Learning through international acquisitions: The process of knowledge acquisition in China

Abstract and Key Results

Regression-based CVN–KIC Models for hot work tool steels

Dies and tools used in hot metal forming (extrusion, forging, rolling, etc.) are exposed to high pressures, elevated temperatures, and thermo-mechanical fatigue. The most common mode of in-service die failure is fatigue fracture (brittle failure through crack propagation). Reliable determination of fracture toughness of the die material is thus critically important. However, as die steels have a combination of high-hardness and high-strength, and are used at elevated temperatures, standard plane-strain fracture toughness (K_IC) testing methods become impracticable. Alternate testing procedures such as the Charpy impact energy (CVN), together with empirical/semi-empirical correlations of K_IC to other data, are then more viable and economical. Experimental data (values of K_IC, CVN, and HRC) of H13 steels have been collected through an exhaustive literature search. This data set has been augmented through in-house experimentation: samples variously heat treated (different tempering temperatures and times, and both air-cooling and oil-quenching), and tested at different working temperatures. Linear and quadratic models are proposed for determination of fracture toughness, based on experimental (in-house) and published values of Charpy impact energy (CVN) and Rockwell hardness (HRC), both at room and at elevated temperatures.     

Overcoming the Interfacial Limitations Imposed by the Solid–Solid Interface in Solid‐State Batteries Using Ionic Liquid‐Based Interlayers

Li‐garnets are promising inorganic ceramic solid electrolytes for lithium metal batteries, showing good electrochemical stability with Li anode. However, their brittle and stiff nature restricts their intimate contact with both the electrodes, hence presenting high interfacial resistance to the ionic mobility. To address this issue, a strategy employing ionic liquid electrolyte (ILE) thin interlayers at the electrodes/electrolyte interfaces is adopted, which helps overcome the barrier for ion transport. The chemically stable ILE improves the electrodes‐solid electrolyte contact, significantly reducing the interfacial resistance at both the positive and negative electrodes interfaces. This results in the more homogeneous deposition of metallic lithium at the negative electrode, suppressing the dendrite growth across the solid electrolyte even at high current densities of 0.3 mA cm^?2. Further, the improved interface Li/electrolyte interface results in decreasing the overpotential of symmetric Li/Li cells from 1.35 to 0.35 V. The ILE modified Li/LLZO/LFP cells stacked either in monopolar or bipolar configurations show excellent electrochemical performance. In particular, the bipolar cell operates at a high voltage (≈8 V) and delivers specific capacity as high as 145 mAh g^?1 with a coulombic efficiency greater than 99%.     

A Monte Carlo Based COVID-19 Detection Framework for Smart Healthcare

COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus disease that has been declared as a global pandemic in 2019. It affects the whole world through person-to-person communication. This virus spreads by the droplets of coughs and sneezing, which are quickly falling over the surface. Therefore, anyone can get easily affected by breathing in the vicinity of the COVID-19 patient. Currently, vaccine for the disease is under clinical investigation in different pharmaceutical companies. Until now, multiple medical companies have delivered health monitoring kits. However, a wireless body area network (WBAN) is a healthcare system that consists of nano sensors used to detect the real-time health condition of the patient. The proposed approach delineates is to fill a gap between recent technology trends and healthcare structure. If COVID-19 affected patient is monitored through WBAN sensors and network, a physician or a doctor can guide the patient at the right time with the correct possible decision. This scenario helps the community to maintain social distancing and avoids an unpleasant environment for hospitalized patients Herein, a Monte Carlo algorithm guided protocol is developed to probe a secured cipher output. Security cipher helps to avoid wireless network issues like packet loss, network attacks, network interference, and routing problems. Monte Carlo based covid-19 detection technique gives 90% better results in terms of time complexity, performance, and efficiency. Results indicate that Monte Carlo based covid-19 detection technique with edge computing idea is robust in terms of time complexity, performance, and efficiency and thus, is advocated as a significant application for lessening hospital expenses.     

