Measurement of pressure drop and flow resistance in microchannels with integrated micropillars

In the present study, we investigate single phase fluid flow through microchannels with integrated micropillars to calculate the pressure drop and flow resistance. The microchannels, which contain micropillars arranged in square and staggered arrangement, are fabricated in silicon substrate using standard photolithography and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) techniques. The DRIE technique results in precise and accurate fabrication with smooth and vertical wall profiles. Pressure drop measurements are performed on microchannels with integrated micropillars under creeping flow regime over a range of water flow rates from 50 to 600 μl/min. It is observed that the pressure drop varies linearly with increasing flow rates. Flow resistance ( $\Updelta P/Q$ ) is calculated using the pressure drop values and is found to be decreasing as the Darcy number ( $\sqrt{K/h^2}$ ) increases. In general, the square arrangement of pillars offers higher resistance to flow than their staggered counterparts. It is observed that the existing theoretical models fail to accurately predict the permeability of the microchannel with integrated micro-pillars, particularly for cases where the micropillars have smooth and accurate geometric conformity, as obtained in the microfabricated structures used in the present study.     

A Local Pressure Boundary Condition Spectral Collocation Scheme for the Three-Dimensional Navier–Stokes Equations

A spectral collocation scheme for the three-dimensional incompressible \(({\varvec{u}},p)\) formulation of the Navier–Stokes equations, in domains \(\varOmega \) with a non-periodic boundary condition, is described. The key feature is the high order approximation, by means of a local Hermite interpolant, of a Neumann boundary condition for use in the numerical solution of the pressure Poisson system. The time updates of the velocity \({\varvec{u}}\) and pressure \(p\) are decoupled as a result of treating the pressure gradient in the momentum equation explicitly in time. The pressure update is computed from a pressure Poisson equation. Extension of the overall methodology to the Boussinesq system is also described. The uncoupling of the pressure and velocity time updates results in a highly efficient scheme that is simple to implement and well suited for simulating moderate to high Reynolds and Rayleigh number flows. Accuracy checks are presented, along with simulations of the lid-driven cavity flow and a differentially heated cavity flow, to demonstrate the scheme produces accurate three-dimensional results at a reasonable computational cost.     

Micro molecular tagging velocimetry for analysis of gas flows in mini and micro systems

A new micro molecular tagging velocimetry (μMTV) setup has been developed to analyze velocity fields in confined internal gas flows. MTV is a little-intrusive velocimetry technique. It relies on the properties of molecular tracers which can experience relatively long lifetime luminescence once excited by a laser beam with an appropriate wavelength. The technique has been validated for acetone seeded flows of argon inside a 1 mm depth rectangular minichannel, with a multilayer design offering two optical accesses. Velocity profiles have been obtained using a specific data reduction process, with a resolution in the order of 15 μm. The experimental data are compared to theoretical velocity profiles of compressible pressure-driven flows. A good agreement is observed, except close to the walls, where the accuracy would still need to be improved. Following these first results obtained at atmospheric pressure, the influence of pressure on the luminescence intensity of acetone molecules is analyzed. The obtained data lead to a discussion of MTV applicability to rarefied flows and its possible use for a direct measurement of velocity slip at the channel walls.     

Finding peculiar compositions of two frequent strings with background texts

We consider mining unusual patterns from a set  \(T\) of target texts. A typical method outputs unusual patterns if their observed frequencies are far from their expectation estimated under an assumed probabilistic model. However, it is difficult for the method to deal with the zero frequency and thus it suffers from data sparseness. We employ another set  \(B\) of background texts to define a composition  \(xy\) to be peculiar if both \(x\) and  \(y\) are more frequent in  \(B\) than in  \(T\) and conversely \(xy\) is more frequent in  \(T\) . \(xy\) is unusual because \(x\) and  \(y\) are infrequent in  \(T\) while \(xy\) is unexpectedly frequent compared to  \(xy\) in  \(B\) . To find frequent subpatterns and infrequent patterns simultaneously, we develop a fast algorithm using the suffix tree and show that it scales almost linearly under practical settings of parameters. Experiments using DNA sequences show that found peculiar compositions basically appear in rRNA while patterns found by an existing method seem not to relate to specific biological functions. We also show that discovered patterns have similar lengths at which the distribution of frequencies of fixed length substrings begins to skew. This fact explains why our method can find long peculiar compositions.     

