Self-oscillating dimmable electronic ballast

This paper presents a simple alternative for an electronic ballast operating in self-sustained oscillating mode with dimming capability for fluorescent lamps. A simple modification in one of the gate drivers side circuit allows the lamp to dim without compromising the simplicity, reliability, and low cost which characterize the self-oscillating electronic ballast (SOEB). A qualitative analysis is presented to explain the behavior of the proposed self-oscillating electronic ballast with dimming feature. In addition, the stability and the key equations for the design are derived using the extended Nyquist criterion and describing function method. Experimental results from two 40-W electronic ballasts are presented to demonstrate the performance and to validate the analysis carried out.     

Higher Order Barycentric Coordinates

In recent years, a wide range of generalized barycentric coordinates has been suggested. However, all of them lack control over derivatives. We show how the notion of barycentric coordinates can be extended to specify derivatives at control points. This is also known as Hermite interpolation. We introduce a method to modify existing barycentric coordinates to higher order barycentric coordinates and demonstrate, using higher order mean value coordinates, that our method, although conceptually simple and easy to implement, can be used to give easy and intuitive control at interactive frame rates over local space deformations such as rotations.     

Extension of a combined analytical/numerical initial value problem solver for turbulent mixing with combustion

Here, we describe the development of a reacting flow multi-species/combustion methodology, implemented as an extension to the differential reduced ejector analysis (DREA) computer program [Mathematical and computer modeling, vol. 31, 2000, p. 21; Appl. Math. Model. 25 (2001) 427; Comput. Math. Appl. 43(10–11); NASA Contractor Report, 1998]. Use of the single fluid IVP solver framework that was developed for the original DREA model has been directly coupled into the combustion formulation. With these modifications, the analysis has an elementary single step reaction Fuel+Oxidizer→Product combustion capability. Though approximate in nature, the simplicity and efficiency of the DREA formulation make it suitable for its original niche, namely design and preliminary design environments where more complex and expensive models may be inappropriate.     

Development of a heart monitoring system with high-Tc DC-SQUID gradiometers

We investigated different types of high-T_c DC-SQUID gradiometers with the aim to develop an one-channel heart monitoring system for non-invasive measurements in unshielded environment. This system could be used to obtain information about the patients condition in serial examinations and in emergency cases fast and stable. Step-edge and bicrystal Josephson junctions were used to prepare planar galvanically coupled thin film gradiometers and magnetometers. These sensors were used to carry out measurements in well-shielded and non-shielded environment and we compared the different noise properties and field gradient resolutions. With different types and sizes of high-T_c DC-SQUID sensors magnetocardiograms were measured in a magnetically shielded room. The influence of antenna configurations, SQUID parameters, and cooling conditions on the measurement of magnetocardiograms will be discussed. We investigated possibilities to suppress the earth magnetic field (with pairs of Helmholtz coils) and for noise field compensation in unshielded environment.     

Magnetic Levitation of liquid helium

We report on the stable levitation of liquid helium drops of up to 2 cm diameter in a magnetic trap at temperatures down to 1.5 K in the earth's gravitational field. The production and properties of a magnetic trap for diamagnetic materials is discussed. The behavior of liquids in such a trap is analyzed, including the deformation of a liquid drop by the trap forces. We frequently observe two drops in the magnetic trap which are held in apparent contact for up to 3 minutes without coalescing. This non-coalescence effect was only seen above the superfluid transition temperature. We explain this effect in terms of the existence of a vapor layer between the drops caused by evaporation of the drops, much like the suspension of a liquid drop above a hot surface known as the Leidenfrost effect.     

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons Activate the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor and the Constitutive Androstane Receptor to Regulate Xenobiotic Metabolism in Human Liver Cells

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are environmental pollutants produced by incomplete combustion of organic matter. They induce their own metabolism by upregulating xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes such as cytochrome P450 monooxygenase 1A1 (CYP1A1) by activating the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR). However, previous studies showed that individual PAHs may also interact with the constitutive androstane receptor (CAR). Here, we studied ten PAHs, different in carcinogenicity classification, for their potential to activate AHR- and CAR-dependent luciferase reporter genes in human liver cells. The majority of investigated PAHs activated AHR, while non-carcinogenic PAHs tended to activate CAR. We further characterized gene expression, protein abundancies and activities of the AHR targets CYP1A1 and 1A2, and the CAR target CYP2B6 in human HepaRG hepatoma cells. Enzyme induction patterns strongly resembled the profiles obtained at the receptor level, with AHR-activating PAHs inducing CYP1A1/1A2 and CAR-activating PAHs inducing CYP2B6. In summary, this study provides evidence that beside well-known activation of AHR, some PAHs also activate CAR, followed by subsequent expression of respective target genes. Furthermore, we found that an increased PAH ring number is associated with AHR activation as well as the induction of DNA double-strand breaks, whereas smaller PAHs activated CAR but showed no DNA-damaging potential.     

pROST: a smoothed \ell _p-norm robust online subspace tracking method for background subtraction in video

An increasing number of methods for background subtraction use Robust PCA to identify sparse foreground objects. While many algorithms use the \(\ell _1\) -norm as a convex relaxation of the ideal sparsifying function, we approach the problem with a smoothed \(\ell _p\) -quasi-norm and present pROST, a method for robust online subspace tracking. The algorithm is based on alternating minimization on manifolds. Implemented on a graphics processing unit, it achieves realtime performance at a resolution of \(160 \times 120\) . Experimental results on a state-of-the-art benchmark for background subtraction on real-world video data indicate that the method succeeds at a broad variety of background subtraction scenarios, and it outperforms competing approaches when video quality is deteriorated by camera jitter.     

Sky Based Light Metering for High Dynamic Range Images

Image calibration requires both linearization of pixel values and scaling so that values in the image correspond to real‐world luminances. In this paper we focus on the latter and rather than rely on camera characterization, we calibrate images by analysing their content and metadata, obviating the need for expensive measuring devices or modeling of lens and camera combinations. Our analysis correlates sky pixel values to luminances that would be expected based on geographical metadata. Combined with high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, which gives us linear pixel data, our algorithm allows us to find absolute luminance values for each pixel—effectively turning digital cameras into absolute light meters. To validate our algorithm we have collected and annotated a calibrated set of HDR images and compared our estimation with several other approaches, showing that our approach is able to more accurately recover absolute luminance. We discuss various applications and demonstrate the utility of our method in the context of calibrated color appearance reproduction and lighting design.     

Spectral Ray Differentials

Light refracted by a dispersive interface leads to beautifully colored patterns that can be rendered faithfully with spectral Monte‐Carlo methods. Regrettably, results often suffer from chromatic noise or banding, requiring high sampling rates and large amounts of memory compared to renderers operating in some trichromatic color space. Addressing this issue, we introduce spectral ray differentials, which describe the change of light direction with respect to changes in the spectrum. In analogy with the classic ray and photon differentials, this information can be used for filtering in the spectral domain. Effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by filtering for offline spectral light and path tracing as well as for an interactive GPU photon mapper based on splatting. Our results show considerably less chromatic noise and spatial aliasing while retaining good visual similarity to reference solutions with negligible overhead in the order of milliseconds.