Effect of Cryogenic Temperature Deposition of Various Metal Contacts on Bulk Single-Crystal <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-Type ZnO

The effect of cryogenic temperatures during metal deposition on the contact properties of Pd, Pt, Ti, and Ni on bulk single-crystal n-type ZnO has been investigated. Deposition at both room and low temperature produced contacts with Ohmic characteristics for Ti and Ni metallizations. By sharp contrast, both Pd and Pt contacts showed rectifying characteristics after deposition with barrier heights between 0.37 eV and 0.69 eV. Changes in contact behavior were measured on Pd to anneal temperatures of ∼300 °C, showing an increase in barrier height along with a decrease in ideality factor with increasing annealing temperature. This difference with annealing temperature is in sharp contrast to previous results for Au contacts to ZnO. There were no differences in near-surface stoichiometry for the different deposition temperatures; however, low temperature contacts demonstrated some peeling/cracking for Pt and Pd.     

Hot Workability of as‐Cast High Manganese‐High Carbon Steels

In order to produce new high Mn‐high C austenitic steels (R_m>700 MPa), different tests and methods were used to determine a suitable window of process parameters. In‐situ melting hot tensile tests and hot compression tests were carried out to investigate the hot ductility, fracture characteristics and flow behaviour during continuous casting and hot deformation of 3 steels with Mn and C contents between 9‐23% and 0.6‐0.9%, respectively. The results show that these steels are susceptible to interdendritic fracture at high temperatures. Decreasing Mn content improves the reduction of area at high temperatures to 60% or more. Hot deformation loads for processing the investigated steels are not higher in comparison to the stainless steel 1.4301.     

Investigation of Efficient Conditions for Oxidative Roasting of Chromite Ore to Produce Potassium Chromate with KOH Additive

A method of producing potassium Chromate directly from chromite ore and KOH was investigated. The chromium recovery was >90% after roasting at 800°C for 3 hours. The KOH‐to‐ore weight ratio was 1.2:1 and the ore‐to‐recycling residue weight ratio was 1:1. Production from the roasting process was easy to leach and about 100% of Chromate could be recovered through a treatment at 30°C for 30~40min with a water/solid ratio of 5:1. The obtained Chromate solution was purified by addition of conventional compounds.     

An evolutionary strategy for decremental multiobjective optimization problems

In this article, an evolutionary algorithm for multiobjective optimization problems in a dynamic environment is studied. In particular, we focus on decremental multiobjective optimization problems, where some objectives may be deleted during evolution—for such a process we call it objective decrement. It is shown that the Pareto‐optimal set after objective decrement is actually a subset of the Pareto‐optimal set before objective decrement. Based on this observation, the inheritance strategy is suggested. When objective decrement takes place, this strategy selects good chromosomes according to the decremented objective set from the solutions found before objective decrement, and then continues to optimize them via evolution for the decremented objective set. The experimental results showed that this strategy can help MOGAs achieve better performance than MOGAs without using the strategy, where the evolution is restarted when objective decrement occurs. More solutions with better quality are found during the same time span. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 847–866, 2007.     

Kernel support for zero‐loss Internet service restart

Owing to long serving time and huge numbers of clients, Internet services can easily suffer from transient faults. Although restarting a service can solve this problem, information of the on‐line requests will be lost owing to the service restart, which is unacceptable for many commercial or transaction‐based services. In this paper, we propose an approach to achieve the goal of zero‐loss restart for Internet services. Under this approach, a kernel subsystem is responsible for detecting the transient faults, retaining the I/O channels of the service, and managing the service restart flow. In addition, some straightforward modifications to the service should be made to take advantage of the kernel support. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented the subsystem in the Linux kernel. Moreover, we modified a Web server and a CGI program to take advantage of the kernel support. According to the experimental results, our approach incurs little runtime overhead (i.e. less than 3.2%). When the service crashes, it can be restarted quickly (i.e. within 210 μs) with no information loss. Furthermore, the performance impact due to the service crash is small. These results show that the approach can efficiently achieve the goal of zero‐loss restart for Internet services. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

INTERNET‐BASED REAL‐TIME CONTROL ARCHITECTURES WITH TIME‐DELAY/PACKET‐LOSS COMPENSATION

The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of Internet‐based real‐time control. A novel client/server‐based architecture for Internet‐based supervisory control with a Common Gateway Interface/Hyper Text Markup Language (CGI/HTML) interface is presented. A real‐time operating environment was established for closed‐loop control over Ethernet. We conceived of an autoregressive (AR) prediction scheme and a novel compensation algorithm to compensate for network‐induced time delays and data‐packet losses simultaneously. We constructed an open‐loop unstable ball magnetic‐levitation (maglev) setup as a test bed to validate the two proposed control architectures. Experimental results proved the feasibility of Internet‐based real‐time control and verified the effectiveness of the proposed time‐delay/packet‐loss compensation algorithm in networked feedback control systems.     

PID TUNING FOR DOMINANT POLES AND PHASE MARGIN

A simple PID tuning method for dominant pole placement and phase margin specification is proposed in this paper. Time domain specifications as settling time and percentage overshoot are represented by a pair of dominant poles, which is combined with phase margin specification to achieve closed‐loop stability and robustness. A graphical method is developed to determine PID settings to meet these specifications simultaneously. An example is given for illustration.     

PARAMETRIC SOLUTIONS TO THE GENERALIZED SYLVESTER MATRIX EQUATION AX ‐ XF = BY AND THE REGULATOR EQUATION AX ‐ XF = BY + R

In this paper, explicit parametric solutions to the generalized Sylvester matrix equation AX ‐ XF = BY and the regulator matrix equation AX ‐ XF = BY + R are proposed without any transformation and factorization. The proposed solutions are presented in terms of the Krylov matrix of matrix pair (A, B), a symmetric operator and the generalized observability matrix of matrix pair (Z, F) where Z is an arbitrary matrix and is used to denote the degree of freedom in the solution. Due to its elegant form and convenient computation, these proposed solutions will play an important role in solving and analyzing these types of equations in control systems theory.