Conduction degradation by fretting corrosion phenomena for contact samples made of high-copper alloys

The main cause of electrical contact resistance degradation by corrosion is the vibration of contact interfaces. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the change of contact resistance by means of a vibration test for uncoated sphere/plane contact made of new high-copper alloys.The influence of electrical and mechanical properties of materials, and mainly hardness, on contact resistance has been studied in this work. During the fretting test, a contact point was submitted to 16,000 vibration cycles under fretting amplitude of 50 μm and 1 Hz frequency. The sphere part was fixed, while the plane part was submitted to relative motion. At the end of the test, the fretted surfaces and the wear debris were analyzed by scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy to evaluate damage, oxidation and elemental composition present in the wear surfaces. In addition, the measurement of the wear track profile using a 3D surface scanning system was introduced. Increases in contact resistance and contact temperature were examined during the fretting test.The results showed that the contact resistance for the harder alloy was higher than that obtained for the other materials. In addition, topographic measurements showed that the small wear track corresponds to the harder material.     

Modeling of coupled mass and heat transfer through venting membranes for automotive applications

Experimental and theoretical approaches based on a mathematical model, have been developed to study the evolution of environmental parameters (temperature, total pressure, relative humidity, and water vapor partial pressure) inside a housing of an electronic device with a window containing a macroporous membrane. The model was based on the coupling of mass and heat transfer taking into account the effects of polarization of concentration in boundary layers. Membranes have been characterized by mercury porosimetry, liquid entry pressure measurements, scanning electron microscopy, and gas permeation. Once the model was experimentally validated, it was applied to investigate the influence of membranes on heat and mass transfer and to study the impact of the boundary layers on the global mass transport. The results demonstrated the importance of the membrane choice and dimensions to get the best temperature regulation and avoid water condensation inside an automotive electronic control unit (ECU). © 2008 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2009     

Redox shuttles for safer lithium-ion batteries

Overcharge protection is not only critical for preventing the thermal runaway of lithium-ion batteries during operation, but also important for automatic capacity balancing during battery manufacturing and repair. A redox shuttle is an electrolyte additive that can be used as intrinsic overcharge protection mechanism to enhance the safety characteristics of lithium-ion batteries. The advances on stable redox shuttles are briefly reviewed. Fundamental studies for designing stable redox shuttles are also discussed.     

Adaptive scheduling mechanism for IPTV over WiMAX IEEE 802.16j networks

A WiMAX technology is a very promising Broadband Wireless Access technology that is able to transmit different service types. This latter can have different constraints such as traffic rate, maximum latency, and tolerated jitter. The IEEE 802.16 Medium Access Control specifies five types of QoS classes: UGS, rtPS, ertPS, nrtPS, and BE. However, the IEEE 802.16 standard does not specify the scheduling algorithm to be used. Operators have the choice among many existing scheduling techniques. Also, they can propose their own scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we propose a scheduling strategy (Adaptive Weighted Round Robin, AWRR) for various Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services traffic over 802.16j networks. Our scheme adapts dynamically the scheduler operation to according queue load and quality of service constraints. In particular, the proposed mechanism gives more priority to high definition television and standard definition television traffic by using two schedulers. The proposed scheduling algorithm has been simulated using the QualNet network simulator. The experimental results show that our scheduler schemes AWRR have a better performance than the traditional scheduling techniques for rtPS traffic, which allows ensuring QoS requirements for IPTV application. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Electrodes based on nano-tree-like vanadium nitride and carbon nanotubes for micro-supercapacitors

Vanadium nitride(VN) was deposited by DC-sputtering on a vertically aligned carbon nanotube(CNTs)template for the purpose of nano-structuration. This led to the fabrication of hierarchically composite electrodes consisting of porous and nanostructured VN grown on vertically aligned CNTs in a nano-treelike configuration for micro-supercapacitor application. The electrodes show excellent performance with an areal capacitance as high as 37.5 m F cm~(-2) at a scan rate of 2 mV s~(-1) in a 0.5 MK_2SO_4 mild electrolyte solution. Furthermore, the capacitance decay was only 15% after 20,000 consecutive cycles. Moreover,the capacitance was found to increase with VN deposit thickness. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analyses of the electrodes before and after cycling suggest that the oxide layers that form at the VN surface is the responsible for the redox energy storage in this material. Such electrodes can compete with other transition metal nitride based electrodes for micro-supercapacitors.     

