Voronoi cell finite element model based on micropolar theory of thermoelasticity for heterogeneous materials

In this paper, a new ‘Voronoi cell finite element model’ is developed for solving steady-state heat conduction and micropolar thermoelastic stress analysis problems in arbitrary heterogeneous materials. The method is based on the natural discretization of a multiple phase domain into basic structural elements by Dirichlet Tessellation. Tessellation process results in a network of polygons called Voronoi polygons. In this paper, formulations are developed for treating these polygons as elements in a finite element mesh. Furthermore, a composite Voronoi cell finite element model is developed to account for the presence of a second phase inclusion within a polygonal element. Various numerical examples are executed for validating the effectiveness of this model in the analysis of the temperature and stress fields for micropolar elastic materials. Effective material properties are derived for microstructures containing different distributions of second phase.     

Microhole drilling through electrochemical processes: A review

Day-to-day interest is growing in the drilling of high aspect-ratio deep microholes in various hard-to-machine and newer materials. Besides cost-effectiveness in the manufacturing process, an accurate dimension with the good surface finish is essential for microhole drilling. The conventional methods encounter various problems such as residue stresses, heat generation near cutting zone, high tool-wear, etc. Electrochemical microdrilling (ECMD) is one of the cost-effective techniques, provide a better alternative in drilling microholes with reasonably accurate dimensions and good surface finish in various industrial applications especially in computer, electronic, and aerospace industries. This article reviews current researches and developments of electrochemical processes for circular microholes drilling. It highlights the effects of various key factors (such as the development of microtools, electrolyte, inter-electrode-gap monitoring and control, etc.) on the aspect-ratio and accuracy of circular microholes, produced by ECMD. For further research, it will open up various challenging opportunities, especially in the field of (i) development and handling of microtool electrodes, (ii) development and handling of electrolytes medium, (iii) development in monitoring and controlling techniques of inter-electrode-gap, and (iv) development in strategies for process control for drilling high quality, deep and high aspect-ratio circular microholes into hard-to-machine materials using ECMD.     

Adaptive feed-forward controller of piezoelectric actuator for micro/nano-positioning

In this paper, design and implementation of an adaptive feed-forward controller for micro/nano-positioning control of piezoelectric actuator (PEA) is described. Discrete-time Dahl hysteresis-based mathematical model of the PEA is developed and the values of the model parameters are estimated through an autoregressive with exogenous terms (ARX) model identification technique using experimental input–output data. A recursive least-square estimator (RLSE)-based adaptive feed-forward (FF) controller is proposed, which takes into account the parameter uncertainty. The FF controller has also been implemented in a DsPIC30F4011 microcontroller. The established PEA model and the controller are validated by simulation and experimental results including parameter variation.     

Measurement of atmospheric water vapour content over a tropical location by dual frequency microwave radiometry

Atmospheric water vapour was measured over a tropical location, Calcutta, by deploying dual frequency microwave radiometers operating at 22.235 and 31.4 GHz. Simultaneous measurements of brightness temperature and hence attenuation in the presence of thin cloud were made for the purpose. An algorithm was developed to exclude the effect of non-precipitating liquid water during the measurement of water vapour. The experimental results are supported by the corresponding radiosonde data analysis. Dual frequency radiometric measurements are shown to improve the rms accuracy, over the single frequency inversion technique, for the measurement of water vapour.     

Spatially Confined Growth of Fullerene to Super‐Long Crystalline Fibers in Supramolecular Gels for High‐Performance Photodetector

As a superstar organic semiconductor, fullerene (C₆₀) is versatile in nature for its multiple photoelectric applications. However, owing to its natural 0D structure, a challenge still remains unbeaten as to growth of 1D fullerene crystals with tunable sizes. Herein, reported is an efficient approach to grow C₆₀ as super‐long crystalline fibers with tunable lengths and diameters in supramolecular gel by synergic changes of anti‐solvent, gel length, crystallization time or fullerene concentration. As a result, the crystalline C₆₀ fibers can be modulated to as long as 70 mm and 70 000 in their length‐to‐width ratio. In this case, the gel 3D network provides spatial confinements for the growth of 1D crystal along the directional dispersion of anti‐solvent. The fabricated fullerene device exhibits high responsivity (2595.6 mA W^‐1) and high specific detectivity (2.7 × 10¹² Jones) at 10 V bias upon irradiation of 400 nm incident light. The on/off ratio and its quantum efficiency are near to 540 and about 800%, respectively, and importantly, its photoelectric property remains very stable after storage in air for six months. Therefore, spatially confined growth of fullerene in supramolecular gels will be another crucial strategy to synthesize 1D semiconductor crystals for photoelectrical device applications in near future.     

