Experimental investigation and multiresponse genetic optimization of drilling parameters for self-healing GFRP

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - Self-healing materials heal partially or completely when damage occurs to restore the functionality of the material. Self-healing technology has found...     

Computer Systems Based on Silicon Photonic Interconnects

We present a computing microsystem that uniquely leverages the bandwidth, density, and latency advantages of silicon photonic interconnect to enable highly compact supercomputer-scale systems. We describe and justify single-node and multinode systems interconnected with wavelength-routed optical links, quantify their benefits vis-a-vis electrically connected systems, analyze the constituent optical component and system requirements, and provide an overview of the critical technologies needed to fulfill this system vision. This vision calls for more than a hundredfold reduction in energy to communicate an optical bit of information. We explore the power dissipation of a photonic link, suggest a roadmap to lower the energy-per-bit of silicon photonic interconnects, and identify the challenges that will be faced by device and circuit designers towards this goal.     

Application of combined temporal and spectral processing methods for speaker recognition under noisy,reverberant or multi-speaker environments

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the combined temporal and spectral processing methods for speaker recognition task under noise, reverberation or multi-speaker environments. Automatic speaker recognition system gives good performance in controlled environments. Speech recorded in real environments by distant microphones is degraded by factors like background noise, reverberation and interfering speakers. This degradation strongly affects the performance of the speaker recognition system. Combined temporal and spectral processing (TSP) methods proposed in our earlier study are used for pre-processing to improve the speaker-specific features and hence the speaker recognition performance. Different types of degradation like background noise, reverberation and interfering speaker are considered for evaluation. The evaluation is carried out for the individual temporal processing, spectral processing and the combined TSP method. The experimental results show that the combined TSP methods give relatively higher recognition performance compared to either temporal or spectral processing alone.     

A new weighted-sum-of-gray-gases model for CO2–H2O gas mixtures

Decoupled radiative transfer calculations of Sandia Flame D are performed employing experimental measurements of temperature and gas compositions and the discrete ordinates method. Turbulence radiation interactions are accounted for employing temperature variance measurements. The spatial variations in the mean H₂O/CO₂ ratios within the flame are seen to vary widely and sometimes fall outside the range of the weighted-sum-of-gray-gases model (WSGGM) parameters reported in the literature. Therefore, parameters for a new WSGGM are computed from total emissivity correlations encompassing the range of the H₂O/CO₂ ratios encountered within the flame. Predictions from the new model compare favorably against the spectral-line-based WSGGM and existing benchmarks.     

Operational transform technique for generating Lyapunov functions

An operational transform technique is established to generate Lyapunov functions for the transient stability study of a power system modelled to full complexity. This method requires the system equations in state-space form without any additional assumption. A modifiable skew symmetric transformation matrix is shown to exist, via which the Lyapunov functions for a power system are generated. The power and the simplicity of the presented method is demonstrated by applying it to a single-machine, infinite-bus system, taking into account the effects of transfer conductances and all control equipment. The applicability of the method to a typical multimachine power system is examined and presented.     

High fill-factor two-axis gimbaled tip-tilt-piston micromirror array actuated by self-Aligned vertical electrostatic combdrives

In this paper, we present a high fill-factor micromirror array actuated by self-aligned vertical electrostatic combdrives. To meet the requirements of applications in free-space communication and imaging, each micromirror has three degrees of freedom of motion: rotation around two axes in the mirror plane and linear translation perpendicular to the mirror plane. Our approach is to integrate the high fill-factor reflectors into the fabrication process of the actuators on the wafer-scale. Multilevel silicon-on-insulator (SOI) bonding is utilized to form the high optical quality reflectors and high aspect-ratio vertical combdrive actuators. The wiring for electrical access to the multielectrode per pixel array is fabricated on separate wafers by thin film processing, and flip-chip bonded to the reflector/actuator chip. This architecture overcomes the fill-factor limitation of top-side accessed electrical addressing of mirrors made on SOI. Our 360/spl mu/m pixel size mirror array achieves a 99% fill-factor with optically flat reflectors.     

