In Situ Tensile Measurements of Single Fibers by Scanning Electron Microscopy

A newly developed tensile module allows tensile experiments of single fibers to be carried out under visual observation in the scanning electron microscope. This allows correlation of measured data with observed changes in the microstructure, such as surface irregularities and crack formation. With point heating, the thermal behavior of the fibers may be studied up to 2500°C. The results are presented with tensile elongation recordings and micrograph sequences of the structural changes. Carbon fibers with and without an aluminum coating were selected as testing specimens.     

Feststoffbildung durch Kristallisation und Fällung

Formation of solids by crystallization and precipitation. Formation of solids from solutions can take place by crystallization or precipitation. The principal factor is the relationship between solubility and supersaturation. In crystallization, the solubility of the crystallising substance is so high that the formation of solids occurs largely in the metastable zone in the immediate vicinity of the solubility limits. Crystal growth and nucleation are functions of supersaturation. If a high supersaturation is required at low substance-specific growth rates for an adequate crystal growth, high nucleation rates and hence small crystals will result. On this basis, the authors present information for the specific design of crystallization processes. In contrast, the solubility of the precipitated product must be very low for precipitation. Direct crystal formation is possible only for substance systems of high solubility. As a rule, however, the precipitated substance is so insoluble that solids are formed via amorphous intermediates. The results of a large number of experiments show the influence of various parameters of the precipitation process on the filtrability of the precipitated product.     

Multifunktionales Batteriespeichersystem

In the national research project “Multifunctional Battery Storage System (MBS)” open questions were answered concerning the technical feasibility and profitability of a grid-connected battery storage system using a vanadium-redox-flow battery in combination with the renewable power generation plants PV and small wind power (Sterrer et al., Multifunktionales Batteriespeichersystem—MBS-Endbericht. Industrielle Forschung im Rahmen der österreichischen Programmlinie Neue Energie 2020, 3. Ausschreibung, noch nicht veröffentlicht, 2013). The technical implementation and the demonstration operation of the pilot plant over a period of two years showed that the battery storage system is suitable for intelligent marketing of renewable energy as well as the provision of system services for grid stabilisation. However, the investigation of different operating strategies of the pilot battery-storage system, a large scale storage system and pooled PV/battery storage systems as virtual power plant for the participation at the energy trading market and energy reserve market showed that all operation strategies being considered in this study may not be profitable in foreseeable future. However, if the costs of the battery storage system can be reduced to about 250 €/kWh until the year 2030, the application of the vanadium-redox-flow battery in particular in large-scale storage plants (e.g. 10 MW, 100 MWh) for the participation at the energy reserve market seems realistic.     

Finding Quadratic Schedules for Affine Recurrence Equations Via Nonsmooth Optimization

Frequently, affine recurrence equations can be scheduled more efficiently by quadratic scheduling functions than by linear scheduling functions. In this paper, the problem of finding optimal quadratic schedules for affine recurrence equations is formulated as a convex nonsmooth programming problem. In particular, sufficient constraints for causality are used generalizing Lamport's condition. In this way, the presented problem formulation becomes independent of the problem size. The research tool AQUAD is described implementing this problem formulation. Several nontrivial examples demonstrate that AQUAD can be effectively used to calculate quadratic schedules for affine recurrence equations. Finally, it is shown how array processors can be synthesized from affine recurrence equations which are scheduled by quadratic functions with a singular Hessian matrix.     

Multiview deblurring for 3-D images from light-sheet-based fluorescence microscopy

We propose an algorithm for 3-D multiview deblurring using spatially variant point spread functions (PSFs). The algorithm is applied to multiview reconstruction of volumetric microscopy images. It includes registration and estimation of the PSFs using irregularly placed point markers (beads). We formulate multiview deblurring as an energy minimization problem subject to L1-regularization. Optimization is based on the regularized Lucy-Richardson algorithm, which we extend to deal with our more general model. The model parameters are chosen in a profound way by optimizing them on a realistic training set. We quantitatively and qualitatively compare with existing methods and show that our method provides better signal-to-noise ratio and increases the resolution of the reconstructed images.     

Synthesis of scanning electron microscopy images by high performance computing for the metrology of advanced CMOS processes

Scanning electron microscopy is still the technique of choice for imaging and for in-line measurement of critical dimensions and overlay accuracy in most of the core technology processes. In particular, critical dimension microscopy provides information about design template matching and edge placement errors through links with design having proven beneficial effects on process yield and product reliability. In this paper, the use of high performance computing is demonstrated to simulate linescans and 2D secondary electron images to be used in optical proximity error correction strategies for nanometer scale technologies.     

Reduced-Complexity Near-Maximum-Likelihood Detection for Decision Feedback Assisted Space-Time Equalization

A novel decision-feedback (DF) aided reduced complexity maximum likelihood (ML) space-time equalizer (STE) designed for a single-carrier system is introduced. Two different methods of incorporating DF into the recursive tree search based receiver structure are proposed for allowing detection at a moderate computational cost. Additionally, a further complexity reduction scheme is proposed, which exploits the specific characteristics of both the wide-band channel and the proposed DF-STE. In comparison to the DF-STE not benefiting from this complexity reduction, the proposed detector is capable of reducing the complexity by several orders of magnitude. More quantitatively, for the specific rank-deficient system considered, which detected the signal transmitted from four transmit antennas with the aid of two receive antennas, the complexity might be reduced by a factor of 100 at low Signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) without noticeable performance degradation. By contrast, at higher SNRs a complexity reduction of a factor of 10 might be achieved, depending on the tolerable performance degradation.     

UNICORE 6 — Recent and Future Advancements

UNICORE is a European Grid Technology with more than 10 years of history. Originating from the Supercomputing domain, the latest version UNICORE 6 has turned into a general-purpose Grid technology that follows established standards and offers a rich set of features to its users. The paper starts with an architectural insight into UNICORE 6, highlighting the workflow features, standards and the different clients. Next, the current state of advancement is presented by describing recent developments. The paper closes with an outlook on future planned developments.