Optimal Control of the Primary Drying Stage of Freeze Drying of Solutions in Vials Using Variational Calculus

The problem of operating freeze drying of pharmaceutical products in vials placed in trays of a freeze dryer to remove free water (in frozen state) at a minimum time was formulated as an optimal control problem. Two different types of freeze dryer designs were considered. In type I freeze dryer design, upper and lower plate temperatures were controlled together, while in type II freeze dryer design, upper and lower plate temperatures were controlled independently. The heat input to the material being dried and the drying chamber pressure were considered as control variables. Constraints were placed on the system state variables by the melting and scorch temperatures during primary drying stage. Necessary conditions of optimality for the primary drying stage of freeze drying process in vials are derived and presented. Furthermore, an approach for constructing the optimal control policies that would minimize the drying time for the primary drying stage was given. In order to analyze optimal control policy for the primary drying stage of the freeze-drying process in vials, a rigorous multi-dimensional unsteady state mathematical model was used. The theoretical approach presented in this work was applied in the freeze drying of skim milk. Significant reductions in the drying times of primary drying stage of freeze drying process in vials were obtained, as compared to the drying times obtained from conventional operational policies.     

Characterization of rheological properties of systems containing sugar substitutes and carrageenan

The effects of addition of κ-carrageenan to solutions containing 40% (w/w) sugar substitute on the rheological properties of these systems were investigated at 25 °C using a rotational viscometer at rotational speeds of 6, 12, 30, and 60 rev min⁻¹. The flow behaviour of the solutions was adequately described by the power law model with or without yield stress. The consistency index ( K ) and the flow behaviour index ( n ) were determined from shear stress vs. shear rate data. The flow parameters of the solutions depended on the carrageenan concentration. The apparent viscosities of the systems decreased with increasing shear rate, indicating pseudoplastic behaviour. The final carrageenan concentration was found to be an effective factor controlling the degree of sliminess of the model food systems studied.     

Millimeter-wave Ground-based Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging for Foreign Object Debris Detection: Experimental Studies at Short Ranges

In this paper, millimeter-wave imaging of foreign object debris (FOD)-type objects on the ground is studied with the help of ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GB-SAR) technique. To test the feasibility of detecting runway FODs with this technique, some preliminary experiments are conducted within short antenna-to-target ranges of small imaging patches. An automated stripmap GB-SAR system with stepped-frequency transmission is constructed together with a quasi-monostatic data collection operation. The imaging experiments for various braces and screws are then carried out by using 32–36?GHz and 90–95?GHz frequency bands of the millimeter-wave. Images reconstructed by a matched-filter based algorithm are analyzed to determine the proper system parameters for an efficient imaging and to comprehend the factors against a successful detection. Results demonstrate the capability of GB-SAR imaging in accurately locating these FOD-like targets under near-range operating conditions.     

Opportunistic Beamforming over Rayleigh Channels with Partial Side Information

In recent years, diversity techniques have evolved into highly attractive technology for wireless communications in different forms. For instance, the channel fluctuations of the users in a network are exploited as multiuser diversity by scheduling the user with the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). When fading is slow, beamforming at a multiple antenna transmitter is used to induce artificial channel fluctuations to ensure multiuser diversity in the network. Such a beamforming scheme is called opportunistic beamforming since the transmitter uses random beamforming to artificially induce opportunism in the network [1]. Opportunism requires a large number of users in the system in order to reach the performance of the true beamforming that uses perfect channel state information (CSI). In this paper we investigate the benefit of having partial CSI at an opportunistic transmitter. In the investigation, we focus on the maximum normalized SNR scheduling where user?s feedback consists of SNR relative to its channel gain. We show that opportunism can be beneficially used to increase the average throughput of the system. Simulations support the analytical average throughput results obtained as the amount of CSI and the number of users vary.     

Physical polymer surface modification methods and applications in food packaging polymers.

Continued innovations in the polymer industry have made polymer surface modification methods a subject of intense research. The importance and necessity of surface modification of plastics are explained, and the advantages of physical surface treatments over the less-sophisticated chemical methods are outlined. Currently available physical surface modification methods for food packaging polymers are reviewed from the food packaging perspective. These physical surface modification methods include flame, corona discharge, UV, gamma-ray, electron beam, ion beam, plasma, and laser treatments. The principle of operation of each method is briefly described, and the advantages and disadvantages of each technique are cited. The extent to which each of these methods can produce the specific modifications desired is discussed. Furthermore, the effects of each treatment on barrier, mechanical, and adhesion properties of food packaging polymers are also examined. Finally, an overview of economic aspects of sophisticated surface modification techniques, including ion beam, plasma, and laser treatments, is presented.     

