Power density optimization for MEMS piezoelectric micro power generator below 100 Hz applications

Microsystem Technologies - In piezoelectric based micro-power generator (PMPG), electrical energy is generated from mechanical vibration by gaining on the piezoelectric effects. This study...     

Application of immersed MF (IMF) followed by reverse osmosis (RO) membrane for wastewater reclamation: A case study in Malaysia.

A pilot scale membrane plant was constructed and monitored in Shah Alam, Malaysia for municipal wastewater reclamation for industrial application purposes. The aim of this study was to verify its suitability under the local conditions and environmental constraints for secondary wastewater reclamation. Immersed-type crossflow microfiltration (IMF) was selected as the pretreatment step before reverse osmosis filtration. Secondary wastewater after chlorine contact tank was selected as feed water. The results indicated that the membrane system is capable of producing a filtrate meeting the requirements of both WHO drinking water standards and Malaysian Effluent Standard A. With the application of an automatic backwash process, IMF performed well in hydraulic performance with low fouling rate being achieved. The investigations showed also that chemical cleaning is still needed because of some irreversible fouling by microorganisms always remains. RO treatment with IMF pretreatment process was significantly applicable for wastewater reuse purposes and promised good hydraulic performance.     

Face localization for facial features extraction using a symmetrical filter and linear Hough transform

In this paper, face localization for facial feature extraction is presented. The method consists of three steps: (1) facial features enhancement using symmetrical filter, and then the morphological process is applied to examine the edge, peaks, and valley fields; (2) line construction using linear Hough transform; (3) localization of the face region based on the constructed lines and the elimination of excess areas outside the face boundary. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007     

A comparative study between overlay method and selective-differential media for recovery of stressed Enterobacter sakazakii cells from infant formula

This study compares the performance of different selective-differential media with the overlay method for recovery of stressed cells of Enterobacter sakazakii from infant formula milk (IFM). Five different selective-differential media were used in this study: OK medium, violet red bile agar (VRBA), Druggan-Forsythe-Iversen agar (DFI), Enterobacteriaceae enrichment (EE) agar, and fecal coliform agar (FCA). Tryptic soy agar supplemented with 0.1% sodium pyruvate (TSAP) was used as a control. The overlay method involved applying a thin layer (8ml) of each of the selective media onto TSAP after spreading a sample onto TSAP. Reconstituted IFM was inoculated by ca 1x10(7)CFU/ml of a mixture of four strains of E. sakazakii and subjected to different stress conditions: heat (55 degrees C for 10min), a freeze-thaw cycle (-20 degrees C for 24h, thawed at room temperature, frozen again at -20 degrees C, and thawed), acidic pH (pH 3.56 for 15min), alkaline pH (pH 11.04 for 15min), and desiccation (E. sakazakii was inoculated onto powdered IFM at a level of ca 1x10(6)CFU/g, held at 21 degrees C, water activity of the inoculated product was 0.29 and examined at 0, 15, and 30d). No major differences were noticed between the control (TSAP) and the overlay methods. However, the overlay method recovered significantly higher numbers of stressed E. sakazakii cells compared to selective-differential media. Also, the selective-differential media exhibited some variability in terms of their capabilities to recover stressed cells of E. sakazakii. Among all the examined selective-differential media, DFI performed better for recovering stressed E. sakazakii cells. This study suggests that the overlay method may serve as a potential alternative to direct selective plating for best recovery of E. sakazakii from IFM.     

ABCB1 Does Not Require the Side-Chain Hydrogen-Bond Donors Gln347, Gln725, Gln990 to Confer Cellular Resistance to the Anticancer Drug Taxol

The multidrug efflux transporter ABCB1 is clinically important for drug absorption and distribution and can be a determinant of chemotherapy failure. Recent structure data shows that three glutamines donate hydrogen bonds to coordinate taxol in the drug binding pocket. This is consistent with earlier drug structure-activity relationships that implicated the importance of hydrogen bonds in drug recognition by ABCB1. By replacing the glutamines with alanines we have tested whether any, or all, of Gln³⁴⁷, Gln⁷²⁵, and Gln⁹⁹⁰ are important for the transport of three different drug classes. Flow cytometric transport assays show that Q347A and Q990A act synergistically to reduce transport of Calcein-AM, BODIPY-verapamil, and OREGON GREEN-taxol bisacetate but the magnitude of the effect was dependent on the test drug and no combination of mutations completely abrogated function. Surprisingly, Q725A mutants generally improved transport of Calcein-AM and BODIPY-verapamil, suggesting that engagement of the wild-type Gln⁷²⁵ in a hydrogen bond is inhibitory for the transport mechanism. To test transport of unmodified taxol, stable expression of Q347/725A and the triple mutant was engineered and shown to confer equivalent resistance to the drug as the wild-type transporter, further indicating that none of these potential hydrogen bonds between transporter and transport substrate are critical for the function of ABCB1. The implications of the data for plasticity of the drug binding pocket are discussed.     

