Reliable before-fabrication forecasting of MEMS piezoresistive pressure sensor: mathematical modelling and numerical simulation

Microsystem Technologies - Micro-mechanical systems (MEMS) based piezoresistive pressure sensors have significant importance in several pressure sensor devices in real world, i.e., aviation, IoT...     

Taming the killer in the kitchen: mitigating household air pollution from solid-fuel cookstoves through building design

In this study, we attempt to mitigate household air pollution (HAP) through improved kitchen design. Field surveys were conducted in ten kitchens of rural western India, which were then modelled and simulated for dynamic indoor airflow network analysis. The simulated results were statistically clustered using principal component analysis and hierarchical agglomerative clustering, to construct a cumulative built environment parameter called ‘Built Factor’ for each kitchen, and subsequently a derivative matrix was developed. Categorization of better performing kitchens from this derivative matrix enabled in deriving the built parameter thresholds for a ‘better’ kitchen design. This derived kitchen showed 60 % reduction in PM2.5 peak concentration during cooking hours. The evaluation described here is essentially a “proof of concept”, that effective building design can be an alternative way to reduce HAP without the introduction of chimneys, improved cookstoves or shifting to cleaner fuel.     

Biocompatible antimicrobial cotton fibres for healthcare industries: a biogenic approach for synthesis of bio‐organic‐coated silver nanoparticles

Cotton fibres coated with biogenically fabricated silver nanoparticles (SNPs) are most sought material because of their enhanced activity and biocompatibility. After successful synthesis of SNPs on cotton fibres using leaf extract of Vitex negundo Linn, the fibres were studied using diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, nanoparticle tracking analysis, energy dispersive X‐ray, and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry. The characterisation revealed uniformly distributed spherical agglomerates of SNPs having individual particle size around 50 nm with the deposition load of 423 μg of silver per gram of cotton. Antimicrobial assay of cotton–SNPs fibres showed effective performance against pathogenic bacteria and fungi. The method is biogenic, environmentally benign, rapid, and cost‐effective, producing highly biocompatible antimicrobial coating required for the healthcare industry.Inspec keywords: cotton, health care, nanoparticles, coatings, silver, fibres, nanofabrication, scanning electron microscopy, X‐ray chemical analysis, atomic emission spectroscopy, plasma applications, microorganisms, biotechnologyOther keywords: biocompatible antimicrobial cotton fibre coating, healthcare industry, bioorganic‐coated silver nanoparticle synthesis, biogenically fabricated silver nanoparticle, SNP, leaf extraction, Vitex negundo Linn, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, nanoparticle tracking analysis, energy dispersive X‐ray spectrometry, inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry, uniformly distributed spherical agglomerate, antimicrobial assay, pathogenic bacteria, fungi, Ag     

All‐Organic Dual Spin Valves with Well‐Resolved Four Resistive‐States

The formation of all‐organic dual spin valves (DSVs) with three organic spin‐selective layers, that is, spin‐injection, spin‐detection, and an additional spin‐filtering layer at the intermediate, is reported. As spin‐selective layers, manganese‐ and cobalt phthalocyanines, which are well‐known single‐molecule magnets, are used in their immobilized forms, so that all‐organic DSVs can be prefabricated for characterization. The three spin‐selective layers have provided four configurations with at most two spin‐flip interfaces enforcing spin‐flipping at the two nonmagnetic organic spacer layers, for which copper phthalocyanine is used. Since a couple of the four configurations have exhibited similar resistivities, the degeneracy in the resistive‐states is broken through asymmetric spin‐injection and spin‐detection layers and also through asymmetric thickness of the nonmagnetic spacer layers. When both the spin‐flip interfaces are made operative independently, a 2‐bit logic with four distinct resistive states can be achieved.     

