A novel organic-inorganic hybrid containing allyl benzoxazine and polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) was synthesized by the thiol-ene (click) reaction. The benzoxazine (BOZ)-containing POSS (SPOSS-BOZ) copolymerized with benzoxazine/epoxy resin was used to prepare composites of SPOSS-PBZ-E nanocomposites(NPs). The polymerization behavior was monitored by FTIR and non-isothermal differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), which showed that the composites had completely cured with multiple polymerization mechanisms according to the oxazine ring-opening and epoxy resin (EP) polymerization. The thermal properties of the organic–inorganic polybenzoxazine (PBZ) nanocomposites were analyzed by DSC and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Furthermore, the X-ray diffraction analysis and the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs of the SPOSS-PBZ-E nanocomposites indicated that SPOSS was chemically incorporated into the hybrid nanocomposites in the size range of 80–200 nm. The flame retardancy of the benzoxazine epoxy resin composites was investigated by limiting oxygen index (LOI), UL 94 vertical burn test, and cone calorimeter tests. When the amount of SPOSS reached 10% or more, the vertical burning rating of the curing system arrived at V-1, and when the SPOSS-BOZ content reached 20 wt %, the thermal stability and flame retardancy of the material were both improved. Moreover, in the cone calorimeter testing, the addition of SPOSS-BOZ hindered the decomposition of the composites and led to a reduction in the peak heat release rate (pHRR), the average heat release rate (aHRR), and the total heat release (THR) values by about 20%, 25%, and 25%, respectively. The morphologies of the chars were also studied by SEM and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and the flame-retardant mechanism of POSS was mainly a condensed-phase flame retardant. The ceramic layer was formed by the enrichment of silicon on the char surface. When there are enough POSS nanoparticles, it can effectively protect the combustion of internal polymers.

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Collision detection, which refers to the computational problem of finding the relative placement or configuration of two or more objects, is an essential component of many applications in computer graphics and robotics. In image-guided robotic surgery, realtime collision detection is critical for preserving healthy anatomical structures during the surgical procedure. However, the computational complexity of the problem usually results in algorithms that operate at low speed. In this paper, we present a fast and accurate algorithm for collision detection between Oriented-Bounding-Boxes (OBBs) that is suitable for real-time implementation. Our proposed Sweep and Prune algorithm can perform a preliminary filtering to reduce the number of objects that need to be tested by the classical Separating Axis Test algorithm, while the OBB pairs of interest are preserved. These OBB pairs are re-checked by the Separating Axis Test algorithm to obtain accurate overlapping status between them. To accelerate the execution, our Sweep and Prune algorithm is tailor-made for the proposed method. Meanwhile, a high-performance scalable hardware architecture is proposed by analyzing the intrinsic parallelism of our algorithm and is implemented on FPGA platform. Results show that our hardware design on the FPGA platform can achieve around 8× higher running speed than the software design on a CPU platform. As a result, the proposed algorithm can achieve a collision frame rate of 1 kHz and fulfill the requirement for the medical surgery scenario of Robot-Assisted Laparoscopy.

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