Gas analysis of the CVD process for high yield growth of carbon nanotubes over metal-supported catalysts

Changes in the gas composition during the methane chemical vapor deposition growth of single- and double-walled carbon nanotubes over metal-supported MgO catalysts were investigated in an attempt to increase the nanotube yield. Monitoring the gas composition by gas chromatography as a function of the reaction time provides information on the activity and lifetime of the catalyst. The degree of methane decomposition, i.e., the C-H bond dissociation, was closely related to the nanotube yield, and the Fe-Mo binary catalyst exhibited a high activity. The effects of water vapor on the catalytic nanotube growth were also studied by introducing water vapor in the inlet gas. An appropriate amount of water prolonged the lifetime of the catalyst and increased the nanotube yield by 35%.     

The characteristics of the external‐electrode mercury fluorescent lamp for backlighting liquid‐crystal‐television displays

Abstract— A reliable external‐electrode mercury fluorescent lamp (EEFL) has been developed for backlighting a liquid‐crystal‐television (LC‐TV) display. This involved the investigation of the EEFL characteristics and the improvement in the construction of the EEFL and drive waveforms, in the frequency range of 50–200 kHz, that affects the EEFL characteristics. The results showed that a sinusoidal waveform is suitable for driving the EEFL, and EEFL's voltage decreases when the frequency of the drive waveform is increased.     

Structural Distortion and Compositional Gradients Adjacent to Epitaxial LiMn2O4 Thin Film Interfaces

Thin film electrode materials are key components in the development of high rate, high capacity solid‐state Li‐ion batteries. Detailed knowledge of the epitaxial film/substrate(current‐collector) interface structures, which provides insights into epitaxial growth mechanisms and the effects of microstructure on electrochemical properties, is essential for efficient materials and device design. Here we report the epitaxial growth mechanism of a typical cathodic LiMn₂O₄ thin film by exploring the detailed structural and compositional variations in the vicinity of a film/substrate interface using state‐of‐the‐art scanning transmission electron microscopy. Direct observation of atom columns shows the epitaxial film forms an atomically flat and coherent heterointerface with the substrate, but that the crystal lattice is tetragonally distorted with a measurable compositional gradient from the interface to the crystal bulk. The growth mechanism is interpreted in terms of a combination of chemical and physicomechanical effects, namely a complex interplay between the internal Jahn‐Teller distortions induced by oxygen non‐stoichiometry and the lattice misfit strain.     

Evolutionary design of dynamic neural networks for evaporator control

This paper presents a novel neural network (NN) to control an ammonia refrigerant evaporator. Inspired by the latest findings on the biological neuron, a dynamic synaptic unit (DSU) is proposed to enhance the information processing capacity of artificial neurons. Treating the dynamic synaptic activity after the nonlinear somatic activity helps to capture the dynamics demarcated by the Gaussian activation pertaining to the input space. This practice leads to a remarkable reduction in curse of dimensionality. The proposed NN architecture has been compared with two other conventional architectures; one with dynamic neural units (DNUs) and the other with nonlinear static functions as perceptrons. The objective is to control evaporator heat flow rate and secondary fluid outlet temperature while keeping the degree of refrigerant superheat in the range 4–7 K at the evaporator outlet by manipulating refrigerant and evaporator secondary fluid flow rates. The drawbacks of conventional approaches to this problem are discussed, and how the novel method can overcome them are presented. An evolutionary approach is adopted to optimize the parameters of the NN controllers. Then evaporator process model is accomplished as a combination of governing equations and a sub NN resulting in a simple and sufficiently accurate model. The effectiveness of the proposed dynamic NN controller for the evaporator system model is validated using experimental data from the ammonia refrigeration plant.     

A framework for constructing databases for supervisory control systems

This paper presents a framework for constructing databases for supervisory control systems. The proposed framework utilizes a generation-based approach and object-oriented framework libraries. In this framework, a database is designed for the target system from a design template, and the software for the database system is generated from the database design. The generated database system includes a domain-specific object system and a diagram and plant data editor, which provides effective data input functions. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Electr Eng Jpn, 123(1): 32–42, 1998     

Hybrid negative example selection using visual and conceptual features

An application of Query-By-Example (QBE) is presented where shots that are visually similar to provided example shots are retrieved. To implement QBE, counter-example shots are required to accurately distinguish shots that are relevant to the query from those that are not (Li and Snoek (2009), Yu et al. (2004)). However, there are usually a huge number of shots, not relevant to a particular query, which can serve as counter-example shots. It is difficult for a user to provide counter-example shots that would aid retrieval. Thus, we developed a QBE method based on partially supervised learning where a retrieval model is constructed by selecting counter-example shots from shots without user supervision. To ensure the speed and accuracy of the QBE method, we select a small number of counter-example shots that are visually similar to given example shots but irrelevant to the query. Such shots are useful for characterizing the boundary between relevant and irrelevant shots. For our method, we first filter shots that are visually dissimilar to example shots based on SVMs on a visual feature. Then we filter shots relevant to the query based on concept detection results from pre-constructed classifiers. Shots that pass the above two tests are considered as counter-example shots. Experimental results obtained using TRECVID 2009 video data validate the effectiveness of our method.     

Bias-stress-induced increase in parasitic resistance of InP-based InAlAs/InGaAs HEMTs

The reliability of InP-based HEMTs is studied, focussing on how it is affected by the doped layer material and gate recess structure. Bias-and-temperature stress tests reveal that fluorine-induced donor passivation in the recess region, formed adjacent to the gate electrode, causes the source resistance (R_s) to increase at large drain bias voltages. The increase in R_s can be prevented by using InP or InAlP as the carrier supply layer material instead of InAlAs. On the other hand, the increase in the drain resistance (R_d) does not depend on the material of the carrier supply layer, which suggests that a mechanism different from that in the case of R_s should be considered. It is also found that a deep gate recess suppresses the increase in R_d after long-term stressing.     

A generation method of artificial fluctuation data of wind power output considering smoothing effect

To use realistic wind power fluctuation data is important in simulating frequency change of power systems. It is well known that the smoothing effect must be taken into account when generating the artificial wind power output. Therefore, this paper proposed a new method to generate fluctuation waveform considering smoothing effect based on random number to fulfill the correlation among multiple sites and autoregression model. The effectiveness of the proposed method was tested by using practical wind speed data measured in Tohoku district.     

Electromagnetic silicon MEMS resonator

We have fabricated a silicon MEMS resonator aiming at multimodal sensors, and evaluated vibration characteristics by electromagnetic drive and induced electromotive force detection. The resonance frequency of the driving voltage of 0.6 Vpp shows torsional vibration of approximately 87 kHz, and the resonance frequency is shifted toward the low‐frequency side as the driving voltage increases. Resonance characteristics due to temperature change and film stress were evaluated.