Geodesic Order Types

The geodesic between two points a and b in the interior of a simple polygon P is the shortest polygonal path inside P that connects a to b. It is thus the natural generalization of straight line segments on unconstrained point sets to polygonal environments. In this paper we use this extension to generalize the concept of the order type of a set of points in the Euclidean plane to geodesic order types. In particular, we show that, for any set S of points and an ordered subset \(\mathcal {B} \subseteq S\) of at least four points, one can always construct a polygon P such that the points of \(\mathcal {B} \) define the geodesic hull of S w.r.t. P, in the specified order. Moreover, we show that an abstract order type derived from the dual of the Pappus arrangement can be realized as a geodesic order type.     

Optimization of design and characterization of a novel micro-pumping system with peristaltic motion

In this work, we present a novel design of peristalsis based micro pump with optimized fluid chambers possessing improved discharge efficiency per unit volume of the pumping architecture and reduced reverse flow. Such designs are very often important from the standpoint of blood cell sorting assays where a full delivery of fluid containment within the pumping chamber is critical. The paper uses FLUENT and COMSOL simulations to look at the fluid flow within the pumping chamber due to the deflecting actuator membrane during pumping cycle. The resulting effect of fluid-membrane interaction has been evaluated on different chamber designs for observing the lateral velocity distribution profile of fluid in the connecting channels. It has been observed through particle image velocimetry (PIV) that the optimized design has minimized chamber retainability with maximum deflection of the actuator membrane and minimum reverse flow component. Optimized geometrical profile formulated above was seen to allow the maximum contact area between actuating membrane and fluid containment thus reducing the problem of fluid retainability. Other experimental studies show that the new design has much lower percentage retainability of biological and other fluids contained within the chambers which makes it a comparatively high efficiency micropumping system with respect to the conventional design with circular membrane and chambers. The experimental evaluation of the new micro pump design has shown its least count to be 0.1 μl/min which is very well comparing with some of the other micropumping mechanisms like electro-osmotic, magneto-hydrodynamic mechanisms (Laser and Santiago in J Micromech Microeng 14:35, 2004; Iverson et al. 2008) and additionally provides better discharge efficiency per unit volume of the pumping architecture, lower retainability, minimized reverse flow and precise pumping of fluids.     

Fault tolerance in distributed systems using fused state machines

Replication is a standard technique for fault tolerance in distributed systems modeled as deterministic finite state machines (DFSMs or machines). To correct \(f\) crash or \(\lfloor f/2 \rfloor \) Byzantine faults among \(n\) different machines, replication requires \(nf\) backup machines. We present a solution called fusion that requires just \(f\) backup machines. First, we build a framework for fault tolerance in DFSMs based on the notion of Hamming distances. We introduce the concept of an ( \(f\) , \(m\) )-fusion, which is a set of \(m\) backup machines that can correct \(f\) crash faults or \(\lfloor f/2 \rfloor \) Byzantine faults among a given set of machines. Second, we present an algorithm to generate an ( \(f\) , \(f\) )-fusion for a given set of machines. We ensure that our backups are efficient in terms of the size of their state and event sets. Third, we use locality sensitive hashing for the detection and correction of faults that incurs almost the same overhead as that for replication. We detect Byzantine faults with time complexity \(O(n f)\) on average while we correct crash and Byzantine faults with time complexity \(O(n \rho f)\) with high probability, where \(\rho \) is the average state reduction achieved by fusion. Finally, our evaluation of fusion on the widely used MCNC’91 benchmarks for DFSMs shows that the average state space savings in fusion (over replication) is 38 % (range 0–99 %). To demonstrate the practical use of fusion, we describe its potential application to two areas: sensor networks and the MapReduce framework. In the case of sensor networks a fusion-based solution can lead to significantly fewer sensor-nodes than a replication-based solution. For the MapReduce framework, fusion can reduce the number of map-tasks compared to replication. Hence, fusion results in considerable savings in state space and other resources such as the power needed to run the backups.     

A novel distributed congestion control for bufferless network-on-chip

Bufferless Network-on-Chip (NoC) emerges as an interesting option for NoC design in recent years, which can save considerable router power and area. However, bufferless NoC only works well under low-to-medium load because it becomes more easily congested as message injection rate increases. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed source-throttling congestion control mechanism that relieves the effect of congestion in bufferless NoC under high load, called Cbufferless. The proposed strategy uses a novel congestion detection and control mechanism, computing average deflection rate of routing flit and distributed throttling message injection. Utilizing the new mechanism, the congestion information can be directly obtained inside node, which allows the mechanism to be fully distributed without requiring any transmission of global congestion information among neighbor routers and within a router. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism improves system throughput by up to $\sim $ 30 and $\sim $ 15.5 %, saves energy consumption by up to $\sim $ 40 and $\sim $ 19 % than that of baseline and injection rate throttling bufferless NoCs, respectively, and keeps lower message latency under congested load when compared.     

