Self-assembly of highly oriented palladium-based nanowires on mica surface

The self-assembly of various nanostructures is recently attracting a great deal of research attention. In this paper, we demonstrate that a palladium chloride aqueous solution, mixed with a proper ammonia solution, can produce Tetra-amminepalladous chloride (Pd(NH₃)₄Cl₂·H₂O) nanowires. These nanowires can spontaneously form the two-dimensional hexagon-oriented Pd(NH₃)₄Cl₂·H₂O arrays on mica surfaces. We can control the length and height of these nanowires by adjusting their deposit time on the mica substrate. This method can be potentially used in making sensors or in making templates to wire and position nanodevices.     

Network and device-level impacts: performance and reliability of active I/O storage systems

Distributed active storage architectures are designed to offload user-level processing to the peripheral from the host servers. In this paper, we report preliminary investigation on performance and fault recovery designs, as impacted by emerging storage interconnect protocols and state-of-the-art storage devices. Empirical results obtained using validated device-level and interconnect data demonstrate the significance of the said parameters on the overall system performance and reliability.     

A branch-and-price algorithm to solve the molten iron allocation problem in iron and steel industry

The molten iron allocation problem (MIAP) is to allocate molten iron from blast furnaces to steel-making furnaces. The allocation needs to observe the release times of the molten iron defined by the draining plan of the blast furnaces and the transport time between the iron-making and steel-making stages. Time window constraints for processing the molten iron must be satisfied to avoid freezing. The objective is to find a schedule with minimum total weighted completion time. This objective reflects the practical consideration of improving steel-making efficiency and reducing operation cost caused by the need for reheating. Such a problem can be viewed as a parallel machine scheduling problem with time windows which is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we first formulate the molten iron allocation problem as an integer programming model and then reformulate it as a set partitioning model by applying the Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition. We solve the problem using a column generation-based branch-and-price algorithm. Since the subproblem of column generation is still NP-hard, we propose a state-space relaxation-based dynamic programming algorithm for the subproblem. Computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of solving problems with up to 100 jobs to optimality within a reasonable computation time.     

2002年度煤炭工业优秀科技成果述评

从矿区建设、采煤技术、煤炭洗选技术和环保、高效先进的煤矿专用设备与自动化控制系统等几个方面介绍了我国煤炭工业取得科研成果，并对这些优秀成果的特点进行了分析。认为我国煤炭工业的科研成果的技术水平在逐年提高，已进入了世界先进行列。     

重油催化裂化沉降器结焦原因分析

分析了重油催化裂化沉降器结焦的原因，认为反应油气中含有催化剂颗粒以及油气中重组分的冷凝是沉降器结焦的物理原因，而重芳烃、胶质、沥青质的高温缩合则是沉降器结焦的化学因素。因此，防止沉降器结焦的关键是抑制油气重组分的冷凝和减少油气在沉降器内的停留时间。     

Piezoelectric Nanogenerators for Self-Powered Nanodevices

A novel approach converts nanoscale mechanical energy into electric energy for self-powering nanodevices.In our own work, we've used piezoelectric zinc-oxide nanowire (ZnO NW) arrays to demonstrate a novel approach for converting nanoscale mechanical energy into electric energy. Here, we review the fundamental principle behind the nanogenerator, present an approach for improving its performance, and discuss some of the challenges we face in pushing this technology to reach its potential.     

Factors Affecting the Squareness of Hysteresis Loops of Sintered NdFeB Magnets

Investigation into the magnets with different squareness of hysteresis loop (SHL) reveals that the microstructure of sintered NdFeB magnets has great effects on the SHL of the magnets. The abnormal grain growth deteriorates the SHL seriously. The shape of the grain and the grain boundary affect the intensity of demagnetization field, and consequently on the SHL. The added elements have effects on the phase structures and distributions in the magnets, which influences the uniform of demagnetization field.     

Foreword

This special issue contains six selected papers that were presented at the 11th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2005), held in Kunming, Yunnan, China on August 16–19, 2005. This year we obtained 353 submissions and 96 of them were accepted for presentation at the conference. These six selected papers represent several areas in theoretical computer science, including complexity, computational biology, computational finance, and network algorithms. We thank the authors for submitting and revising their work, and PC members and referees for their careful reviewing.     

A polynomial dynamic system approach to software design for attractivity requirement

Because of the widespread increasing application of Web services and autonomic computing, self-adaptive software is an area gaining increasing importance. Control theory provides a theoretical foundation for self-adaptive software. In this paper, we propose the use of the supervisory control theory of discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS) to provide a rigorous foundation for designing software for reactive systems. This paper focuses in particular on design of software with an attractivity requirement. It studies this problem using the polynomial dynamic system (PDS) model of DEDS. A necessary and sufficient condition for software existence and two algorithms for such software design are presented.