In the present work, various types of carbon nanotubes are synthesised in hot-wall chemical vapour deposition (CVD) reactors using different temperatures and carbon sources (hydrocarbons). Growth rates were continuously monitored using an electronic microbalance coupled to the reactors. The obtained products are characterised by Raman spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The data from the deposition process and the characteristics of the developed materials are discussed in detail. The kinetic data are compared with those attained by employing conventional catalysts. Furthermore, techniques of semi-industrial CNT functionalisation are developed in this study and results on their effectiveness on the synthesis of resin-based nanocomposites are presented.