Complexity of Rational and Irrational Nash Equilibria

We introduce two new natural decision problems, denoted as ? RATIONAL NASH and ? IRRATIONAL NASH, pertinent to the rationality and irrationality, respectively, of Nash equilibria for (finite) strategic games. These problems ask, given a strategic game, whether or not it admits (i) a rational Nash equilibrium where all probabilities are rational numbers, and (ii) an irrational Nash equilibrium where at least one probability is irrational, respectively. We are interested here in the complexities of ? RATIONAL NASH and ? IRRATIONAL NASH. Towards this end, we study two other decision problems, denoted as NASH-EQUIVALENCE and NASH-REDUCTION, pertinent to some mutual properties of the sets of Nash equilibria of two given strategic games with the same number of players. The problem NASH-EQUIVALENCE asks whether or not the two sets of Nash equilibria coincide; we identify a restriction of its complementary problem that witnesses ? RATIONAL NASH. The problem NASH-REDUCTION asks whether or not there is a so called Nash reduction: a suitable map between corresponding strategy sets of players that yields a Nash equilibrium of the former game from a Nash equilibrium of the latter game; we identify a restriction of NASH-REDUCTION that witnesses ? IRRATIONAL NASH. As our main result, we provide two distinct reductions to simultaneously show that (i) NASH-EQUIVALENCE is co- $\mathcal{NP}$ -hard and ? RATIONAL NASH is $\mathcal{NP}$ -hard, and (ii) NASH-REDUCTION and ? IRRATIONAL NASH are both $\mathcal{NP}$ -hard, respectively. The reductions significantly extend techniques previously employed by Conitzer and Sandholm (Proceedings of the 18th Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 765–771, 2003; Games Econ. Behav. 63(2), 621–641, 2008).     

SLAC: Statistical total lesion metabolic activity computation by fuzzy unsupervised learning of PET images

Accurate lesion metabolic response estimation is imperative for efficient tumor staging and follow-up studies. Positron emission tomography (PET) successfully images the lesion metabolic activity. Nonetheless, on course of accurate delineation, chances are high to end up with activity underestimation as, due to the limited resolution, the PET images suffer from partial volume effects. Recently, PET images were modeled as a fuzzy mixture to delineate lesions accurately. We extend this work by proposing a statistical lesion activity computation (SLAC) approach to robustly estimate the total lesion activity (TLA) directly from the modeled partial volume mixtures, without an explicit delineation. To evaluate the proposed method, PET scans of phantoms containing spherical and non-spherical lesions with increased activity uptake were simulated. The PET images were reconstructed with the standard clinically used maximum likelihood expectation maximization and an edge preserving maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm, both with resolution recovery. From these images, the TLA was estimated in each lesion using the proposed method and compared to the TLA estimation in the tumor delineations obtained with three state-of-the-art PET delineation schemes. SLAC outperformed TLA estimation via tumor delineation and showed robust against variation in reconstruction parameters. With reference to the ground truth knowledge, SLAC gives median $\delta $ TLA $~\approx $  5 % for spherical lesions. For more realistic non-spherical lesions, median $\delta $ TLA $~\approx $  15 %.     

A new spatial IP assignment method for IP-based wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), one of the commercial wireless mesh networks (WMNs), are envisioned to provide an effective solution for sensor-based AmI (Ambient Intelligence) systems and applications. To enable the communications between AmI sensor networks and the most popular TCP/IP networks seamlessly, the best solution model is to run TCP/IP directly on WSNs (Mulligan et al. 2009; Hui and Culler 2008; Han and Mam 2007; Kim et al. 2007; Xiaohua et al. 2004; Dunkels et al. 2004; Dunkels et al. 2004; Dunkels 2001; Dunkels et al. 2004). In this case, an IP assignment method is required to assign each sensor node a unique IP address. SIPA (Dunkels et al. 2004) is the best known IP assignment method that uses spatial relations and locations of sensor nodes to assign their IP addresses. It has been applied in Contiki (Dunkels et al. 2004), a famous WSN operating system, to support the 6LowPAN protocol. In Chang et al. (2009), we proposed the SLIPA (Scan-Line IP Assignment) algorithm to improve the assignment success rate (ASR) obtained by SIPA. SLIPA can achieve a good ASR when sensor nodes are uniformly distributed. However, if sensor nodes are deployed by other distributions, the improvements would be limited. This paper proposes a new spatial IP assignment method, called SLIPA-Q (SLIPA with equal-quantity partition), to improve SLIPA. Experiments show that, by testing the proposed method 1,000 times with 1,000 randomly deployed sensor nodes, the average ASR obtained by SLIPA-Q is over two times of that obtained by SLIPA. Under the same 88% ASR, the average numbers of sensor nodes those can be successfully assigned by SLIPA-Q, SLIPA, and SIPA are 950, 850, and 135, respectively. Comparing to previous spatial IP assignment methods, SLIPA-Q can achieve dramatic improvements in ASR for assigning IP addresses to a large set of sensor nodes.     

