Simulation Studies of Annealing Effect on a mc-Si Ingot for Photovoltaic Application

Silicon - A multi-crystalline silicon (mc-Si) ingot was grown by the directional solidification (DS) process for photovoltaic (PV) application. We have numerically investigated shear stress and...     

Ta2O5/Nb2O5 and Y2O3 Co-doped Zirconias for Thermal Barrier Coatings

Zirconia doped with 3.2–4.2 mol% (6–8 wt%) yttria (3–4YSZ) is currently the material of choice for thermal barrier coating topcoats. The present study examines the ZrO₂-Y₂O₃-Ta₂O₅/Nb₂O₅ systems for potential alternative chemistries that would overcome the limitations of the 3–4YSZ. A rationale for choosing specific compositions based on the effect of defect chemistry on the thermal conductivity and phase stability in zirconia-based systems is presented. The results show that it is possible to produce stable (for up to 200 h at 1000°–1500°C), single (tetragonal) or dual (tetragonal + cubic) phase chemistries that have thermal conductivity that is as low (1.8–2.8W/m K) as the 3–4YSZ, a wide range of elastic moduli (150–232 GPa), and a similar mean coefficient of thermal expansion at 1000°C. The chemistries can be plasma sprayed without change in composition or deleterious effects to phase stability. Preliminary burner rig testing results on one of the compositions are also presented.     

Effect of underlap and soft error performance in 30 nm FinFET-based 6T-SRAM cells with simultaneous and independent driven gates

The effect of Gate-Source/Drain underlap (L _un) on soft error performance in 30 nm common double gate-FinFET (simultaneously driven gates) and independent double gate-FinFET (independently driven gates) have been examined through extensive mixed mode-device and circuit simulations using Sentaurus TCAD. Four different 6T-SRAM topologies, one simultaneously driven double gate-FinFET and three independently driven double gate-FinFETs-based topologies namely Flex-V _TH, Flex-PG, and PG-SN are chosen to study the geometrical parameter L _un and also to calculate their soft error performance. When L _un increases, current decreases due to increase in parasitic series resistance. The simulation results reveal that L _un increase in independently driven double gate-FinFETs in place of access devices in 6T-SRAM does not degrade the soft error performance significantly whereas the L _un increase inside the cell, in the inverters, degrade the performance significantly.     

Are Diamonds a MEMS' Best Friend?

Next-generation military and civilian communication systems will require technologies capable of handling data/ audio, and video simultaneously while supporting multiple RF systems operating in several different frequency bands from the MHz to the GHz range [1]. RF microelectromechani-cal/nanoelectromechanical (MEMS/NEMS) devices, such as resonators and switches, are attractive to industry as they offer a means by which performance can be greatly improved for wireless applications while at the same time potentially reducing overall size and weight as well as manufacturing costs.     

Synthetic Applications of Carbohydrate-derived Donor-Acceptor Cyclopropanes

In this account, we elaborate our group's contribution towards understanding the chemistry of carbohydrate-derived donor-acceptor (DA) cyclopropanes. Our work was mainly focused on the ring opening of these versatile chiral synthons under the influence of Lewis acid promoters like electrophilic halogen species, TMSOTf, BF₃.OEt₂, etc. We studied various modes of ring opening on these DA cyclopropanes, envisaging the access to intriguing molecular architectures. These modes of reaction of the DA cyclopropanes can be controlled by strategically introducing an electron-withdrawing group (EWG) onto the cyclopropane ring, which could direct the ring cleavage by polarizing the cyclopropane C−C bond. Our studies also revealed that the ring opening is sluggish in the absence of an EWG. Using this concept, we demonstrated the synthesis of various biologically interesting molecular skeletons, viz., glycoamino acids (GAA), GAA nucleotides, α-levoglucosan amino acid, and septano-oligosaccharides, with high selectivity. We also applied our understanding to the first stereoselective synthesis of (S)-(−)-longianone and confirmed its absolute configuration. Apart from the inherently activated DA cyclopropanes, we introduced the in situ generation of DA cyclopropanes, starting from vinylcyclopropanes (VCPs). The ring-opening and ring-expansion chemistry of these easily accessible synthons was studied. The chemistry developed for carbohydrate-fused cyclopropanes was also applied for carbohydrate-derived spiro-cyclopropanes. The Lewis-acid-mediated ring opening of spiro-DA-cyclopropanes enabled easy access to fused furopyrans and spirolactones.     

Dispersed ZrO2 nanoparticles in MCM‐48 with high adsorption activity

A new two‐step synthesis of ZrO₂‐MCM nanocomposites using the gel combustion technique was accomplished; the resulting material had a high‐surface area and showed very high adsorption activity. The deposition of 2–5 nm ZrO₂ particles over MCM was achieved using gel combustion technique with glycine as a fuel, and the formation of nanocomposites was confirmed using transmission electron microscopy. The composites were also characterized by XRD, SEM, FTIR and N₂ adsorption‐desorption analysis. The nanocomposites were tested for the adsorption of cationic dyes. High rates of adsorption and large dye uptake were observed over the nanocomposites. The rate of adsorption over the nanocomposites was higher than that observed for physical ZrO₂‐MCM mixtures and commercial activated carbon. The nanocomposite with 10 wt % ZrO₂ showed the highest rate of adsorption owing to the synergistic effects of ZrO₂ surface groups, smaller particle size, fine dispersion and high‐surface area of the composite. © 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 58: 2987–2996, 2012     

Improved authentication and computation of medical data transmission in the secure IoT using hyperelliptic curve cryptography

The Journal of Supercomputing - Data transmission is a great challenge in any network environment. However, medical data collected from IoT devices need to be transmitted at high speed to ensure...     

Transforming Binary Uncertainties for Robust Speech Recognition

Recently, several algorithms have been proposed to enhance noisy speech by estimating a binary mask that can be used to select those time-frequency regions of a noisy speech signal that contain more speech energy than noise energy. This binary mask encodes the uncertainty associated with enhanced speech in the linear spectral domain. The use of the cepstral transformation smears the information from the noise dominant time-frequency regions across all the cepstral features. We propose a supervised approach using regression trees to learn the nonlinear transformation of the uncertainty from the linear spectral domain to the cepstral domain. This uncertainty is used by a decoder that exploits the variance associated with the enhanced cepstral features to improve robust speech recognition. Systematic evaluations on a subset of the Aurora4 task using the estimated uncertainty show substantial improvement over the baseline performance across various noise conditions.     

A survey of imperatives and action representation formalisms

Representation and reasoning of actions is a wide spread area in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. The representation involves natural language instructions, which are based on the linguistic concepts and the reasoning methodology deals with the logical structures. In the computational domain, several theories pertaining to the state-space approach have been proposed to represent and reason out actions. Considering these aspects, this paper provides an account of work from the viewpoint of linguistics, logic and action representation formalisms. Based on this study, this paper then proposes a seven axes categorization scheme, that can be used to compare and analyze different theories.