Dielectric,ferroelectric, and energy storage properties in dysprosium doped sodium bismuth titanate ceramics

In this work, Na_0.5(Bi_1-xDy_x)_0.5TiO₃ (0?≤?x?≤?15%) ceramics were prepared via solid state reaction method and were characterized. A stable and pure perovskite phase was revealed by X-ray diffraction analysis for all compositions and a symmetry change from rhombohedral to orthorhombic phase was detected beyond 10% of Dy substitution. The incorporation of Dy³⁺ into Sodium Bismuth Titanate (Na_0.5Bi_0.5TiO₃) matrix allows a substantial decrease of the coercive field, an increase in the resistivity, and leads to a high stability of the dielectric permittivity (??/?_(150?°C) ≤?±?15%) over a wide temperature range. Furthermore, this system was found to exhibit improved energy storage properties at high temperatures with a maximum energy density of 1.2?J/cm³ obtained for 2%Dy composition at 200?°C. The obtained results are very promising for energy storage capacitors operating at high temperatures.     

Distributed Coordination and Workflow on the World Wide Web

This paper describes WebFlow, an environment thatsupports distributed coordination services on theWorld Wide Web. WebFlow leverages the HTTP Webtransport protocol and consists of a number of toolsfor the development of applications that require thecoordination of multiple, distributed servers.Typical applications of WebFlow include distributeddocument workspaces, inter/intra-enterprise workflow,and electronic commerce. In this paper we describe thegeneral WebFlow architecture for distributedcoordination, and then focus on the environment fordistributed workflow.     

Design of High Speed AWGN Communication Channel Emulator

This paper presents a method for designing a high accuracy white gaussian noise generator suitable for communication channel emulation. The proposed solution is based on the combined use of the Box-Muller method and the central limit theorem. The resulting architecture provides a high accuracy AWGN with a low complexity architecture for a digital implementation in FPGA. The performance is studied by means of MATLAB simulations and various complexity figures are given.     

2-Methylthiazolidine and 4-ethylguaiacol,male sex pheromone components of the cockroachNauphoeta cinerea (dictyoptera,blaberidae): A reinvestigation

InNauphoeta cinerea, male calling behavior is associated with sex pheromone release by the sternal glands. The male pheromone that attracts females from a distance is a mixture of 2-methylthiazolidine and 4-ethylguaiacol. It is active at very low concentrations, 0.05 and 0.01 ng, respectively. Two other compounds, 3-hydroxy-2-butanone and 2-methyl-2thiazoline, act at close range, keeping the female in the vicinity of the male. The function of the volatile pheromone and those of previously described contact pheromones are discussed in regard to their possible involvement in the establishment of male dominant-subordinate relationships.     

Characterization and modeling of diffusion process for mass transport through the Tournemire argillites (Aveyron, France)

Argillites are one of the geological formations studied by IRSN for their confining properties for isolation of radioactive wastes. One of the main objectives is the study of water transport through rocks with very low water content and very low hydraulic conductivity by modeling of natural tracer profiles. This paper presents the protocol developed for and applied to the acquisition of data for chloride content in interstitial water of the Toarcian argillites at the Tournemire site (Southern France). This protocol is based on laboratory diffusion experiments and on modeling. Experimental data obtained during the transient and steady-state parts of diffusion experiments enable, respectively, the assessment of the diffusion coefficient and the determination of Cl concentration in pore water. Using this protocol, profiles with depth for both of these data sets have been acquired along the geological sequence. Taking into account the present knowledge of the geological and hydrogeological history of the Tournemire massif, a conceptual model granting the main role for mass transport to diffusion has been proposed. According to this conceptual model, a one-dimensional numerical model was built for simulating the mass transport of chloride through the sedimentary column, over 53 Ma. The good agreement between experimental data and calculated values for both diffusion coefficients and concentrations of chloride confirms that diffusion is likely the main process for mass transport in the massif. This model was also tested with the deuterium content of interstitial water, applying variable concentrations at the aquifer system boundaries for reflecting the thermal dependency of isotopic composition in precipitation. These simulations also reveal the likely important role of heterogeneities, such as fractures, in the variability of tracer concentrations with regards to a simple diffusion profile.     

Design and Implementation of an Agent Home Scheme Strategy for Prefetch-Based DSM Systems

In recent years, cluster computing has been widely investigated and there is no doubt that it can provide a cost-effective computing infrastructure by aggregating computational power, communication, and storage resources. Moreover, it is also considered to be a very attractive platform for low-cost supercomputing. Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems utilize the physical memory of each computing node interconnected in a private network to form a global virtual shared memory. Since this global shared memory is distributed among the computing nodes, accessing the data located in remote computing nodes is an absolute necessity. However, this action will result in significant remote memory access latencies which are major sources of overhead in DSM systems. For these reasons, in order to increase overall system performance and decrease this overhead, a number of strategies have been devised. Prefetching is one such approach which can reduce latencies, although it always increases the workload in the home nodes. In this paper, we propose a scheme named Agent Home Scheme. Its most noticeable feature, when compared to other schemes, is that the agent home distributes the workloads of each computing nodes when sending data. By doing this, we can reduce not only the workload of the home nodes by balancing the workload for each node, but also the waiting time. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain about 20% higher performance than the original JIAJIA, about 18% more than History Prefetching Strategy (HPS), and about 10% higher than Effective Prefetch Strategy (EPS).     

