Removal of Volatile Organic Compounds by Adsorption and Photocatalytic Oxydation

Based on the study of equilibrium adsorption on viscose rayon-based activated carbon fiber （ACF） by gravimetric method, mounting of TiO2 on PAN-based activated carbon cloth （ACC） and their photocatalytic activity as well as adsorption performance for benzene were investigated. The crystallinity of TiO2 and pore structure were characterized by XRD and N2 adsorption. The results show that crystallinity of TiO2 and pore structure could be postulated by heat treatment condition. Both crystallinity of TiO2 and pore structure of hybrid have effects on photocatalytic performance of TiO2-mounted ACC. It would be more attractive and prospective for the combination of TiO2 photocatalytic activity and adsorption ability of porous materials.     

Error Concealment Using Inter‐layer Correlation for Scalable Video Coding

In this paper, we propose a new error concealment (EC) method using inter‐layer correlation for scalable video coding. In the proposed method, the auxiliary motion vector (MV) and the auxiliary mode number (MN) of intra prediction are interleaved into the bitstream to recover the corrupted frame. In order to reduce the bit rate, the proposed method encodes the difference between the original and the predicted values of the MV and MN instead of the original values. Experimental results show that the proposed EC outperforms the conventional EC by 2.8 dB to 6.7 dB.     

Background removal of multiview images by learning shape priors.

Image-based rendering has been successfully used to display 3-D objects for many applications. A well-known example is the object movie, which is an image-based 3-D object composed of a collection of 2-D images taken from many different viewpoints of a 3-D object. In order to integrate image-based 3-D objects into a chosen scene (e.g., a panorama), one has to meet a hard challenge--to efficiently and effectively remove the background from the foreground object. This problem is referred to as multiview images (MVIs) segmentation. Another task requires MVI segmentation is image-based 3-D reconstruction using multiview images. In this paper, we propose a new method for segmenting MVI, which integrates some useful algorithms, including the well-known graph-cut image segmentation and volumetric graph-cut. The main idea is to incorporate the shape prior into the image segmentation process. The shape prior introduced into every image of the MVI is extracted from the 3-D model reconstructed by using the volumetric graph cuts algorithm. Here, the constraint obtained from the discrete medial axis is adopted to improve the reconstruction algorithm. The proposed MVI segmentation process requires only a small amount of user intervention, which is to select a subset of acceptable segmentations of the MVI after the initial segmentation process. According to our experiments, the proposed method can provide not only good MVI segmentation, but also provide acceptable 3-D reconstructed models for certain less-demanding applications.     

Control of swarm behavior in crossing pedestrians based on temporal/spatial frequencies

In the densely-populated urban areas, pedestrian flows often cross each other and congestion is caused. The congestion makes us feel uncomfortable and sometimes leads to pedestrian accidents. To reduce the congestion or the risk of accidents, it is required to control the swarm behavior of pedestrian flows. This paper proposes modeling and controlling method of the crossing pedestrian flows. In the social/urban engineering, it is well known that the swarm behavior with a diagonal stripe pattern emerges in the crossing area of the flows. This is a self-organized phenomenon caused by the local collision avoidance effect of the pedestrians. To control the macroscopic behavior of the flows, we utilize this self-organized phenomenon. Firstly, we propose the continuum model of the crossing pedestrian flows. In the continuum model, the dynamic change of the congestion in the diagonal stripe pattern is simulated as the density. Secondly, the novel control method to improve average flow velocity is proposed based on the model. The proposed method utilizes the dynamic interaction between the diagonal stripe pattern and guides, who are moving in the flows. The authors derive the control algorithm through an analysis on the temporal and spatial frequencies of the crossing flows. The validity is verified with simulations using the continuum model. Moreover, we apply the proposed method to the particle model, assuming the actual pedestrians.     

Exponentially weighted moving average-based procedure with adaptive thresholding for monitoring nonlinear profiles: Monitoring of plasma etch process in semiconductor manufacturing

Recently, there are many situations where the quality of a process is characterized by a relationship of functional data (or profiles) such as time series and image data. Such data have been used for detecting out-of-process and quality improvement in many engineering applications such as semiconductor manufacturing, automobile manufacturing, and nano-machining systems. The functional data contain high dimensionality, high feature correlation, non-stationality, and large amount of noise. Due to such characteristics, most classic statistical process control (SPC) may not perform on-line monitoring satisfactorily on functional data. In addition, local shift monitoring with functional data is more significant than the detection of global shifting patterns. In this paper, wavelet-based exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) test statistic with adaptive thresholding method, which extracts several significant coefficients from original functional data in the wavelet domain and monitors out-of-control events, is proposed. Instead of monitoring global shifting, the local shifting in functional data is of major significance in our study. Throughout this study, we use a spectroscopy in monitoring of plasma etching process from semiconductor manufacturing to illustrate the implementation of the proposed approach. Experiment studies show that the proposed approach quickly detects smaller local shifts compared with the well-known methods.     

Influence of solvent and temperature on extraction of phenolic compounds from grape seed,antioxidant activity and colour of extract

This study was aimed to investigate the influence of solvent (water and ethanol in concentration: 50%, 70% and 96%) and extraction temperature (25–80) °C on polyphenols extraction of grape seed (Vitis vinifera L. cv. “Frankovka”) cultivated in Eastern Croatia. The best results were reached using 50% ethanol at 80 °C. The most abundant individual polyphenolic compound was catechin which makes the average of 45.11% of the total phenolic content followed by epicatechin (34.45%), procyanidin B₂ (12.90%), gallic acid (5.34%), gallocatechin (1.58%), epicatechin gallate (1.01%). The antioxidant activity of extracts was determined by DPPH‐method and it was highly dependent on extraction solvent and temperature. The total extractable proanthocyanidins content of extract had the highest positive correlation (r = 0.994) with antioxidant activity, which indicated that these compounds might be the most important antioxidant in examined grape seed extracts. Relationship between phenolic content and colour of extracts was observed.     

High-performance energy-efficient D-flip-flop circuits

This paper investigates performance, power, and energy efficiency of several CMOS master-slave D-flip-flops (DFF's). To improve performance and energy efficiency, a push-pull DFF and a push-pull isolation DFF are proposed. Among the five DFF's compared, the proposed push-pull isolation circuit is found to be the fastest with the best energy efficiency. Effects of using a double-pass-transistor logic (DPL) circuit and tri-state push-pull driver are also studied. Last, metastability characteristics of the five DFP's are also analyzed     

Hybrid ring coupler for W-band MMIC applications using MEMS technology

The hybrid ring coupler was designed and fabricated on a GaAs substrate using surface micromachining techniques, which adopted dielectric-supported air-gapped microstrip line (DAML) structure. The fabrication process of DAML is compatible with the standard monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) techniques, and the hybrid ring coupler can be simply integrated into a plane-structural MMIC. The fabricated hybrid ring coupler shows wideband characteristics of the coupling loss of 3.57 /spl plusmn/ 0.22dB and the transmission loss of 3.80 /spl plusmn/ 0.08dB across the measured frequency range of 85 to 105GHz. The isolation characteristics and output phase differences are -34dB and 180/spl plusmn/1/spl deg/, at 94GHz, respectively.