Photoreactivation of Escherichia coli following medium-pressure ultraviolet disinfection and its control using chloramination.

Ultraviolet (UV) disinfection is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative disinfection technology to chlorination in recent years. In this study, we investigated the photoreactivation of Escherichia coli following medium-pressure (MP) UV disinfection of synthetic water by a bench-scale collimated beam apparatus. The UV doses ranged from 1.6 -19.7 mWs/cm2 and photoreactivation was investigated for 6 hours under fluorescent light. In addition, chloramination was applied after UV disinfection to investigate its ability to control photoreactivation. It was found that photoreactivation occurred for all UV doses tested and the increase in bacteria numbers ranged from 0.04 to 1.35 log10. However, the degree of photoreactivation decreased with increased UV doses. Chloramination experiments revealed that the addition of 0.5 mg/l of monochloramine resulted in suppression of photoreactivation for 1 hour only. An increased monochloramine dose of 1 mg/l was found to prevent photoreactivation for the entire duration of the experiment. The results of this study have shown that photoreactivation occurs even after MP UV disinfection, although it is of a lesser extent at higher UV doses. This study has also established that secondary chloramination can effectively suppress and eliminate photoreactivation with a chloramine dose of 1 mg/l.     

Programmable group-delay module using binary polarization switching

We demonstrate the first programmable group-delay module based on polarization switching. With a unique binary tuning mechanism, the device can generate any differential group delay value from -45 to +45 ps with a resolution of 1.40 ps, or any true-time-delay value from 0 to 45 ps with a resolution of 0.7 ps. The delay varying speeds for both applications are under 1 ms and can be as fast as 0.1 ms. We evaluate both the dynamic and static performances of the device while paying special attention to its dynamic figures of merit for polarization-mode dispersion emulation and compensation applications. Our experiment shows that the device exhibits a negligible transient-effect induced power penalty (<0.2 dB) in a 10-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero system.     

Traction-based Completed Adjoint Double Layer Boundary Element Method in elasticity

This paper is concerned with a traction-based Completed Adjoint Double Layer Boundary Element Method to solve for the surface traction of a system of rigid particles embedded in an elastic matrix. The main feature of the method is a single layer representation of the displacement field, which leads to a system of second-kind integral equations for the traction field, the extreme eigenvalue of which could be deflated, allowing iterative solution strategies to be effectively applied. The method is therefore most suitable for large-scale simulations of particulate solids. The method is benchmarked against some known analytic solutions, including the difficult stress singularity problems at sharp edges. The effectiveness of the method in dealing with a large number of inclusions is also demonstrated with an elongational deformation problem involving up to 25 inclusions.Research supported by the Australian Research Council (to NP-T and X-JF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (X-JF).     

Powder Deposition in Three Parallel-Oriented Dies of Different Shapes

Uniformity of bulk density distribution during the die filling process is required to minimize quality problems, such as distortion and cracking, for powder compacts. Understanding the die filling process is necessary in ensuring a uniform powder deposition. The second-generation pressure deposition tester (PDT-II) was used to investigate the deposition process and final pressure distribution of powder filling in toroidal, cylindrical, and E-shaped dies. All tests were conducted using a spray-dried free-flowing granular powder. The results indicated that for toroidal dies: (1) the area around 0° orientation (the leeward end) had the highest pressure values (1186.7 to 2498.0 Pa), with the average pressure values of the remaining area 353.7-648.0 Pa; (2) the pressure distribution was symmetrical about the centerline parallel to the feed shoe movement direction; (3) the highest feed shoe speed (500 mm/s) led to the most nonuniform pressure distribution among the three speeds; (4) higher feed shoe speed did not always result in higher final pressure values; and (5) the right die tended to have higher final pressure values (215.0 to 2498.0 Pa) than the center die (95.4 to 2052.5 Pa). For E-shaped dies: (1) the final pressure values of the middle leg (308.9 to 760.7 Pa) were higher than those of the left and the right legs (148.9 to 530.3 Pa); (2) the area along the backside had the highest final pressure value (1054.6 to 1303.8 Pa); (3) the pressure distribution was symmetrical about the centerline parallel to the feed shoe movement direction; and (4) neither the center die nor the right die always had higher pressure values than the other one at all locations. Comparison between cylindrical and toroidal dies indicated that: (1) neither of the two die shapes (cylinder and toroid) led to consistently higher or lower final pressure values at all locations and (2) for all three feed shoe speeds, the toroidal die had higher average final pressure values in the 0° orientation.     

Impact of microstructure on stability of permanent magnet biasedmagnetoresistive heads

This work pertains to output voltage stability of soft adjacent layer biased magnetoresistive heads with abutted permanent magnetic films for domain stabilization. A micromagnetic model has been developed to study the effect of the permanent magnet film microstructure and the micromagnetic properties of the abutted junction interface on head stability. The impact on head stability is analyzed with respect to interfacial ferromagnetic coupling across the junction interface and intergranular exchange coupling in the permanent magnet films among other film properties     

A perceptually motivated three-component image model-part II:applications to image compression

For past I see ibid., vol.4, no.4, p.405 (1995). The use of the image model of Part I is investigated in the context of image compression. The model decomposes the image into a primary component that contains the strong edge information, a smooth component that represents the background slow-intensity variations, and a texture component that contains the textures. The primary component, which is known to be perceptually important, is encoded separately by encoding the intensity and geometric information of the strong edge brim contours. Two alternatives for coding the smooth and texture components are studied: entropy-coded adaptive DCT and entropy-coded subband coding. It is shown via simulations that the proposed schemes, which can be thought of as a hybrid of waveform coding and feature-based coding techniques, result in both subjective and objective performance improvements over several other image coding schemes and, in particular, over the JPEG continuous-tone image compression standard. These improvements are especially noticeable at low bit rates. Furthermore, it is shown that a perceptual tuning based on the contrast-sensitivity of the human visual system can be used in the DCT-based scheme, which in conjunction with the three-component model, leads to additional subjective performance improvements.     

镨掺杂分布对1.3μm光纤放大器特性影响

对掺氟化镨玻璃光纤放大器的小信号增益，用广义的高斯近似公式可获得精确的分析表达。文中研究了限制光纤芯层中央部分的镨掺杂对光纤放大器特性的影响，结果发现限制镨掺杂分布能改进光纤放大器的工作效率，且截止波长比芯层全部均匀掺镨的光纤更长。     

Hierarchical production control for a flow shop with dynamic setup changes and random machine breakdowns

In this paper, we study a manufacturing system consisting of two machines separated by two intermediate buffers, and capable of producing two different products. Each product requires a constant processing time on each of the machines. Each machine requires a constant non-negligible setup change time from one product to the other. The demand rate for each product is considered to be piecewise constant. Each machine undergoes failure and repair. The time-to-failure and time-to-repair are exponentially distributed random variables. The setup change and processing operations are resumable. We model our system as a continuous time, continuous flow process. An optimal control problem is formulated for the system to minimize the total expected discounted cost over an infinite horizon. To determine the optimal control policy structure, a discrete version of the problem is solved numerically using a dynamic programming formulation with a piecewise linear penalty function. A real-time control algorithm is then developed with the objective of maintaining low work-in-process inventory and keeping the production close to the demand. The algorithm uses a hierarchical control structure to generate the loading times for each product on each machine in real time and to respond to random disruptions in the system. The system is simulated using this algorithm to study its performance. The performance of the algorithm is also compared to alternative policies.