Multi‐hop medium access control protocol for low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks using wake‐up radio

The IEEE 802.15.4K Task Group was formed recently to address the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring networks. The aim is to collect scheduled and event data from a large number of non‐mains powered endpoints that are widely dispersed. The application requirements include reliable data transfer, energy efficiency, and long deployment lifetime. To meet the low energy critical infrastructure monitoring network requirements, we propose a multihop medium access control protocol where the scheduled or event data are routed to the coordinator through the cluster heads. The power consumption of the cluster heads is critical as they use more power than the normal endpoints. Our protocol uses the wake‐up radio approach from cluster head to cluster head communication and an efficient guaranteed time slots allocation scheme to minimize the power consumption of the cluster heads. We derive analytical expressions for the average power consumption of cluster heads as well as ordinary endpoints. The results show that our proposed protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and SCP MAC in terms of power consumption. High power efficiency is achieved in both the cluster heads and normal endpoints. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A neuro-stimulus chip with telemetry unit for retinal prostheticdevice

In this retinal prosthesis project, a rehabilitative device is designed to replace the functionality of defective photoreceptors in patients suffering from retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The device consists of an extraocular and an intraocular unit. The implantable component receives power and a data signal via a telemetric inductive link between the two units. The extraocular unit includes a video camera and video processing board, a telemetry protocol encoder chip, and an RF amplifier and primary coil. The intraocular unit consists of a secondary coil, a rectifier and regulator, a retinal chip with a telemetry protocol decoder, a stimulus signal generator, and an electrode array. This paper focuses on the design, fabrication, and testing of a microchip which serves as the telemetry protocol decoder and stimulus signal generator. It is fabricated by MOSIS with 1.2-mm CMOS technology and was demonstrated to provide the desired biphasic current stimulus pulses for an array of 100 retinal electrodes at video frame rates     

Trace Element Microanalysis in Iron Meteorites by Laser Ablation ICPMS

A laser ablation microanalysis system has been developed that can analyze trace elements with a sensitivity in the ppb range, using a CETAC LSX-200 laser ablation system with a Finnigan Element. This capability has been applied to a set of iron meteorites to demonstrate the laser microprobe's analytical capability for the determination of platinum group elements (PGEs) with a spatial resolution of ～20 μm, comparable to that of dynamic secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). The laser is shown to provide an accurate means of solid sampling for magnetic sector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), allowing the determination of bulk metal composition, chemical zoning within the sample, and depth profiling. Recovery of the chemical zoning in taenite lamellae was achieved for Ru, Rh, and Pd, which was not previously possible using SIMS. The methods presented here show that magnetic sector ICPMS can be successfully coupled to a laser ablation system, providing the advantages of higher sensitivity of the sector instrument, low background count rates (<0.1 counts/s), and flat-topped spectral peaks, while minimizing tradeoff against the speed of data acquisition required to handle the transient signals from the laser ablation system.     

Privacy-aware searching with oblivious term matching for cloud storage

Encryption ensures confidentiality of the data outsourced to cloud storage services. Searching the encrypted data enables subscribers of a cloud storage service to access only relevant data, by defining trapdoors or evaluating search queries on locally stored indexes. However, these approaches do not consider access privileges while executing search queries. Furthermore, these approaches restrict the searching capability of a subscriber to a limited number of trapdoors defined during data encryption. To address the issue of privacy-aware data search, we propose Oblivious Term Matching (OTM). Unlike existing systems, OTM enables authorized subscribers to define their own search queries comprising of arbitrary number of selection criterion. OTM ensures that cloud service provider obliviously evaluates encrypted search queries without learning any information about the outsourced data. Our performance analysis has demonstrated that search queries comprising of 2 to 14 distinct search criteria cost only 0.03 to 1.09 $ per 1000 requests.     

Multicast video-on-demand service in an enterprise network with client-assisted patching

Multicast Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems are scalable and  cheap-to-operate. In such systems, a single stream is shared by a batch of common user requests. In this research, we propose multicast communication technique in an Enterprise Network where multimedia data are stored in distributed servers. We consider a novel patching scheme called Client-Assisted Patching where clients’ buffer of a multicast group can be used to patch the missing portion of the clients who will request the same movie shortly. This scheme significantly reduces the server load without requiring larger client cache space than conventional patching schemes. Clients can join an existing multicast session without waiting for the next available server stream which reduces service latency. Moreover, the system is more scalable and cost effective than similar existing systems. Our simulation experiment confirms all these claims.

Probabliistic Analysis Of Electrocardiogram (Ecg) Heart Signal

Electrocardiography (ECG) is a heart signal wave that is recorded using medical sensors, which are normally attached to the human body by the heart. ECG waves have repetitive patterns that can be efficiently used in the diagnosis of heart problems as they carry several characteristics of heart operation. Traditionally, the analysis of ECG waves is done using informal techniques, like simulation, which is in-exhaustive and thus the analysis results may lead to ambiguities and life threatening scenarios in extreme cases. In order to overcome such problems, we propose to analyze ECG heart signals using probabilistic model checking, which is a formal methods based quantitative analysis approach. This work presents the formal probabilistic analysis of ECG signal abnormalities where the likelihood of abnormal patterns is studied and analyzed using the PRISM model checker.