Synthesis of carbon nanomaterials for dye‐sensitized solar cells

In this paper, it was demonstrated that Na₂O can react with CO to produce carbon nanofibers at 500 °C and carbon nanosheets at 550 °C. Furthermore, the nanosheets exhibited excellent performance as a counter electrode for a dye‐sensitized solar cell (DSSC), leading to a high power conversion efficiency of 7.57%. The efficiency is larger than that (4.72%) of a DSSC with the carbon nanofiber counter electrode and even comparable with that of an expensive Pt‐based DSSC. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new class of nonlinear Rauch–Tung–Striebel cubature Kalman smoothers

In this paper, a new Rauch–Tung–Striebel type of nonlinear smoothing method is proposed based on a class of high-degree cubature integration rules. This new class of cubature Kalman smoothers generalizes the conventional third-degree cubature Kalman smoother using the combination of Genz׳s or Mysovskikh׳s high-degree spherical rule with the moment matching based arbitrary-degree radial rule, which considerably improves the estimation accuracy. A target tracking problem is utilized to demonstrate the performance of this new smoother and to compare it with other Gaussian approximation smoothers. It will be shown that this new cubature Kalman smoother enhances the filtering accuracy and outperforms the extended Kalman smoother, the unscented Kalman smoother, and the conventional third-degree cubature Kalman smoother. It also maintains close performance to the Gauss–Hermite quadrature smoother with much less computational cost.     

A derivative UKF for tightly coupled INS/GPS integrated navigation

The tightly coupled INS/GPS integration introduces nonlinearity to the measurement equation of the Kalman filter due to the use of raw GPS pseudorange measurements. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) is a typical method to address the nonlinearity by linearizing the pseudorange measurements. However, the linearization may cause large modeling error or even degraded navigation solution. To solve this problem, this paper constructs a nonlinear measurement equation by including the second-order term in the Taylor series of the pseudorange measurements. Nevertheless, when using the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to the INS/GPS integration for navigation estimation, it causes a great amount of redundant computation in the prediction process due to the linear feature of system state equation, especially for the case with system state vector in much higher dimension than measurement vector. To overcome this drawback in computational burden, this paper further develops a derivative UKF based on the constructed nonlinear measurement equation. The derivative UKF adopts the concise form of the original Kalman filter (KF) to the prediction process and employs the unscented transformation technique to the update process. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the derivative UKF can achieve higher accuracy with a much smaller computational cost in comparison with the traditional UKF.     

Design of two-channel filter bank using nature inspired optimization based fractional derivative constraints

In this article, a novel approach for 2-channel linear phase quadrature mirror filter (QMF) bank design based on a hybrid of gradient based optimization and optimization of fractional derivative constraints is introduced. For the purpose of this work, recently proposed nature inspired optimization techniques such as cuckoo search (CS), modified cuckoo search (MCS) and wind driven optimization (WDO) are explored for the design of QMF bank. 2-Channel QMF is also designed with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and artificial bee colony (ABC) nature inspired optimization techniques. The design problem is formulated in frequency domain as sum of L₂ norm of error in passband, stopband and transition band at quadrature frequency. The contribution of this work is the novel hybrid combination of gradient based optimization (Lagrange multiplier method) and nature inspired optimization (CS, MCS, WDO, PSO and ABC) and its usage for optimizing the design problem. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated by passband error (ϕ_p), stopband error (ϕ_s), transition band error (ϕ_t), peak reconstruction error (PRE), stopband attenuation (A_s) and computational time. The design examples illustrate the ingenuity of the proposed method. Results are also compared with the other existing algorithms, and it was found that the proposed method gives best result in terms of peak reconstruction error and transition band error while it is comparable in terms of passband and stopband error. Results show that the proposed method is successful for both lower and higher order 2-channel QMF bank design. A comparative study of various nature inspired optimization techniques is also presented, and the study singles out CS as a best QMF optimization technique.     

Random-valued impulse noise removal using adaptive dual threshold median filter

Noise detection and its removal is very important in the image processing. Detection of noise is very crucial and significant in random valued impulse noise because it does not hamper the image pixels uniformly. This paper presents a novel and unique concept of adaptive dual threshold for the detection of random valued impulse noise along with simple median filter at noise removal stage. Simulation results shows that an efficient noise detection leads to a superior quality of de-noised image as compared to existing adaptive threshold based image de-noising techniques. Proposed threshold computation is based on averaging of pixel values of window which enhances the PSNR of our system as compared to existing median filter based image de-noising methods.     

Kernel-based fourth-order diffusion for image noise removal

The fourth-order partial differential equations have good performance on noise smoothing and edge preservation without creating blocky effects on smooth regions. However, for low signal-to-noise ratio images, the discrimination between edges and noise is a challenging problem. A novel kernel-based fourth-order diffusion is proposed in this paper. It introduces a kernelized gradient operator in the fourth-order diffusion process, which leads to more effective noise removal capability. Experiment results show that this method outperforms several previous anisotropic diffusion methods for noise removal and edge preservation.     

Ku波段基片集成波导带通滤波器的设计

设计了一款基于基片集成波导的ku波段卫星通信的带通滤波器。描述了位于SIW内部的金属通孔的等效电路模型,并分析通孔直径、位置等关键参数对滤波器性能的影响。针对基于中心位置的SIW带通滤波器带宽较窄的问题,提出偏置金属通孔SIW带通滤波器的设计方法,从而增大滤波器的带宽。并通过对改进后的基片集成波导带通滤波器的仿真,验证了设计的正确性和方法的有效性。     

Verification of Iron Loss Calculation Method Using a High‐Precision Iron Loss Analyzer

Because of the improved performance of power devices, the volume of the ac filter inductors used in high‐frequency PWM inverters has been reduced. However, the temperature rise in the filter inductor due to this miniaturization has become more pronounced. Therefore, we have proposed an iron loss calculation method for the ac filter inductor. However, the accuracy of the value calculated via the loss map method cannot be verified, because the iron loss arising during each switching period cannot be measured with conventional power measuring instruments. In order to resolve this problem, we developed an inductor loss analyzer (ILA), which allows precise measurement of the iron loss in the inductor during each switching period. The accuracy of the calculation of iron loss in the filter inductor by the loss map method was verified with the ILA. We found that the value calculated by the loss map method differed slightly from the value measured with the ILA. However, these differences can be reduced if we take into account the accurate flux density calculation and the effect of the duty ratio of PWM pulses on the loss. Finally, we verified that the loss map method can provide accurate iron loss calculations.     

Improving oxidation resistance of porous FeAl-based intermetallics with high boron/yttrium alloying

The coalloying with high contents of chromium (Cr), boron (B) and yttrium (Y) for porous B2-structured FeAl intermetallics fabricated through reactive synthesis was conducted. The oxidation behaviors of porous FeAl-based materials were investigated by evaluating the pore-structure evolution, oxidation kinetics and oxide-scale configuration. The results show that with the coalloying of high contents of Cr, B and Y, the oxidation mass gains of porous FeAl materials at 600?800 °C are significantly reduced. The combination of B enriched on the surface of oxide scales and Y located at the scale?metal interface promotes the formation of thin protective nodular α-Al₂O₃ oxide scales. It is indicated that introducing relatively high contents of reactive elements such as B and Y can benefit the selective growth of α-Al₂O₃ scales at relatively low temperatures without pre-treatment.