Fast computation of smallest enclosing circle with center on a query line segment

Here we propose an efficient algorithm for computing the smallest enclosing circle whose center is constrained to lie on a query line segment. Our algorithm preprocesses a given set of n points P={p₁,p₂,…,pn} such that for any query line or line segment L, it efficiently locates a point c on L that minimizes the maximum distance among the points in P from c. Roy et al. [S. Roy, A. Karmakar, S. Das, S.C. Nandy, Constrained minimum enclosing circle with center on a query line segment, in: Proc. of the 31st Mathematical Foundation of Computer Science, 2006, pp. 765-776] have proposed an algorithm that solves the query problem in O(log²n) time using O(nlogn) preprocessing time and O(n) space. Our algorithm improves the query time to O(logn); but the preprocessing time and space complexities are both O(n²).     

Online Speech Enhancement by Retraining of LSTM Using SURE Loss and Policy Iteration

Neural Processing Letters - Speech enhancement is required for improving the quality and intelligibility in various applications such as recognition, hearing aids and other personal assistant...     

The Parameterized Complexity of Stabbing Rectangles

The NP-complete geometric covering problem Rectangle Stabbing is defined as follows: Given a set R of axis-parallel rectangles in the plane, a set L of horizontal and vertical lines in the plane, and a positive integer k, select at most k of the lines such that every rectangle is intersected by at least one of the selected lines. While it is known that the problem can be approximated in polynomial time within a factor of two, its parameterized complexity with respect to the parameter k was open so far. Giving two fixed-parameter reductions, one from the W[1]-complete problem Multicolored Clique and one to the W[1]-complete problem Short Turing Machine Acceptance, we prove that Rectangle Stabbing is W[1]-complete with respect to the parameter k, which in particular means that there is no hope for an algorithm running in f(k)?|R∪L| ^O(1) time. Our reductions also show the W[1]-completeness of the more general problem Set Cover on instances that “almost have the consecutive-ones property”, that is, on instances whose matrix representation has at most two blocks of 1s per row. We also show that the special case of Rectangle Stabbing where all rectangles are squares of the same size is W[1]-hard. The case where the input consists of non-overlapping rectangles was open for some time and has recently been shown to be fixed-parameter tractable (Heggernes et al., Fixed-parameter algorithms for cochromatic number and disjoint rectangle stabbing, 2009). By giving an algorithm running in (2k) ^k ?|R∪L| ^O(1) time, we show that Rectangle Stabbing is fixed-parameter tractable in the still NP-hard case where both these restrictions apply, that is, in the case of disjoint squares of the same size. This algorithm is faster than the one in Heggernes et al. (Fixed-parameter algorithms for cochromatic number and disjoint rectangle stabbing, 2009) for the disjoint rectangles case. Moreover, we show fixed-parameter tractability for the restrictions where the rectangles have bounded width or height or where each horizontal line intersects only a bounded number of rectangles.     

Novel ammonia-sensing phenomena in sol–gel derived Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3 thin films

In this paper, ammonia-sensing behavior of barium strontium titanate (BST) thin films have been reported for the first time. Thin films of BST deposited by sol–gel spin coating technique have been found to show an increase in resistance when exposed to ammonia gas. The sensitivity variation was from 20 to 60%, with lowest detection limit of about 160 ppm. The films were prepared with different pre-sintering temperatures and thickness and effect of these parameters on the ammonia-sensing have been studied. The optimum temperature for operation was found to be close to 270 °C. The ammonia-sensing studies were also performed for other gases like ethanol, NO₂ and CO; but the sensitivity in these cases was negligibly smaller than that in case of ammonia.