Metal contact properties of poly3-octylthiophene thin films

Chemically synthesized undoped poly3-octylthiophene (P3OT) was deposited as thin films on conducting glass substrates by drop casting. Doping state of P3OT was obtained by adding FeCl₃ into the original P3OT solution. A qualitative explanation of the electrical contact behavior of the P3OT films was given by a band diagram made from optical absorbance spectra and electrochemical current–voltage curves of the polymeric films. Gold contacts on both undoped and doped P3OT films give an ohmic contact. Silver/P3OT contact shows a rectifying behavior; the forward current is 500 times the reverse current at 0.5 V. Aluminum also forms rectifying contact with the two types of P3OT films, although the experimental rectification ratio is lower than that of the silver. The I–V curves of rectifying contacts were analyzed with Schottky equation and different diode parameters were obtained.     

Influence of size and polarity of residue 31 in porcine pancreatic phospholipase A2 on catalytic properties

Residue 31 of porcine pancreatic phospholipase A₂ (PLA₂) islocated at the entrance to the active site. To study the roleof residue 31 in PLA₂, six mutant enzymes were produced by site-directedmutagenesis, replacing Leu by either Trp, Arg, Ala, Thr, Seror Gly. Direct binding studies indicated a three to six timesgreater affinity of the Trp31 PLA₂ for both monomeric and micellarsubstrate analogs, relative to the wild-type enzyme. The otherfive mutants possess an unchanged affinity for monomers of theproduct analog n-decylphosphocholine and for micelles of thediacyl substrate analog rac-l,2-dioctanoylamino-dideoxy-glycero-3-phosphocholine.The affinities for micelles of the monoacyl product analog n-hexadecylphosphocholinewere decreased 9–20 times for these five mutants. Kineticstudies with monomeric substrates showed that the mutants haveV_max values which range between 15 and 70% relative to the wild-typeenzyme. The V_max values for micelles of the zwitterionic substratel,2-dioctanoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine were lowered 3–50times. The K_m values for the monomeric substrate and the k_mvalues for the micellar substrate were hardly affected in thecase of five of the six mutants, but were considerably decreasedwhen Trp was present at position 31. The results of these investigationspoint to a versatile role for the residue at position 31: involvementin the binding and orientating of monomeric substrate (analogs),involvement in the binding of the enzyme to micellar substrateanalogs and possibly involvement in shielding the active sitefrom excess water.     

Fast Multi-Hypothesis Motion Compensated Filter for Video Denoising

Multi-Hypothesis motion compensated filter (MHMCF) utilizes a number of hypotheses (temporal predictions) to estimate the current pixel which is corrupted with noise. While showing remarkable denoising results, MHMCF is computationally intensive as full search is employed in the expectation of finding good temporal predictions in the presence of noise. In the frame of MHMCF, a fast denoising algorithm FMHMCF is proposed in this paper. With edge preserved low-pass prefiltering and noise-robust fast multihypothesis search, FMHMCF could find reliable hypotheses while checking very few search locations, so that the denoising process can be dramatically accelerated. Experimental results show that FMHMCF can be 10 to 14 times faster than MHMCF, while achieving the same or even better denoising performance with up to 1.93 dB PSNR (peak-signal-noise-ratio) improvement.     

A Discretized Approach to Air Pollution Monitoring Using UAV-based Sensing

Mobile Networks and Applications - Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become a cheap alternative to sense pollution values in a certain area due to their flexibility and ability to...     

DBA algorithm for the support of multi-tiered bandwidth guarantee in Ethernet passive optical networks

Access Networks based on Passive Optical Network (PON) technology can offer transport services to broadband service providers, such as mobile backhauling/fronthauling for Mobile Network Operators and multi-ONU Service Level Agreements for Virtual Network Operators. Besides that, Infrastructure Service Provider (InP) also provides broadband access services to end-users, such as residential subscribers and single or multi-site enterprises. In such a scenario, the InPs support diverse customers in the same PON. This paper proposes a bandwidth slicing mechanism to assure bandwidth isolation for different PON customers who rent part of a PON infrastructure from the InP. We introduce a Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation algorithm for Ethernet PONs called MAB-IPACT, which assures bandwidth on different granularity: conventional customers with a single ONU, multi-ONU customers owning a group of ONUs and providing a single type of service, and multi-ONU customers having diverse types of services. The MAB-IPACT algorithm also prioritizes bandwidth distribution among subgroups of ONUs of the same multi-ONU customer. A subgroup of ONUs is a subset of ONUs that belongs to the same multi-ONU customer, which are employed for the same type of service (e.g., ONUs for business service.). Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism improves the network performance of multi-ONU customers with subgroups of ONUs serving different services.

     

A fast and efficient technique to apply Selective TMR through optimization

Fault tolerance is an important factor for circuits in critical applications, especially those working in harsh environments. There are many techniques to increase reliability of circuits, being those based on redundancy very popular. In this way, Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) is frequently used, but it usually incurs high area costs. That is why other alternative techniques, as Selective TMR, are used in order to reduce this cost. In this technique, only a subset of registers is tripled, those that are more sensitive and produce a higher error rate in the circuit. However, the problem of these methodologies is the complexity of finding the optimal set of registers to triple, what usually leads to very high computation times. In this paper, a novel solution that improves Selective TMR is presented, based on the automatic and fast calculation of an initial partition prior to the optimization process. The solution has been tested on a real communication circuit, a Feed-Forward Equalizer.     