A Practical Space-Code Correlator Receiver for DSP Based Software Radio Implementation in CDMA2000

Development of practical algorithms for beamforming in 3G CDMA systems and their software radio implementations are still a challenging task, which will facilitate upgrading of traditional base stations into smart antenna capable 3G base stations. In this paper, we propose a practical space-code correlator (SCC) receiver structure for its software radio implementation a DSP. SCC’s advantage comes from the fact that it doesn’t require any training sequence or learning parameter as in other algorithms (LMS or CM). DSP implementations of the SCC are performed using Texas Instruments C67xx family platforms. In the simulations, reverse link base band signal format of CDMA2000 is used and the effects of different array topologies (uniform linear array-ULA or uniform circular array-UCA) are considered. The implementation results regarding beamforming accuracy, weight vector computation time (execution time), search resolution effect on DOA estimation accuracy, DSP resource utilization, and received SINR are presented. The results show that DSP based SCC beamformer can estimate weight vectors within less than 10 ms with DOA search resolution of 2° especially when C6713 DSP is used. With faster DSPs and larger search resolutions, execution time could be significantly reduced as well. It provides comparable SINR performance with LMS and CM algorithms.

A capacitive threshold-logic gate

A dense and fast threshold-logic gate with a very high fan-in capacity is described. The gate performs sum-of-product and thresholding operations in an architecture comprising a poly-to-poly capacitor array and an inverter chain. The Boolean function performed by the gate is soft programmable. This is accomplished by adjusting the threshold with a dc voltage. Essentially, the operation is dynamic and thus, requires periodic reset. However, the gate can evaluate multiple input vectors in between two successive reset phases because evaluation is nondestructive. Asynchronous operation is, therefore, possible. The paper presents an electrical analysis of the gate, identifies its limitations, and describes a test chip containing four different gates of fan-in 30, 62, 127, and 255. Experimental results confirming proper functionality in all these gates are given, and applications in arithmetic and logic function blocks are described     

A compact high-speed (31,5) parallel counter circuit based oncapacitive threshold-logic gates

A novel high-speed circuit implementation of the (31,5)-parallel counter (i.e., population counter) based on capacitive threshold logic (CTL) is presented. The circuit consists of 20 threshold logic gates arranged in two stages, i.e., the parallel counter described here has an effective logic depth of two. The charge-based CTL gates are essentially dynamic circuits which require a periodic refresh or precharge cycle, but unlike conventional dynamic CMOS gates, the circuit can be operated in synchronous as well as in asynchronous mode. The counter circuit is implemented using conventional 1.2 μm double-poly CMOS technology, and it occupies a silicon area of about 0.08 mm². Extensive post-layout simulations indicate that the circuit has a typical input-to-output propagation delay of less than 3 ns, and the test circuit is shown to operate reliably when consecutive 31-b input vectors are applied at a rate of up to 16 Mvectors/s. With its demonstrated data processing capability of about 500 Mb/s, the CTL-based (31,5) parallel counter offers a number of application possibilities, e.g., in high-speed parallel multiplier arrays and data encoding circuits     

Interference analysis and capacity for forward link 3G CDMA network with adaptive antennas

In code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, the capacity of forward link (FL) communication to mobile receivers is limited primarily by co‐channel interference (CCI). Adaptive antenna arrays (AAAs) that use antenna arrays along with advanced signal processing at the base station (BS) have been proposed to mitigate this limitation. For a 3G CDMA cellular network, where each BS equipped with an AAA serves mixture of voice and data users within its coverage, we study FL capacity and investigate the effects of different factors (array topology, multipath angle spread, data rate, and beamforming algorithm) on this capacity under Rayleigh fading channel. By modeling the instantaneous signal‐to‐interference power ratio received at the mobile, we derive the system outage equation that considers blocking of either desired voice or data user. Simulation results show that for the same element spacing and number of antenna elements per cell, the uniform circular array (UCA) topology results in larger capacity than the sectorized uniform linear array (ULA) topology does, and that a larger angle spread or data user rate reduces FL capacity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fuzzy algorithms for combined quantization and dithering

Color quantization reduces the number of the colors in a color image, while the subsequent dithering operation attempts to create the illusion of more colors with this reduced palette. In quantization, the palette is designed to minimize the mean squared error (MSE). However, the dithering that follows enhances the color appearance at the expense of increasing the MSE. We introduce three joint quantization and dithering algorithms to overcome this contradiction. The basic idea is the same in two of the approaches: introducing the dithering error to the quantizer in the training phase. The fuzzy C-means (FCM) and the fuzzy learning vector quantization (FLVQ) algorithms are used to develop two combined mechanisms. In the third algorithm, we minimize an objective function including an inter-cluster separation (ICS) term to obtain a color palette which is more suitable for dithering. The goal is to enlarge the convex hull of the quantization colors to obtain the illusion of more colors after error diffusion. The color contrasts of images are also enhanced with the proposed algorithm. We test the results of these three new algorithms using quality metrics which model the perception of the human visual system and illustrate that substantial improvements are achieved after dithering