Inorganic-Based Printed Thermoelectric Materials and Devices

One of the simplest ways to generate electric power from waste heat is thermoelectric (TE) energy conversion. So far, most of the research on thermoelectrics has focused on inorganic bulk TE materials and their device applications. However, high production costs per power output and limited shape conformity hinder applications of state-of-the-art thermoelectric devices (TEDs). In recent years, printed thermoelectrics has emerged as an exciting pathway for their potential in the production of low-cost shape-conformable TEDs. Although several inorganic bulk TE materials with high performance are successfully developed, achieving high performance in inorganic-based printed TE materials is still a challenge. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in printed thermoelectrics in recent years. In this review article, it is started with an introduction signifying the importance of printed thermoelectrics followed by a discussion of theoretical concepts of thermoelectricity, from fundamental transport phenomena to device efficiency. Afterward, the general process of inorganic TE ink formulation is summarized, and the current development of the inorganic and hybrid inks with the mention of their TE properties and their influencing factors is elaborated. In the end, TEDs with different architecture and geometries are highlighted by documenting their performance and fabrication techniques.     

Hot Photo–Carriers, Excitons, Desorption, and Surface Diffusion in Rare Gas Solids

The dynamics of valence excitations of rare gas solids were studied with time–and spectrally resolved luminescence experiments. From the decay curves of the free–exciton luminescence in solid X _e , information concerning exciton transport and electron–hole recombination was deduced. The peculiar role of excitons stimulating the luminescence of surface centers and of desorption phenomena was analysed in a simple model system (Kr doped solid Ar). From a time–resolved analysis of the luminescence of surface centers, thermally activated lateral diffusion of Kr* metastables on the surface of the Ar host was established.     

Infrastructure Federation Through Virtualized Delegation of Resources and Services

Infrastructure federation is becoming an increasingly important issue for modern Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs): Dynamic elasticity of quasi-static Grid environments, incorporation of special-purpose resources into commoditized Cloud infrastructures, cross-community collaboration for increasingly diverging areas of modern e-Science, and Cloud Bursting pose major challenges on the technical level for many resource and middleware providers. Especially with respect to increasing costs of operating data centers, the intelligent yet automated and secure sharing of resources is a key factor for success. With the D-Grid Scheduler Interoperability (DGSI) project within the German D-Grid Initiative, we provide a strategic technology for the automatically negotiated, SLA-secured, dynamically provisioned federation of resources and services for Grid-and Cloud-type infrastructures. This goal is achieved by complementing current DCI schedulers with the ability to federate infrastructure for the temporary leasing of resources and rechanneling of workloads. In this work, we describe the overall architecture and SLA-secured negotiation protocols within DGSI and depict an advanced mechanism for resource delegation through means of dynamically provisioned, virtualized middleware. Through this methodology, we provide the technological foundation for intelligent capacity planning and workload management in a cross-infrastructure fashion.     

A type-centric framework for specifying heterogeneous, large-scale, component-oriented, architectures

Maintaining integrity and consistency, and effecting conformance in architectures of large-scale systems require specification and enforcement of many different forms of structural constraints. While type systems have proved effective for enforcing structural constraints in programs and data structures, most architectural modeling frameworks include only weak notions of typing or rely on first order logic constraint languages that have steep learning curves associated with them and that become unwieldy when scaling to large systems.We present the Cadena Architecture Language with Meta-modeling (CALM) — that uses multi-level type systems to specify and enforce a variety of architectural constraints relevant to the development of large-scale component-based systems. Cadena is a robust and extensible tool that has been used to specify a number of industrial strength component models and applied in multiple industrial research projects on model-driven development and software product lines.     

Verification and falsification of programs with loops using predicate abstraction

Predicate abstraction is a major abstraction technique for the verification of software. Data is abstracted by means of Boolean variables, which keep track of predicates over the data. In many cases, predicate abstraction suffers from the need for at least one predicate for each iteration of a loop construct in the program. We propose to extract looping counterexamples from the abstract model, and to parametrise the simulation instance in the number of loop iterations. We present a novel technique that speeds up the detection of long counterexamples as well as the verification of programs with loops.     