Two‐sided matching framework for optimal user association in 5G multi‐RAT UDNs

Recently, academic and industrial research communities are paying more explicit attention to the 5G multiple radio access technology ultra‐dense networks (5G multi‐RAT UDNs) for boosting network capacity, especially in UD urban zones. To this aim, in this paper, we intend to tackle the user association problem in 5G multi‐RAT UDNs. By considering the decoupled uplink/downlink access (DUDA), we divide our user association problem into two distinct subproblems representing, respectively, the uplink and the downlink channels. Next, we formulated each one as a nonlinear optimization problem with binary variables. Then, to solve them, we were restricted by the hard complexity, as well as the hard feasibility of centralized user association schemes. Thus, to resolve our user association problem in a reasonable time and distributed manner, we formulated each subproblem as a many‐to‐one matching game based on matching theory. Next, we provide two fully distributed association algorithms to compute the uplink and downlink stable matching among user equipments (UEs) and base stations (BSs). Simulation results corroborate our theoretical model and show the effectiveness and improvement of our achieved results in terms of the overall network performance, quality of service (QoS), and energy efficiency (EE) of UEs.     

Developing pressure sensors from impregnated textile sandwiched in inkjet-printed electrodes

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - This work presents an interesting fabrication route toward development of pressure sensing patch by utilizing electrically conductive cotton...     

Solid-Phase Synthesis of Substrate-Based Dipeptides and Heterocyclic Pseudo-dipeptides as Potential NO Synthase Inhibitors

More than 160 arginine analogues modified on the C-terminus via either an amide bond or a heterocyclic moiety (1,2,4-oxadiazole, 1,3,4-oxadiazole and 1,2,4-triazole) were prepared as potential inhibitors of NO synthases (NOS). A methodology involving formation of a thiocitrulline intermediate linked through its side-chain on a solid support followed by modification of its carboxylate group was developed. Finally, the side-chain thiourea group was either let unchanged, S-alkylated (Me, Et) or guanidinylated (Me, Et) to yield respectively after TFA treatment the corresponding thiocitrulline, S-Me/Et-isothiocitrulline and N-Me/Et-arginine substrate analogues. They all were tested against three recombinant NOS isoforms. Several compounds containing a S-Et- or a S-Me-Itc moiety and mainly belonging to both the dipeptide-like and 1,2,4-oxadiazole series were shown to inhibit nNOS and iNOS with IC₅₀ in the 1–50 μM range. Spectral studies confirmed that these new compounds interacted at the heme active site. The more active compounds were found to inhibit intra-cellular iNOS expressed in RAW264.7 and INS-1 cells with similar efficiency than the reference compounds L-NIL and SEIT.     

Software compensation of rapid prototyping machines

This paper addresses accuracy improvement of rapid prototyping (RP) machines by parametric error modeling and software error compensation. This approach is inspired by the techniques developed over the years for the parametric evaluation of coordinate measuring machines (CMM) and machine tool systems. The confounded effects of all errors in a RP machine are mapped into a “virtual” parametric machine error model. A generic artifact is built on the RP machine and measured by a master CMM. Measurement results are then used to develop a machine error function and error compensation is applied to the files which drive the build tool. The method is applied to three test parts and the results show a significant improvement in dimensional accuracy of built parts.     

Multiscale proper generalized decomposition based on the partition of unity

Solutions of partial differential equations could exhibit a multiscale behavior. Standard discretization techniques are constraints to mesh up to the finest scale to predict accurately the response of the system. The proposed methodology is based on the standard proper generalized decomposition rationale; thus, the PDE is transformed into a nonlinear system that iterates between microscale and macroscale states, where the time coordinate could be viewed as a 2D time, representing the microtime and macrotime scales. The macroscale effects are taken into account because of an FEM-based macrodiscretization, whereas the microscale effects are handled with unidimensional parent spaces that are replicated throughout the domain. The proposed methodology can be seen as an alternative route to circumvent prohibitive meshes arising from the necessity of capturing fine-scale behaviors.