Crystallographic Texture Development in Bismuth Sodium Titanate Prepared by Reactive-Templated Grain Growth Method

Bi_0.5Na_0.5TiO₃ (BNT) and 0.94Bi_0.5Na_0.5TiO₃·0.06BaTiO₃ (BNT–BT) bulk ceramics with extensive 〈100〉 texture were prepared by the reactive-templated grain growth method, using platelike Bi₄Ti₃O₁₂ (BIT) particles as templates for BNT. Calcined compacts were composed of matrix grains with random orientation and 〈100〉-oriented grains transformed from aligned BIT particles, and the texture developed by the growth of oriented grains during sintering. Ceramics with extensive texture were obtained by using the starting mixture containing the maximum concentration of platelike BIT to form the maximum volume fraction of oriented grains.     

Direct Observation of Internal Structure in Spray-Dried Alumina Granules

The internal structure of spray-dried alumina granules was characterized by optical microscopy by immersing them in a liquid having a refractive index close to that of alumina. This method provides a unique technique for the detailed analysis of the internal structure of spray-dried granules.     

PTCR Characteristics in Barium Titanate Ceramics with Curie Points Between 60° and 360°C

PTCR characteristics in porous semiconducting barium titanate ceramics with Curie points from 60° to 360°C were investigated. The magnitude of the PTCR effect in these cerumics decreases self-onsistently with increasing Curie point within this temperature range. A PTCR efSect of more than 4 orders of magnitude was ahserved, for a Ba_0.44Pb_0.6TiO₃ ceramic with a Curie point of 360°C .     

Molecular dynamics model structures for the molten globule state of {alpha}-lactalbumin: aromatic residue clusters I and II

To model the molten globule structure of -lactalbumin, moleculardynamics (MD) simulations were carried out for the protein inexplicit water at high temperature. In these simulations, long-rangeCoulomb interactions were evaluated explicitly with an originalmethod (particle–particle and particle–cell: PPPC)to avoid artifacts caused by the cut-off. The MD simulationswere started from two initial conditions to verify that similarresults would be obtained. From the last 150 ps trajectoriesof the two MD simulations, two partially unfolded average structureswere obtained. These structures had the following common structuralfeatures which are characteristic of the molten globule state.The radii of gyration for these conformations were 7.4 and 9.6%larger than that of the native state. These values were almostthe same as the experimental value (9.6%) observed recentlyby small-angle X-ray scattering (Kataoka,M., Kuwajima,K., Tokunaga,F.and Goto,Y., 1997, Protein Sci., 6, 422–430). Furthermore,aromatic residues of clusters I and II in these structures werefar apart from each other except for Try103–Trp104. Thisresult is in good agreement with NMR experimental results forthe acid-denatured molten globule state (Alexandrescu et al.,1992, 1993); that is, NOE signals between the aromatic residueswere not observed, except for that of Try103–Trp104 inthe molten globule state. Other structural features of thesemodels for the molten globule state are discussed with referenceto native state structures.     

Domain Adaptation for Structured Regression

Discriminative regression models have proved effective for many vision applications (here we focus on 3D full-body and head pose estimation from image and depth data). However, dataset bias is common and is able to significantly degrade the performance of a trained model on target test sets. As we show, covariate shift, a form of unsupervised domain adaptation (USDA), can be used to address certain biases in this setting, but is unable to deal with more severe structural biases in the data. We propose an effective and efficient semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) approach for addressing such more severe biases in the data. Proposed SSDA is a generalization of USDA, that is able to effectively leverage labeled data in the target domain when available. Our method amounts to projecting input features into a higher dimensional space (by construction well suited for domain adaptation) and estimating weights for the training samples based on the ratio of test and train marginals in that space. The resulting augmented weighted samples can then be used to learn a model of choice, alleviating the problems of bias in the data; as an example, we introduce SSDA twin Gaussian process regression (SSDA-TGP) model. With this model we also address the issue of data sharing, where we are able to leverage samples from certain activities (e.g., walking, jogging) to improve predictive performance on very different activities (e.g., boxing). In addition, we analyze the relationship between domain similarity and effectiveness of proposed USDA versus SSDA methods. Moreover, we propose a computationally efficient alternative to TGP (Bo and Sminchisescu 2010), and it’s variants, called the direct TGP. We show that our model outperforms a number of baselines, on two public datasets: HumanEva and ETH Face Pose Range Image Dataset. We can also achieve 8–15 times speedup in computation time, over the traditional formulation of TGP, using the proposed direct formulation, with little to no loss in performance.     