On challenges of model transformation from UML to Alloy

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto language used in the industry for software specifications. Once an application has been specified, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) techniques can be applied to generate code from such specifications. Since implementing a system based on a faulty design requires additional cost and effort, it is important to analyse the UML models at earlier stages of the software development lifecycle. This paper focuses on utilizing MDA techniques to deal with the analysis of UML models and identify design faults within a specification. Specifically, we show how UML models can be automatically transformed into Alloy which, in turn, can be automatically analysed by the Alloy Analyzer. The proposed approach relies on MDA techniques to transform UML models to Alloy. This paper reports on the challenges of the model transformation from UML class diagrams and OCL to Alloy. Those issues are caused by fundamental differences in the design philosophy of UML and Alloy. To facilitate better the representation of Alloy concepts in the UML, the paper draws on the lessons learnt and presents a UML profile for Alloy.     

Interactive volume exploration for feature detection and quantification in industrial CT data

This paper presents a novel method for interactive exploration of industrial CT volumes such as cast metal parts, with the goal of interactively detecting, classifying, and quantifying features using a visualization-driven approach. The standard approach for defect detection builds on region growing, which requires manually tuning parameters such as target ranges for density and size, variance, as well as the specification of seed points. If the results are not satisfactory, region growing must be performed again with different parameters. In contrast, our method allows interactive exploration of the parameter space, completely separated from region growing in an unattended pre-processing stage. The pre-computed feature volume tracks a feature size curve for each voxel over time, which is identified with the main region growing parameter such as variance. A novel 3D transfer function domain over (density, feature size, time) allows for interactive exploration of feature classes. Features and feature size curves can also be explored individually, which helps with transfer function specification and allows coloring individual features and disabling features resulting from CT artifacts. Based on the classification obtained through exploration, the classified features can be quantified immediately.     

On the Power of Las Vegas for One-Way Communication Complexity, OBDDs, and Finite Automata

The study of the computational power of randomized computations is one of the central tasks of complexity theory. The main goal of this paper is the comparison of the power of Las Vegas computation and deterministic respectively nondeterministic computation. We investigate the power of Las Vegas computation for the complexity measures of one-way communication, ordered binary decision diagrams, and finite automata.(i) For the one-way communication complexity of two-party protocols we show that Las Vegas communication can save at most one half of the deterministic one-way communication complexity. We also present a language for which this gap is tight.(ii) The result (i) is applied to show an at most polynomial gap between determinism and Las Vegas for ordered binary decision diagrams.(iii) For the size (i.e., the number of states) of finite automata we show that the size of Las Vegas finite automata recognizing a language L is at least the square root of the size of the minimal deterministic finite automaton recognizing L. Using a specific language we verify the optimality of this lower bound.     

Ontological query answering under expressive Entity-Relationship schemata

The Entity-Relationship (ER) model is a fundamental tool for database design, recently extended and employed in knowledge representation and reasoning due to its expressiveness and comprehensibility. We address the problem of answering conjunctive queries under constraints representing schemata expressed in an extended version of the Entity-Relationship model. This extended model, called ER⁺, comprises is-a constraints among entities and relationships, plus functional and mandatory participation constraints. In particular, it allows for arbitrary permutations of the roles in is-a among relationships. A key notion that ensures high tractability in ER⁺ schemata is separability, i.e., the absence of interaction between the functional participation constraints and the other constructs of ER⁺. We provide a precise syntactic characterization of separable ER⁺ schemata by means of a necessary and sufficient condition. We present a complete complexity analysis of the conjunctive query answering problem under separable ER⁺ schemata, and also under several sublanguages of ER⁺. We show that the addition of so-called negative constraints does not increase the complexity of query answering. With such constraints, our model properly generalizes the most widely adopted tractable ontology languages, including those in the DL-Lite family.