Impact of adhesive ingredients on adhesion between rubber and brass-plated steel wire in tire

Proficiency on underlying mechanism of rubber-metal adhesion has been increased significantly in the last few decades. Researchers have investigated the effect of various ingredients, such as hexamethoxymethyl melamine, resorcinol, cobalt stearate, and silica, on rubber-metal interface. The role of each ingredient on rubber-metal interfacial adhesion is still a subject of scrutiny. In this article, a typical belt skim compound of truck radial tire is selected and the effect of each adhesive ingredient on adhesion strength is explored. Out of these ingredients, the effect of cobalt stearate is found noteworthy. It has improved adhesion strength by 12% (without aging) and by 11% (humid-aged), respectively, over control compound. For detailed understanding of the effect of cobalt stearate on adhesion, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy are utilized to ascertain the rubber coverage and distribution of elements. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results helped us to understand the impact of Cu_XS layer depth on rubber-metal adhesion. The depth profile of the Cu_XS layer was found to be one of the dominant factors of rubber-metal adhesion retention. Thus, this study has made an attempt to find the impact of different adhesive ingredients on the formation of Cu_XS layer depth at rubber-metal interface and establish a correlation with adhesion strength simultaneously.     

HA/β-TCP plasma sprayed coatings on Ti substrate for biomedical applications

The present work focuses on the fabrication of βTCP (β-tricalcium phosphate) and HA/βTCP (hydroxyapatite/β-tricalcium phosphate) composite coatings by plasma spraying. The starting powders were produced via solid-state method using 2 wt% MgO to stabilize βTCP phase. The synthesized powders were preliminarily granulated to be used by the plasma spray process. Coatings obtained on titanium substrates are uniform and well adherent but due to the high temperature and cooling rate typical for plasma spraying process, βTCP phase is almost totally transformed into the α allotrope. Thermal treatment at 800 °C allows the reconversion of the phase αTCP→ βTCP. It is therefore possible to produce coatings with tuneable dissolution properties by selecting the proper initial powder mixture and the specific thermal treatment.     

Contention-conscious transaction ordering in multiprocessor DSP systems

This paper explores the problem of efficiently ordering interprocessor communication (IPC) operations in statically scheduled multiprocessors for iterative dataflow graphs. In most digital signal processing (DSP) applications, the throughput of the system is significantly affected by communication costs. By explicitly modeling these costs within an effective graph-theoretic analysis framework, we show that ordered transaction schedules can significantly outperform self-timed schedules even when synchronization costs are low. However, we also show that when communication latencies are nonnegligible, finding an optimal transaction order given a static schedule is an NP-complete problem, and that this intractability holds both under iterative and noniterative execution. We develop new heuristics for finding efficient transaction orders, and perform an extensive experimental comparison to gauge the performance of these heuristics.     

Effect of Thin Film Thicknesses and Materials on the Response of RTDs and Microthermocouples

Fabrication and thermal characterization of a resistance temperature detector (RTD) heater and microthermocouples (MTs) on silicon substrates have been reported in this paper. The influence of film thickness and nickel-gold (Au) electroplating on RTD on its steady-state temperature with respect to its steady-state electrical power input and resistance is studied. Further, the thermal effects of multiple thermocouples in a thermopile as well as the effects of Au layers in the contact pads of the thermopiles on their open-circuit Seebeck voltage are studied. Therein lies the novelty of this paper. The in situ operating relationships for the RTD heater and the MT are provided     

A Low-Power Wide-Dynamic-Range Analog VLSI Cochlea

Low-power wide-dynamic-range systems are extremely hard to build. The biological cochlea is one of the most awesome examples of such a system: It can sense sounds over 12 orders of magnitude in intensity, with an estimated power dissipation of only a few tens of microwatts. In this paper, we describe an analog electronic cochlea that processes sounds over 6 orders of magnitude in intensity, and that dissipates 0.5 mW. This 117-stage, 100 Hz to 10 KHz cochlea has the widest dynamic range of any artificial cochlea built to date. The wide dynamic range is attained through the use of a wide-linear-range transconductance amplifier, of a low-noise filter topology, of dynamic gain control (AGC) at each cochlear stage, and of an architecture that we refer to as overlapping cochlear cascades. The operation of the cochlea is made robust through the use of automatic offset-compensation circuitry. A BiCMOS circuit approach helps us to attain nearly scale-invariant behavior and good matching at all frequencies. The synthesis and analysis of our artificial cochlea yields insight into why the human cochlea uses an active traveling-wave mechanism to sense sounds, instead of using bandpass filters. The low power, wide dynamic range, and biological realism make our cochlea well suited as a front end for cochlear implants.     