Daily intake of manganese by the adult population of Mumbai

The daily intake of manganese (Mn) estimated through air, water and duplicate dietary analysis is found to range from 0.67 to 4.99 mg with a mean value of 2.21 mg. Ingestion through food contributed to the predominant fraction of the intake. The turnover rate of Mn through blood is approximately 2 h, based on the mean concentration of Mn in blood of 1.54 microg l(-1). The average concentrations of Mn in water and air were approximately 1.42 microg l(-1) and 37 ng m(-3), respectively. The daily intake of Mn by the adult population of Mumbai is closer to the lower bound of the recommended limit of 2-5 mg. Electro Thermal Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry (ET-AAS), has been used for the determination of Mn in a variety of environmental and human biological fluids. The detection limit of Mn for a volume injection of 20 microl is 2 pg absolute. The precision of the method is established by analyzing a synthetic mixture containing various elements in different quantities (0.5-10 ppm) and is found to be within +/- 8%. The reliability of estimation is further assessed through the analysis of Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) of soil, hay, milk powder and fish tissue obtained from IAEA.     

Optical receivers for optoelectronic VLSI

We describe our work on the design and testing of optical receivers for use in optoelectronic VLSI. The local nature of the optoelectronic VLSI system permits novel receiver designs, incorporating multiple optical beams and/or synchronous operation, while the requirement of realizing large numbers of receivers on a single chip severely constrains area and power consumption. We describe four different receiver designs, and their different operating modes. Results include 1-Gb/s high-impedance, two-beam diode-clamped FET-SEED receivers, single and dual-beam transimpedance receivers realized with a hybrid attachment of multiple-quantum well devices to 0.8-μm linewidth CMOS operating to 1 Gb/s, and synchronous sense-amplifier-based optical receivers with low (~1 mW) power consumption. Finally, we introduce a measure of receiver performance that includes area and power consumption     

Submicrosecond surface-induced dissociation of peptide ions in a MALDI TOF MS

Surface-induced dissociation (SID) has been implemented in a matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (MALDI TOF MS), allowing production of tandem mass spectrometric information for peptide ions (MALDI TOF SID TOF). The instrument retains the standard operational modes such as the reflectron monitoring of the MALDI-generated intact ions and postsource decay. We show through ion trajectory simulations and experimental results that implementing SID in a commercial MALDI TOF spectrometer is feasible and that the SID products in this instrument fall in an observation time frame that allows the specific detection of fast-fragmentation channels. The instrument design, pulse timing sequence, and high-voltage electronics together with SID spectra of MALDI-generated peptide ions are presented. Standard peptides such as YGGFLR, angiotensin III, fibrinopeptide A, and des-Arg1-bradykinin were dissociated by means of hyperthermal collisions with a gold surface coated with a self-assembled monolayer of 2-(perfluorodecyl)ethanethiol. With the extraction fields and the short observation times used, the spectra obtained show intense low-mass ion signals such as immonium, b2, b3, and y2 ions. TOF data analysis involved matching simulated and experimental flight times and indicates that the observed fragments are produced at approximately 250 ns after the precursor ion collides with the surface. This submicrosecond gas-phase fragmentation time frame is complementary to the observation time frame of existing SID spectrometers, which are on the order of 10 micros for tandem quadrupoles and are larger than a few milliseconds for SID implemented in Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance spectrometers.     

Optimal Joint Detection/Estimation in Fading Channels With Polynomial Complexity

The problem of sequence detection in frequency-nonselective/time-selective fading channels, when channel state information (CSI) is not available at the transmitter and receiver, is considered in this paper. The traditional belief is that exact maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) of an uncoded sequence over this channel has exponential complexity in the channel coherence time. Thus, for slowly varying channels, i.e., channels having coherence time on the order of the sequence length, the complexity appears to be exponential in the sequence length. In the first part of this work, it is shown that exact MLSD can be computed with only polynomial worst case complexity in the sequence length regardless of the operating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for equal-energy signal constellations. By establishing a relationship between the aforementioned complexity and the rank of the correlation matrix of the fading process, an understanding of how complexity of the optimal MLSD receiver varies as the channel dynamics change is provided. In the second part of this paper, the problem of decoding turbo-like codes in frequency-nonselective/time-selective fading channels without receiver CSI is examined. Using arguments similar to the ones used for the MLSD case, it is shown that the exact symbol-by-symbol soft-decision metrics (SbSSDMs) implied by the min-sum algorithm can be evaluated with polynomial worst case complexity in the sequence length regardless of SNR for equal-energy signal constellations. Finally, by simplifying some key steps in the polynomial-complexity algorithm, a family of fast, approximate algorithms is derived, which yield near-optimal performance