Fabrication of the cyclical fluid channel using the surface acoustic wave actuator and continuous fluid pumping in the cyclical fluid channel

A surface acoustic wave (SAW) device has been reported as a micro fluid device such as a pump of a water droplet so far (Renaudin et al. in μTAS, pp 599–601, 2004, 1:551–553, 2005; Sritharan et al. in Appl Phys Lett 88:054102, 2006; Wixforth in Anal Bioanal Chem 379:982–991, 2004; Yamamoto et al. in μTAS, pp 1072–1074, 2005). The SAW device is an interdigital transducer (IDT) fabricated on the piezoelectric substrate only. IDTs are advantageous in terms of integration, miniaturization, free position setting on the substrate and simple fabrication process because of their simple structure. Therefore, the SAW device is easy to apply to integrated chemical system such as lab-on-a-chip. The SAW drives the liquid homogenously by the transmission of surface vibrations of the substrate. Thus, both ends of the channel for pressure loading are not necessary to pump the liquid by using the SAW. The SAW can pump the liquid in both of a closed channel and an opened channel, although continuous flow pumping using an external pump is difficult for no loading pressure in the closed fluid channel. In this paper, we proposed and fabricated the micro fluid devices combined cyclical fluid channel and SAW actuator for liquid pumping. This device is fabricated on a piezoelectric substrate (LiNbO₃) with UV photolithography and wet etching. Structure material of cyclical fluid channel is epoxy photoresist SU-8 100. Then, it is demonstrated to continuous flow pumping and reciprocal flow pumping in the channel. As a result of optimization of a SAW pump’s structural parameter, 32.5, 71.3 and 108.0 mm/s are achieved in the 500, 1,000 and 2,000 μm channel width as a maximum flow velocity.     

Development of a novel piezoresistive thin film sensor system based on hydrogenated carbon

Thin film sensor systems based on hydrogenated carbon have the advantage to combine two very important characteristics in order to be used in measurement engineering: Firstly, the sensory layer demonstrates piezoresistive behavior and secondly its good properties related to hardness and wear resistance lead in a tribologically stable system. Therefore, the thin film sensor systems can be applied into the main distribution of force within machine parts or used for universal interchangeable sensor systems, e.g. sensory washers. In this article the deposition of a self-contained thin film sensor system on a large technical component (spindle shaft) is shown. The spindle shaft with a length of 480 mm and an outer diameter of 90 mm is part of a belt driven machining spindle for planing machines in woodworking industries. In order to establish a measurement system, which allows monitoring the clamping force of the tool holder and the imbalance of the mounted tool, the thin film sensor system was directly applied to the front surface of the spindle shaft. For this application a novel self-contained thin film sensor system was developed, which consists of an alumina layer for electrical isolation, a chromium layer to establish internal sensor electrodes, a piezoresistive hydrogenated carbon layer (1 μm) and a second covering wear resistance and insulation layer (silicon and oxygen modified carbon layer). The piezoresistive sensor layer and the top layer are part of the diamond like carbon layer family (Robertson, Diam Relat Mater 12:79–84, 2003; Bewilogua et al. DLC based coatings for tribological applications, pp. 67–75, 2006; Biehl et al. Thin Solid Films 515(3):1171–1175, 2006, Novel measurement and monitoring system for forming processes based on piezoresistive thin film systems. Springer Verlag, pp. 879–883, 2010).     