Desensitization of mutant acetylcholine receptors in transgenic mice reduces the amplitude of neuromuscular synaptic currents

While the slow onset of desensitization of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (AChRs), relative to the rate of acetylcholine removal, excludes this kinetic state from shaping synaptic responses in normal neuromuscular transmission, its role in neuromuscular disorders has not been examined. The slow-channel congenital myasthenic syndrome (SCCMS) is a disorder caused by point mutations in the AChR subunit-encoding genes leading to kinetically abnormal (slow) channels, reduced miniature endplate current amplitudes (MEPCs), and degeneration of the postsynaptic membrane. Because of this complicated picture of kinetic and structural change in the neuromuscular junction, it is difficult to assess the importance of the multiple factors that may be responsible for the reduced endplate current amplitudes, and ultimately the clinical syndrome. In order to address this we have used a transgenic mouse model for the SCCMS that has slow AChR ion channels and reduced endplate responsiveness in the absence of any of the degenerative changes. We found that the reduction in MEPC amplitudes in these mice could not be explained by either reduced AChR number or by reduced AChR channel conductance. Rather, we found that the mutant AChRs in situ manifested an activity-dependent reduction in sensitivity that caused diminished MEPC and endplate current amplitude with nerve stimulation. This observation demonstrates that the basis for the reduction in MEPC amplitudes in the SCCMS may be multifactorial. Moreover, these findings demonstrate that, under conditions that alter their rate of desensitization, the kinetic properties of nicotinic AChRs can control the strength of synaptic responses.     

On denoising and compression of DNA microarray images

We address the problems of noise and huge data sizes in microarray images. First, we propose a mixture model for describing the statistical and structural properties of microarray images. Then, based on the microarray image model, we present methods for denoising and for compressing microarray images. The denoising method is based on a variant of the translation-invariant wavelet transform. The compression method introduces the notion of approximate contexts (rather than traditional exact contexts) in modeling the symbol probabilities in a microarray image. This inexact context modeling approach is important in dealing with the noisy nature of microarray images. Using the proposed denoising and compression methods, we describe a near-lossless compression scheme suitable for microarray images. Results on both denoising and compression are included, which show the performance of the proposed methods. Further experiments using the results of the proposed near-lossless compression scheme in gene clustering using cell-cycle microarray data for S. cerevisiae showed a general improvement in the clustering performance, when compared with using the original data. This provides an indirect validation of the effectiveness of the proposed denoising method.     

A rule-based fuzzy-logic approach for the measurement of manufacturing flexibility

Manufacturing flexibility is a difficult to quantify concept that defies universal definition. This paper presents a novel fuzzy-logic approach for measuring manufacturing flexibility that exploits linguistic variables for quantifying pertinent factors affecting commonly utilized flexibility types. Towards this end, we identify and measure the contribution of specified state variables towards the assumed flexibility types in order to compute an overall flexibility index for a generic manufacturing system. The suggested framework provides a convenient end user approach amenable to software implementation that is exemplified through the development of a prototypical software tool called “Flexibility Evaluator”.     

Split and collectorless flotation to medium coking coal fines for multi-product zero waste concept

The medium coking coal fines of − 0.5 mm from Jharia coal field were taken for this investigation. The release analysis of the composite coal reveals that yield is very low at 10.0% ash, about 25% at 14% ash and 50% at 17% ash level. The low yield is caused by the presence of high ash finer fraction. The size-wise ash analysis of − 0.5 mm coal indicated that − 0.5 + 0.15 mm fraction contains less ash than − 0.15 mm fraction. Thus, the composite feed was split into − 0.5 + 0.15 mm and − 0.15 mm fractions and subjected to flotation separately. The low ash bearing fraction (− 0.5 + 0.15 mm) was subjected to two stages collectorless flotation to achieve the concentrate with 10% ash. The cleaner concentrate (18.9%) with 10% ash was recovered which has an application in metallurgical industries. The concentrate of 30.2% yield with 12.5% ash could be achieved in one stage collectorless flotation which is suitable for use in coke making as sweetener. As the − 0.15 mm fraction contains relatively high ash, collector aided flotation using sodium silicate was performed to get a concentrate of 23.6% yield with about 17% ash. The blending of this product with cleaner tail obtained from − 0.5 + 0.15 mm produces about 35.0% yield with 17% ash and that can be utilized for coke making. The reject from the two fractions can be used for conventional thermal power plant or cement industries using a 23.5% ash after one stage collector aided flotation and the final tailings produced content ash of 61.6% can be used for fluidization combustion bed (FBC). This eventually leads to complete utilization of coal.