Guest Editors' Introduction: Attacking Functional Verification through Hybrid Techniques

Hybrid techniques are effective for exploring interesting corner cases, coverage holes, invariant variations, and so forth, in the general area of directed functional validation. However, despite the emergence of several effective hybrid validation techniques, several questions still remain. The five articles in this special issue help explain some of the different facets of this area.     

High-temperature sensible-heat storage options

Alkali-metal carbonate salts meet the requirements for high-temperature solar central receiver systems, but because of their corrosiveness they present special problems in the design of storage tanks. In order to reduce corrosion and temperature sufficiently to retain strength in the storage containing wall, internal and thermal insulation is required. We present design options and operation criteria for sensible-heat, molten-salt storage with internal insulation.     

Oxygen glow discharge experiment to remove deposited layers and to release trapped hydrogen isotopes in HT-7 superconducting tokamak

An experiment to remove re-deposited layers and to release hydrogen using a glow discharge in oxygen (O-GDC) has been performed in the HT-7 superconducting tokamak. In the absence of magnetic fields, the O-GDC wall conditioning had produced rapid, controlled co-deposit removal. Average removal rates, 5.2 × 10²² H-atoms/h, 5.65 × 10²¹ D-atoms/h and 5.53 × 10²² C-atoms/h, respectively, were obtained during 145 min O-GDC experiment in the pressure range 0.5-1.5 Pa. The corresponding removal rate of co-deposited films was ∼1.19 μm/day (26.5 g/day for carbon) based on an area of 12 m². Compared to thermo-oxidation and O-ICR experiment, high pressure O-GDC wall conditioning promoted the oxidation and improved the C and D atoms removal. In the O-GDC experiment, the removal rates of H-atoms and D-atoms as H₂O, HDO and D₂O were higher than that of H₂ and D₂ by factors of about 20 and 50, respectively. During the 145 min O-GDC experiment, about 14.5% O-atoms were converted into carbon oxides and hydroxides, and about 5.37 × 10²² O-atoms were adsorbed on the walls corresponding to a coverage of 4.5 × 10²¹ O/m² on an wall area of 12 m². In a 100 min helium glow discharge (He-GDC) following the O-GDC experiment, 1.53 × 10²² O-atoms, about 28.5% oxygen retained on the walls, were removed. The removal rate of H-atoms in He-GDC cleaning after O-GDC experiment was lower than that in He-GDC cleaning before O-GDC experiment, which indicates that the O-GDC wall conditioning had effectively reduced hydrogen retention on the walls.     

Inference and learning in hybrid probabilistic network

This paper proposed a novel hybrid probabilistic network, which is a good tradeoff between the model complexity and learnability in practice. It relaxes the conditional independence assumptions of Naive Bayes while still permitting efficient inference and learning. Experimental studies on a set of natural domains prove its clear advantages with respect to the generalization ability.     

Matrix partial fraction expansions of rational matrices

A general and rigorous derivation is made of a new formula, established recently in the literature, for matrix partial fraction expansion of a rational matrix. The procedure, by use of a minimal Jordan realization of the rational matrix, provides as a byproduct, general expressions for residue matrices in terms of products of columns of the output matrix and rows of the input matrix of the realization.     

Mass transfer kinetics of neodymium(III) extraction by calix[4]arene carboxylic acid using a constant interfacial area cell with laminar flow

BACKGROUND: Thermodynamics and kinetics data are both important to explain the extraction property. In order to develop a novel separation technology superior to current extraction systems, many promising extractants have been developed including calixarene carboxylic acids. The extraction thermodynamics behavior of calix[4]arene carboxylic acids has been reported extensively. In this study, the mass transfer kinetics of neodymium(III) and the interfacial behavior of calix[4]arene carboxylic acid were investigated. RESULTS: The rate constant (K_ao) becomes constant when the stirring speed was controlled between 250 rpm and 400 rpm. The activation energy (E_a) was calculated to be 21·41 kJ mol^?1 or 88·17 kJ mol^?1 (dependent on temperature) from the slope of log K_ao against 1000/T. The linear relationship between the specific area and the extraction rate is the characteristic of an interfacial reaction control. The minimum bulk concentration of the extractant necessary to saturate the interface (C_min) is lower than 4·19 × 10^?4 mol L^?1. CONCLUSION: The effect of stirring speed, temperature, and species concentration on the extraction rate demonstrates that the extraction regime depends on the extraction conditions. The chemical reaction control governs the extraction regime at temperatures below 303 K and a mixed control regime occurs when the temperature is between 303 K and 318 K. The probable locale for the chemical reaction is at the liquid–liquid interface and the rate equation is deduced to be: ? d[Nd³⁺]_(a)/dt = k_f[Nd³⁺]_(a)[H₄A]_(o)^0·727[H⁺]_(a)^?0·978. The rate‐controlling step was suggested by the analysis of the experimental results. Copyright © 2008 Society of Chemical Industry     

A novel fuzzy clustering algorithm for the analysis of axillary lymph node tissue sections

Recently Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopic imaging has been used as a tool to detect the changes in cellular composition that may reflect the onset of a disease. This approach has been investigated as a mean of monitoring the change of the biochemical composition of cells and providing a diagnostic tool for various human cancers and other diseases. The discrimination between different types of tissue based upon spectroscopic data is often achieved using various multivariate clustering techniques. However, the number of clusters is a common unknown feature for the clustering methods, such as hierarchical cluster analysis, k-means and fuzzy c-means. In this study, we apply a FCM based clustering algorithm to obtain the best number of clusters as given by the minimum validity index value. This often results in an excessive number of clusters being created due to the complexity of this biochemical system. A novel method to automatically merge clusters was developed to try to address this problem. Three lymph node tissue sections were examined to evaluate our new method. These results showed that this approach can merge the clusters which have similar biochemistry. Consequently, the overall algorithm automatically identifies clusters that accurately match the main tissue types that are independently determined by the clinician.     

On the relationship between parity space and approaches to fault detection

Parity space approach and H₂ approach are two important fault detection approaches. This paper studies the relationship between these two approaches, which reveals frequency domain characteristics of the optimal solution of the parity space approach on the one side and provides a numerical solution of the H₂-optimal design of residual generators on the other side.     

电信服务营销渠道转型的必要性

分析了电信企业服务营销渠道的特点、旧有的服务营销渠道模式和存在的问题以及今后电信业和市场等方面发展的新需求，对电信服务营销渠道转型的必要性进行了探讨和研究,同时提供了一个可供参考的服务营销渠道价值评估体系架构,从量化服务营销渠道对电信企业贡献价值的角度论述了服务营销渠道转型的必要性。