Self-Referential Justifications in Epistemic Logic

This paper is devoted to the study of self-referential proofs and/or justifications, i.e., valid proofs that prove statements about these same proofs. The goal is to investigate whether such self-referential justifications are present in the reasoning described by standard modal epistemic logics such as  $\mathsf{S4}$ . We argue that the modal language by itself is too coarse to capture this concept of self-referentiality and that the language of justification logic can serve as an adequate refinement. We consider well-known modal logics of knowledge/belief and show, using explicit justifications, that $\mathsf{S4}$ , $\mathsf{D4}$ , $\mathsf{K4}$ , and  $\mathsf{T}$ with their respective justification counterparts  $\mathsf{LP}$ , $\mathsf{JD4}$ , $\mathsf{J4}$ , and  $\mathsf{JT}$ describe knowledge that is self-referential in some strong sense. We also demonstrate that self-referentiality can be avoided for  $\mathsf{K}$ and  $\mathsf{D}$ . In order to prove the former result, we develop a machinery of minimal evidence functions used to effectively build models for justification logics. We observe that the calculus used to construct the minimal functions axiomatizes the reflected fragments of justification logics. We also discuss difficulties that result from an introduction of negative introspection.     

Time limitations and geometrical parameters in the design of microfluidic comparators

The ability to control the flow of particles (e.g., droplets and cells) in microfluidic environments can enable new methods for synthesis of biomaterials (Mann and Ozin in Nature 382:313–318, 1996), biocharacterization, and medical diagnosis (Pipper et al. in Nat Med 13:1259–1263, 2007). Understanding the factors that affect the particle passage can improve the control over the particles’ flow through microchannels (Vanapalli et al. in Lab Chip 9:982, 2009). The first step to understand the particle passage is to measure the resulting flow rate, induced pressure drop across the channel, and other parameters. Flow rates and pressure drops during passage of a particle through microchannels are typically measured using microfluidic comparators. Since the first microfluidic comparators were reported, a few design factors have been explored experimentally and theoretically, e.g., sensitivity (Vanapalli et al. in Appl Phys Lett 90:114109, 2007). Nevertheless, there is still a gap in the understanding of the temporal and spatial resolution limits of microfluidic comparators. Here we explore, theoretically and experimentally, the factors that affect the spatial and temporal resolution. We determined that the comparator sensitivity is defined by the device geometry adjacent and upstream the measuring point in the comparator. Further, we determined that, in order of importance, the temporal resolution is limited by the convective timescale, capacitive timescale due to channel expansion, and unsteady timescale due to the flow inertia. Finally, we explored the flow velocity limits by characterizing the transition between low to moderate Reynolds numbers (Re <<1 to Re ~ 50). The present work can guide the design of microfluidic comparators and clarify the limits of this technique.     

A Distributed Mincut/Maxflow Algorithm Combining Path Augmentation and Push-Relabel

We propose a novel distributed algorithm for the minimum cut problem. Motivated by applications like volumetric segmentation in computer vision, we aim at solving large sparse problems. When the problem does not fully fit in the memory, we need to either process it by parts, looking at one part at a time, or distribute across several computers. Many mincut/maxflow algorithms are designed for the shared memory architecture and do not scale to this setting. We consider algorithms that work on disjoint regions of the problem and exchange messages between the regions. We show that the region push-relabel algorithm of Delong and Boykov (A scalable graph-cut algorithm for N-D grids, in CVPR, 2008) uses Θ(n ²) rounds of message exchange, where n is the number of vertices. Our new algorithm performs path augmentations inside the regions and push-relabel style updates between the regions. It uses asymptotically less message exchanges, $O(\mathcal{B}^{2})$ , where $\mathcal{B}$ is the set of boundary vertices. The sequential and parallel versions of our algorithm are competitive with the state-of-the-art in the shared memory model. By achieving a lower amount of message exchanges (even asymptotically lower in our synthetic experiments), they suit better for solving large problems using a disk storage or a distributed system.     

Local projection stabilisation on S-type meshes for convection–diffusion problems with characteristic layers

Singularly perturbed convection–diffusion problems with exponential and characteristic layers are considered on the unit square. The discretisation is based on layer-adapted meshes. The standard Galerkin method and the local projection scheme are analysed for bilinear and higher order finite element where enriched spaces were used. For bilinears, first order convergence in the ε-weighted energy norm is shown for both the Galerkin and the stabilised scheme. However, supercloseness results of second order hold for the Galerkin method in the ε-weighted energy norm and for the local projection scheme in the corresponding norm. For the enriched ${\mathcal{Q}_p}$ -elements, p ≥ 2, which already contain the space ${\mathcal{P}_{p+1}}$ , a convergence order p + 1 in the ε-weighted energy norm is proved for both the Galerkin method and the local projection scheme. Furthermore, the local projection methods provides a supercloseness result of order p + 1 in local projection norm.