Magnetically coupled oscillators applicable to high-sensitivity mass detection

Microsystem Technologies - In this paper, a system of magnetically coupled oscillators consisting of a Π-shaped horizontal cantilever and a rectangular vertical cantilever with a frequency...     

Two-step design of critical control systems using disturbance cancellation integral controllers

An efficient critical control system design is proposed in this paper. The key idea is to decompose the design problem into two simpler design steps by the technique used in the classical loop transfer recovery method (LTR). The disturbance cancellation integral controller is used as a basic controller. Since the standard loop transfer recovery method cannot be applied to the disturbance cancellation controller, the nonstandard version recently found is used for the decomposition. Exogenous inputs with constraints both on the amplitude and rate of change are considered. The majorant approach is taken to obtain the analytical sufficient matching conditions. A numerical design example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design.     

A study on a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm based on pair swap

A quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA) is proposed as a stochastic algorithm to perform combinatorial optimization problems. The QEA is evolutionary computation that uses quantum bits and superposition states in quantum computation. Although the QEA is a coarse-grained parallel algorithm, it involves many parameters that must be adjusted manually. This paper proposes a new method, named pair swap, which exchanges each best solution information between two individuals instead of migration in the QEA. Experimental results show that our proposed method is a simpler algorithm and can find a high quality solution in the 0-1 knapsack problem. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007     

A systolic algorithm for Euclidean distance transform

The Euclidean distance transform is one of the fundamental operations in image processing. It has been widely used in computer vision, pattern recognition, morphological filtering, and robotics. This paper proposes a systolic algorithm that computes the Euclidean distance map of an N /spl times/ N binary image in 3N clocks on 2N/sup 2/ processing cells. The algorithm is designed so that the hardware resources are reduced; especially no multipliers are used and, thus, it facilitates VLSI implementation.     

High-temperature and broadband immersion ultrasonic probes

Immersion ultrasonic probes for measurements and imaging at high temperature are presented. The probes consist of sol-gel-sprayed thick films as piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers (UTs) directly deposited onto steel buffer rods. They operate in pulse-echo mode at temperatures up to 500/spl deg/C. The operating ultrasonic frequency is between 5 MHz and 20 MHz, controlled by the film thickness. The ultrasonic thickness measurement of a steel plate with the probe fully immersed in molten zinc at 450/spl deg/C was demonstrated using ultrasonic plane waves. For imaging purposes, the probing end of the steel buffer rod was machined into a semispherical concave shape to form an ultrasonic lens and achieve high spatial resolution with focused ultrasound in liquids. Ultrasonic surface and subsurface imaging using a mechanical raster scan of the focused probe in silicone oil at 200/spl deg/C was also carried out. The importance of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the pulse-echo measurement is discussed.     

Small crack behavior and fracture of nickel-based superalloy under ultrasonic fatigue

Fracture and small crack behavior in the very high cycle domain of 10⁹ cycles were investigated with a nickel-based superalloy under ultrasonic fatigue in ambient air at room temperature. The influence of ultrasonic frequency is examined by comparing the results with those in conventional low frequency fatigue. It is found that fatigue strength increases as frequency is raised up to 19.5 kHz and the most of fatigue life is consumed in nucleating and propagating small cracks up to 100 μm. Transition of fracture mode from transgranular ductile fracture to cleavage-dominated fracture occurs beyond a critical stress intensity factor range of approximately , leading to the catastrophic failure under ultrasonic fatigue.