Life cycle energy and carbon footprint analysis of photovoltaic battery microgrid system in India

Electricity supply in India is from a centralized grid. Many parts of the country experience grid interruptions. Life cycle energy and environmental analysis has been done for a 27 kWp photovoltaic system which acts as grid backup for 3 h outage in an Indian urban residential scenario. This paper discusses energy requirements and carbon emission for a PV storage system for five different battery technologies in Indian context. This can be used as a metric for comparative analysis for new batteries, with an undeveloped market. The energy requirements for the components are quantified and are compared in terms of energy payback time (EPBT) and Net Energy Ratio (NER). All the calculations are done for Indian context. EPBT is found to be in the range of 2–4.5 years for all the systems, while NER is in the range of 6.6–2.52. NaS has the highest emission factor of 0.67 kgCO₂/kWh and the least for NiCd (0.091 kgCO₂/kWh). These factors can be used to select a PV battery option and to target selection of materials and systems based on the reported values.     

Exponentially Accurate Approximations to Periodic Lipschitz Functions Based on Fourier Series Partial Sums

The problem of accurately reconstructing a piecewise smooth. 2-periodic function f and its first few derivatives, given only a truncated Fourier series representation of f, is studied and solved. The reconstruction process is divided into two steps. In the first step, the first 2N + 1 Fourier coefficients of f are used to approximate the locations and magnitudes of the discontinuities in f and its first M derivatives. This is accomplished by first finding initial estimates of these quantities based on certain properties of Gibbs phenomenon, and then refining these estimates by fitting the asymptotic form of the Fourier coefficients to the given coefficients using a least-squares approach. The locations of the singularities are approximated to within O(N ^–M–2), and the associated jump of the kth derivative of f is approximated to within O(N ^–M–1+k ), as N , and the method is robust. These estimates are then used with a class of singular basis functions, which have certain built-in singularities, to construct a new sequence of approximations to f. Each of these new approximations is the sum of a piecewise smooth function and a new Fourier series partial sum. When N is proportional to M, it is shown that these new approximations, and their derivatives, converge exponentially in the maximum norm to f, and its corresponding derivatives, except in the union of a finite number of small open intervals containing the points of singularity of f. The total measure of these intervals decreases exponentially to zero as M . The technique is illustrated with several examples.     

A self-configurable large-scale virtual manufacturing environment for collaborative designers

As manufacturing environments are getting distributed and increasing in size, the related virtual environments are getting larger and more closely networked together. This trend has led to a new paradigm—large-scale virtual manufacturing environment (LSVME). It supports networked and distributed virtual manufacturing to meet manufacturing system requirements. Since it contains a large number of virtual components, an effective data structure and collaborative construction methodology are needed. A metaearth architecture is proposed as the data structure for representing LSVME. This architecture consists of virtual space layer, mapping layer, library layer and ontology layers, which describe interaction among virtual components and has the ability to analyze the characteristics of virtual environment. In addition, it increases reusability of virtual components and supports self-reconfiguration for manufacturing simulation. A heuristic construction method based on graph theory is proposed using this architecture. It prevents redundant design of virtual components and contributes to an effective construction scheduling technique for collaborative designers.     

Architectural design and FPGA implementation of radix-4 CORDIC processor

A new scaled radix-4 CORDIC architecture that incorporates pipelining and parallelism is presented. The latency of the architecture is n/2 clock cycles and throughput rate is one valid result per n/2 clocks for n bit precision. A 16 bit radix-4 CORDIC architecture is implemented on the available FPGA platform. The corresponding latency of the architecture is eight clock cycles and throughput rate is one valid result per eight clock cycles. The entire scaled architecture operates at 56.96 MHz of clock rate with a power consumption of 380 mW. The speed can be enhanced with the upgraded version of FPGA device. A speed-area optimized processor is obtained through this architecture and is suitable for real time applications.     

A general framework for efficient geographic routing in wireless networks

We propose a new link metric called normalized advance (NADV) for geographic routing in multihop wireless networks. NADV selects neighbors with the optimal trade-off between proximity and link cost. Coupled with the local next hop decision in geographic routing, NADV enables an adaptive and efficient cost-aware routing strategy. Depending on the objective or message priority, applications can use the NADV framework to minimize various types of link cost.We present efficient methods for link cost estimation and perform detailed experiments in simulated environments. Our results show that NADV outperforms current schemes in many aspects: for example, in high noise environments with frequent packet losses, the use of NADV leads to 81% higher delivery ratio. When compared to centralized routing under certain settings, geographic routing using NADV finds paths whose cost is close to the optimum. We also conducted experiments in Emulab testbed and the results demonstrate that our proposed approach performs well in practice.