Progress in application of high temperature superconductor in tokamak magnets

It has long been known that high temperature superconductors (HTS) could have an important role to play in the future of tokamak fusion research. Here we report on first results of the use of HTS in a tokamak magnet and on the progress in design and construction of the first fully-HTS tokamak.     

寻求新型节能家用电器解决方案

在全球经济快速发展的今天,人类赖以生存的地球正面临着严峻的环境威胁。虽然2009年全球温室气体排放量比上年下降1.3%,创10年来首降,但全球碳计划机构指出2010年全球二氧化碳排放量将再创历史纪录。     

Determination of Activity Coefficients of Semi-Volatile Organic Aerosols Using the Integrated Volume Method

We demonstrate the use of the Integrated Volume Method (IVM) to estimate activity coefficients of semi-volatile organic compounds pertinent to ambient/atmospheric aerosols in binary mixtures. We generate binary solution aerosols with different mole fractions of individual components; for each mixture, we measure total change in aerosol volume upon heating from 25 ^○ C to 35 ^○ C, with the aerosols being at equilibrium in both states. The change in aerosol volume, or in other words, the partitioning between the particle phase and the gas phase, is used to determine activity coefficients of the compounds as a function of their mole fraction in the mixture. We demonstrate this method using the following four model systems. System 1: adipic acid–pimelic acid, which illustrates polar organic–polar organic interactions. Non-ideal behavior was observed with activity coefficients around three at infinite dilution. System 2: adipic acid–dioctyl sebacate, which illustrates polar organic–non-polar organic interactions. The compounds in this experiment did not form a solution. System 3: adipic acid–ammonium sulfate, which illustrates polar organic–inorganic interactions. The compounds in this experiment did not form a solution. System 4: adipic acid–ambient extracts, which illustrates the potential use of the method to study partitioning behavior of individual components in a complex matrix approximating that of real ambient aerosol. The measured activity coefficients of adipic acid were less than unity for the tested range of mixing ratios, indicating suppression of volatility of this compound in ambient organic matrix.     

Polyarteritis nodosa presenting as temporal arteritis in a 9-year-old child

In a household survey in Guinea-Bissau, 319 episodes of diarrhea in children were followed by interviews every second day with the aim of investigating perceived morbidity and subsequent actions taken. The majority of the mothers had good knowledge of oral rehydration salts (ORS). However, only 58% of the episodes were treated with ORS and the amount given was insufficient. Mothers with no knowledge of ORS did not use it during the observed attack of diarrhea regardless of contact with a health center, which suggests that maternal knowledge is an important determinant of whether health personnel provide ORS. Children with diarrhea considered to be caused by teething were less likely to receive ORS in the acute phase (risk ratio = 0.6, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.5-0.9). Univariate analyses showed that the use of ORS was related to number of reported symptoms, the mother being the care taker, consultations, previous use of ORS, good knowledge of ORS, and having ORS sachets at home. Multivariate Cox regression analyses showed that the presence of ORS sachets at home at the onset of diarrhea was the strongest predictor of use (hazard ratio = 3.3, 95% CI = 1.9-3.6). Improved health education should focus more on the quantity of ORS needed, early signs of dehydration, treatment of teething diarrhea, and breast feeding, and address mothers who have no prior knowledge of ORS. Management of diarrhea may be improved by a more liberal distribution of ORS sachets.     

Parallel Gauss-Jordan elimination for the solution of dense linear systems

Any factorization/back substitution scheme for the solution of linear systems consists of two phases which are different in nature, and hence may be inefficient for parallel implementation on a single computational network. The Gauss-Jordan elimination scheme unifies the nature of the two phases of the solution process and thus seems to be more suitable for parallel architectures, especially if reconfiguration of the communication pattern is not permitted. In this communication, a computational network for the Gauss-Jordan algorithm is presented. This network compares favorably with optimal implementations of the Gauss elimination/back substitution algorithm.     

Damage Detection in Concrete by Fourier and Wavelet Analyses

The effectiveness of vibration-based methods in damage detection of a typical highway structure is investigated. Two types of full-scale concrete structures subjected to fatigue loads are studied: (1) Portland cement concrete pavements on grade; and (2) a simply supported prestressed concrete beams. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and continuous wavelet transform (CWT) are used in the analysis of the structures’ dynamic response to impact, and results from both techniques are compared. Both FFT and CWT can identify which frequency components exist in a signal. However, only the wavelet transform can show when a particular frequency occurs. Results of this research are such that FFT can detect the progression of damage in the beam but not in the slab. In contrast, the CWT analysis yielded a clear difference between the initial and damaged states for both structures. These findings confirm the conclusions of previous studies conducted on small-scale specimens that wavelet analysis has a great potential in the damage detection of concrete. The study also demonstrates that the approach is applicable to full-scale components of sizes similar or close to actual in-service structures.     

Optoelectronic buses for high-performance computing

Modern computer buses are typically organized by the three functions of data transfer, addressing, and arbitration/control. In this paper we present a fiber-based bus design which provides optical solutions for each of these functions. The design includes an all-optical addressing system, based on coincident pulse addressing, which eliminates the latency contribution and bandwidth limitation associated with electronic address decoding. The control system uses time-of-flight relationships between a priority chain and a feedback waveguide to implement fully distributed asynchronous and self-timed bus arbitration     

A time domain approach for avoiding crosstalk in optical blockingmultistage interconnection networks

Crosstalk in multistage interconnection networks can be avoided by ensuring that a switch is not used by two connections simultaneously, in order to support crosstalk-free communications among N inputs and N outputs, a space domain approach dilates an N×N network into one that is essentially equivalent to a 2N×2N network. Path conflicts, however may still exist in dilated networks. This paper proposes a time domain approach for avoiding crosstalk. Such an approach can be regarded as “dilating” a network in time, instead of space. More specifically, the connections that need to use the same switch are established during different time slots. This way, path conflicts are automatically avoided. The time domain dilation is useful for overcoming the limits on the network size while utilizing the high bandwidth of optical interconnects. We study the set of permutations whose crosstalk-free connections can be established in just two time slots using the time domain approach. While the space domain approach trades hardware complexity for crosstalk-free communications, the time domain approach trades time complexity. We compare the proposed time domain to the space domain approach by analyzing the tradeoffs involved in these two approaches     

Routing in modular fault-tolerant multiprocessor systems

In this paper, we consider a class of modular multiprocessor architectures in which spares are added to each module to cover for faulty nodes within that module, thus forming a fault-tolerant basic block (FTBB). In contrast to reconfiguration techniques that preserve the physical adjacency between active nodes in the system, our goal is to preserve the logical adjacency between active nodes by means of a routing algorithm which delivers messages successfully to their destinations. We introduce two-phase routing strategies that route messages first to their destination FTBB, and then to the destination nodes within the destination FTBB. Such a strategy may be applied to a variety of architectures including binary hypercubes and three-dimensional tori. In the presence of f faults in hypercubes and tori, we show that the worst case length of the message route is min {σ+f, (K+1)σ}+c where σ is the shortest path in the absence of faults, K is the number of spare nodes in an FTBB, and c is a small constant. The average routing overhead is much lower than the worst case overhead