Improved Particle Filter Resampling Architectures

The most challenging aspect of particle filtering hardware implementation is the resampling step. This is because of high latency as it can be only partially executed in parallel with the other steps of particle filtering and has no inherent parallelism inside it. To reduce the latency, an improved resampling architecture is proposed which involves pre-fetching from the weight memory in parallel to the fetching of a value from a random function generator along with architectures for realizing the pre-fetch technique. This enables a particle filter using M particles with otherwise streaming operation to get new inputs more often than 2M cycles as the previously best approach gives. Results show that a pre-fetch buffer of five values achieves the best area-latency reduction trade-off while on average achieving an 85% reduction in latency for the resampling step leading to a sample time reduction of more than 40%. We also propose a generic division-free architecture for the resampling steps. It also removes the need of explicitly ordering the random values for efficient multinomial resampling implementation. In addition, on-the-fly computation of the cumulative sum of weights is proposed which helps reduce the word length of the particle weight memory. FPGA implementation results show that the memory size is reduced by up to 50%.

     

Phenomenological model of diffuse global and regional atrophy using finite-element methods

The main goal of this work is the generation of ground-truth data for the validation of atrophy measurement techniques, commonly used in the study of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. Several techniques have been used to measure atrophy in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, but it is extremely difficult to compare their performance since they have been applied to different patient populations. Furthermore, assessment of performance based on phantom measurements or simple scaled images overestimates these techniques' ability to capture the complexity of neurodegeneration of the human brain. We propose a method for atrophy simulation in structural magnetic resonance (MR) images based on finite-element methods. The method produces cohorts of brain images with known change that is physically and clinically plausible, providing data for objective evaluation of atrophy measurement techniques. Atrophy is simulated in different tissue compartments or in different neuroanatomical structures with a phenomenological model. This model of diffuse global and regional atrophy is based on volumetric measurements such as the brain or the hippocampus, from patients with known disease and guided by clinical knowledge of the relative pathological involvement of regions and tissues. The consequent biomechanical readjustment of structures is modelled using conventional physics-based techniques based on biomechanical tissue properties and simulating plausible tissue deformations with finite-element methods. A thermoelastic model of tissue deformation is employed, controlling the rate of progression of atrophy by means of a set of thermal coefficients, each one corresponding to a different type of tissue. Tissue characterization is performed by means of the meshing of a labelled brain atlas, creating a reference volumetric mesh that will be introduced to a finite-element solver to create the simulated deformations. Preliminary work on the simulation of acquisition artefacts is also presented. Cross-sectional and longitudinal sets of simulated data are shown and a visual classification protocol has been used by experts to rate real and simulated scans according to their degree of atrophy. Results confirm the potential of the proposed methodology.     

Modular Hydroxyamide and Thioamide Pyranoside‐Based Ligand Library from the Sugar Pool: New Class of Ligands for Asymmetric Transfer Hydrogenation of Ketones

A large library of pyranoside‐based hydroxyamide and thioamide ligands has been synthesized for asymmetric transfer hydrogenation in an attempt to expand the scope of the substrates to cover a broader range of challenging heteroaromatic and aryl/fluoroalkyl ketones. These ligands have the advantage that they are prepared from commercial D ‐glucose, D ‐glucosamine and α‐amino acids, inexpensive natural chiral feedstocks. By carefully selecting the ligand components (substituents/configurations at the amide/thioamide moiety, the position of amide/thioamide group and the configuration at C‐2), we found that pyranoside‐based thioamide ligands provided excellent enantioselectivities (in the best cases, ees of >99% were achieved) in a broad range of ketones, including the less studied heteroaromatics and challenging aryl/fluoroalkyls. Note that both enantiomers of the reduction products can be obtained with excellent enantioselectivities by simply changing the absolute configuration of the thioamide substituent.

     

Damage detection in elevated spherical containers partially filled with liquid

Damage detection through changes in the dynamic properties has received considerable attention in recent years. However, approaches in structures supporting tanks partially filled with liquid are scarce in the technical literature.In this paper, a numerical-experimental study of damage detection in coupled fluid-structure elevated spherical tank systems is presented. The main objective is to investigate the feasibility to detect structural damage in the support structure by monitoring changes in natural frequencies. The major difficulty arises due to the changes in natural frequencies when the liquid level varies. Thus, in order to gain insight into the dynamical behaviour of the spherical containers and distinguish between the frequency shift caused by container filling conditions or by structural damage, experimental free vibration tests with small vibration amplitudes on a scaled spherical tank model are performed. The dependency of the identified frequencies on the structural damage severity is studied assuming three increasing levels of damage in the support structure. The results indicate that it is possible to detect structural damage, with acceptable confidence, up to liquid filling level of 30%. Moreover, only the “associated structural frequency” reflects the structural damage with a perceptible drop. Next, a numerical model of a real spherical container that takes into account the coupling between fluid and structure is presented to demonstrate the usefulness and validity of the results.