Effects of Mn Additions on the Structure,Mechanical Properties,and Corrosion Behavior of Cu-Al-Ni Shape Memory Alloys

The influences of different amount (0.4, 0.7, and 1 wt.%) of Mn addition on the structure, mechanical properties, and corrosion behavior of Cu-Al-Ni shape memory alloys have been studied using differential scanning calorimetry, field emission scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, tensile test, shape memory effect test, hardness test, and electrochemical test. It was observed that the transformation temperatures, microstructural characteristics, and mechanical properties are highly sensitive to the composition variations. The obtained results show that the transformation temperatures and mechanical properties of Cu-Al-Ni SMAs exhibited the best results with 0.7 wt.% of Mn addition. These kinds of enhancements are mainly due to the type, amount, and morphology of the martensite phase, including the grain refinement. The result of electrochemical test showed that an increment in Mn content up to 0.7 wt.% improved the corrosion resistance of Cu-Al-Ni SMA. However, further increase of Mn content decreases the corrosion resistance of the alloy.     

Creep Behavior of As-Cast Ti-48Al-2Cr Intermetallic Alloy for Aerospace and Automotive Applications

The creep properties of as-cast Ti-48Al-2Cr (at%) alloy which had been strengthen with addition of 2 at% Cr were investigated. Tensile creep experiments were performed in air at temperatures from 600-800°C and initial stresses ranging from 150 to 180 MPa. Stress exponent and activation energy were both measured. Data indicates that the alloy exhibits steady state creep behavior and the steady state creep rate is found to depend on the applied load and temperature. The measured power law stress exponent for steady state creep rate is found to be close to 3 and the apparent activation energy for creep is calculated to be 15.7 kJ/mol. The creep resistance of the present alloy was also compared with binary Ti-48Al (at%) to evaluate the effect of Cr addition on creep resistance of TiAl. It is concluded that addition of 2 at% of Cr does not have significant effect on the creep resistance of TiAl.     

Novel Universal Windowing Multicarrier Waveform for 5G Systems

Fifth Generation (5G) systems aim to improve flexibility, coexistence and diverse service in several aspects to achieve the emerging applications requirements. Windowing and filtering of the traditional multicarrier waveforms are now considered common sense when designing more flexible waveforms. This paper proposed a Universal Windowing Multi-Carrier (UWMC) waveform design platform that is flexible, providing more easily coexists with different pulse shapes, and reduces the Out of Band Emissions (OOBE), which is generated by the traditional multicarrier methods that used in the previous generations of the mobile technology. The novel proposed approach is different from other approaches that have been proposed, and it is based on applying a novel modulation approach for the Quadrature-Amplitude Modulation (64-QAM) which is considered very popular in mobile technology. This new approach is done by employing flexible pulse shaping windowing, by assigning windows to various bands. This leads to decreased side-lobes, which are going to reduce OOBE and boost the spectral efficiency by assigning them to edge subscribers only. The new subband windowing (UWMC) will also maintain comprehensively the non-orthogonality by a variety of windowing and make sure to keep window time the same for all subbands. In addition, this paper shows that the new approach made the Bit Error Rate (BER) equal to the conventional Windowed-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (W-OFDM). This platform achieved great improvement for some other Key Performance Indicators (KPI), such as the Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) compared with the conventional (W-OFDM) and the conventional Universal Filtered Multicarrier (UFMC) approaches. In particular, the proposed windowing scheme outperforms previous designs in terms of the Power Spectral Density (PSD) by 58% and the (BER) by 1.5 dB and reduces the Complementary Cumulative Distribution Function Cubic Metric (CCDF-CM) by 24%.     

Mitigating Pilot Contamination for Channel Estimation in Multi-cell Massive MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a crucial technology platform for the fifth-generation of cellular systems (5G). However, massive MIMO systems are affected by pilot contamination, which influences the data rate of the system. This contamination is caused by the non-orthogonality of the pilot sequences transmitted by users in a cell similar to the neighboring cells. The current study proposes a channel-estimation scheme that employs comprehensive knowledge of large-scale gained by applying an orthogonal pilot reuse sequence to eliminate pilot contamination in edge users with reduced channel quality based on the approximation of large-scale fading, and the performance of this scheme is evaluated using the maximum ratio transmission and zero-forcing precoding techniques. Largely interfering users in neighboring cells are established based on an estimation of large-scale fading, and these users are included in the joint channel processing. The channel quality of users is enhanced by allocating orthogonal pilot reuse sequences to the center user and the edge users based on their levels of pilot contamination estimated from the large-scale fading to mitigate this problem when the number of antenna elements M is infinite. The findings of the simulation indicate that improved channel approximation and reduced performance loss could lead to a high data rate.

     

Analysis of combustion characteristics,engine performance and exhaust emissions of diesel engine fueled with upgraded waste source fuel

Utilization of the waste products as an alternative fuel could reduce the dependence on fossil fuel. The three types of upgraded waste source fuels discussed in this paper were tire derived fuel (TDF), waste plastic disposal fuel (WPD) and upgraded waste cooking oil (UWCO). The detailed combustion pressure showed that kinematic viscosity and cetane number played an important role in determining the combustion quality. TDF's high kinematic viscosity and low cetane number affected its fuel vaporization process; thus, lengthening its ignition delay. UWCO showed the 14% higher power and 13.8% higher torque compared to diesel fuel (DF). WPD produced the lowest NOx due to its low pressure curve during combustion. TDF had produced the highest exhaust emissions (CO, CO₂, NO and NOx). Particulate matter (PM) emissions by UWCO blends were lower than DF. UWCO's soot concentration was 40% lower than DF and increased to 62.5% from low to high engine speed operation.