The Impact of Speculative Execution on SMT Processors

By executing two or more threads concurrently, Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT) architectures are able to exploit both Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) and Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) from the increased number of in-flight instructions that are fetched from multiple threads. However, due to incorrect control speculations, a significant number of these in-flight instructions are discarded from the pipelines of SMT processors (which is a direct consequence of these pipelines getting wider and deeper). Although increasing the accuracy of branch predictors may reduce the number of instructions so discarded from the pipelines, the prediction accuracy cannot be easily scaled up since aggressive branch prediction schemes strongly depend on the particular predictability inherently to the application programs. In this paper, we present an efficient thread scheduling mechanism for SMT processors, called SAFE-T (Speculation-Aware Front-End Throttling): it is easy to implement and allows an SMT processor to selectively perform speculative execution of threads according to the confidence level on branch predictions, hence preventing wrong-path instructions from being fetched. SAFE-T provides an average reduction of 57.9% in the number of discarded instructions and improves the instructions per cycle (IPC) performance by 14.7% on average over the ICOUNT policy across the multi-programmed workloads we simulate. This paper is an extended version of the paper, “Speculation Control for Simultaneous Multithreading,” which appeared in the Proceedings of the 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2004.     

Chemical sensor based on a novel capacitive microwave flexible transducer with polymer nanocomposite-carbon nanotube sensitive film

Microsystem Technologies - This study presents the results on the feasibility of a resonant planar chemical capacitive sensor in the microwave frequency range suitable for gas detection and...     

Near optimal interval observers bundle for uncertain bioreactors

In this paper we design an interval observer for the estimation of unmeasured variables of uncertain bioreactors. The observer is based on a bounded error observer, as proposed in [Lemesle, V., & Gouzé, J.-L. (2005). Hybrid bounded error observers for uncertain bioreactor models. Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, 27, 311-318], that makes use of a loose approximation of the bacterial kinetics. We first show how to generate guaranteed upper and lower bounds on the state, provided that known intervals for the initial condition and the uncertainties are available. These so-called framers depend on a tuning gain. They can be run in parallel and the envelope provides the best estimate. An optimality criterion is introduced leading to the definition of an optimal observer. We show that this criterion provides directly a gain set containing the best framers. The method is applied to the estimation of the total biomass of an industrial wastewater treatment plant, demonstrating its efficiency.     

Binding of the tautomeric forms of isoniazid-NAD adducts to the active site of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis enoyl-ACP reductase (InhA): a theoretical approach

The front-line antituberculosis drug isoniazid (INH) inhibits InhA, the NADH-dependent fatty acid biosynthesis enoyl ACP-reductase from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, via formation of covalent adducts with NAD (INH-NAD adducts). While ring tautomers were found the main species formed in solution, only the 4S chain INH-NAD tautomer was evidenced in the crystallized InhA:INH-NAD complex. In this study we attempted to explore the modes of interaction and energy binding of the different isomers placed in the active site of InhA with the help of various molecular modelling techniques. Ligand and enzyme models were generated with the help of the Vega ZZ program package. Resulting ligands were then docked into the InhA active site individually using computational automated docking package AUTODOCK 3.0.5. The more relevant docked conformations were then used to compute the interaction energy between the ligands and the InhA cavity. The AM1 Hamiltonian and the QM/MM ONIOM methodologies were used and the results compared. The various tautomers were found docked in almost the same place where INH-NAD was present as predicted by earlier X-ray crystallographic studies. However, some changes of ligand conformation and of the interactions ligand-protein were evidenced. The lower binding energy was observed for the 4S chain adduct that probably represents the effective active form of the INH-NAD adducts, as compared to the 4R epimer. The two 4S,7R and 4R,7S ring tautomers show intermediate and similar binding energies contrasting with their different experimental inhibitory potency on InhA. As a possible explanation based on calculated conformations, we formulated the hypothesis of an initial binding of the two ring tautomers to InhA followed by opening of only the ring hemiamidal 4S,7R tautomer (possibly catalyzed by Tyr158 phenolate basic group) to give the 4S chain INH-NAD tight-binding inhibitor. The predictions of ligand-protein interactions at the molecular level can be of primary importance in elucidating the mechanisms of action of isoniazid and InhA-related resistances, in identifying the effective mycobactericidal entities and, in further step, in the design of a new generation of antitubercular drugs.