Development of large-scale stacked-type electrostatic actuators for use as artificial muscles

Electrostatic actuators have the advantages of light weight, flexibility, and high energy efficiency, which make them suitable for use as artificial muscles. However, a traditional electrostatic actuator cannot generate long strokes and a high force density at the same time because such actuator would excessively widen the gap between the electrodes because of its structure. This paper presents a newly developed large-scale stacked-type electrostatic actuator (LSEA) intended for use as an artificial muscle for robots. LSEA is a multi-stacked electrostatic actuator that can be linearly contracted by the application of a voltage. It has a unique structure that prevents overextension of the gap between the electrodes. It can therefore generate a large force. The spring characteristics and the relationship between the contractive force and the stroke were experimentally determined. The findings showed that LSEA prevents the overextension of the gap between the electrodes and has a high contraction ratio that is equivalent to that of a mammalian skeletal muscle.     

Fate of the chlorine and fluorine in a sub-bituminous coal during pyrolysis and gasification

The fate of the chlorine and fluorine present in a sub-bituminous coal from Indonesia during pyrolysis and gasification has been studied with fixed and entrained bed reactors. The rate profile for HCl evolved in the temperature programmed pyrolysis exhibits the main and shoulder peaks at 480 and 600 °C, respectively. Model experiments and subsequent Cl 2p XPS measurements show that HCl reacts with metal impurities and carbon active sites at 500 °C to be retained as inorganic and organic chlorine forms, from which HCl evolves again at elevated temperatures. It is suggested that the HCl observed in the coal pyrolysis may originate from the above-mentioned chlorine functionalities formed by secondary reactions involving the nascent char. In the CO₂ gasification of the 900 °C char at 1000 °C and 2.5 MPa, any measurable amounts of HCl and HF could not be detected even at a high conversion of 75 wt% (daf), suggesting the accumulation of these halogens in the residual char. When the coal is injected into an O₂-blown, entrained bed gasifier at 1200-1400 °C under 2.6 MPa, the partial oxidation proceeds to a larger extent at a higher O₂/coal ratio, whereas the chlorine and fluorine are enriched in the remaining char, and the extent of the enrichment at the latter stage of gasification is larger with the fluorine. The XPS measurements of the chars reveal the presence of the broad F 1 s peak, which can cover a wide range of binding energies attributable to inorganic and organic fluorine. The halogen enrichment during gasification is discussed in terms of secondary reactions of HCl and HF with char.     

Influence of ash composition on heavy metal emissions in ash melting process

Two kinds of fly ash, discharged in the combustion of either refused derived fuel (RDF) or car shredder dust (SD), were examined for the emission of heavy metals in melting process under oxidizing and reducing conditions. The residual fractions of heavy metal in slag were experimentally estimated. As a result, it was confirmed that several volatile heavy metals were readily emitted during melting process. The type of atmosphere provided for the melting process was found to affect the emission of some volatile metals in RDF ash, but not in SD ash. The emission of volatile heavy metals in RDF ash under oxidizing conditions was lower than under any other conditions in this study. The emission behavior of iron and heavy metals in RDF ash under reducing conditions was similar to that in SD ash. These facts indicated that phosphorous in RDF ash had the property of fixing the volatile metals in the slag only under oxidizing conditions. Then the mixture of SD ash with phosphorous oxide powder was also tested in a melting process, and the result was consistent with the above inference of the effect of phosphorous.