1.3-$mu$m Amplifier-Free All-Optical 2R Regenerator Using Two-Mode Injection-Locked Distributed Feedback Laser Diode

This study presents a novel and cost-effective 1.3-mum all-optical 2R regenerator based on a two-mode injection-locked distributed feedback laser diode. The proposed 2R regenerator, with 14.13-dB small signal gain, has achieved an amplifier-free 10-Gb/s straight line transmission over 60 km while keeping the power penalty less than 0.84 dB at bit-error rate (BER) =10^-9. In addition, properties like BER degradation, output extinction ratio, gain, and data-rate transparency are also experimentally investigated     

Adsorption of Phenols onto Granular Activated Carbon in a Liquid–Solid Fluidized Bed

The adsorption of phenol, p-chlorophenol and p-nitrophenol onto granular activated carbon (GAC) in a liquid–solid fluidized-bed adsorber has been studied. The effects of particle sizes of activated carbon (0·937, 1·524 mm), liquid flow rate (1·2, 2·0, 4·0 dm³ min⁻¹), initial phenol concentrations (1·12×10⁻⁴, 5·88×10⁻⁴ mol dm⁻³) and activated carbon mass (75, 150, 300 g) were investigated. The isotherm data were analysed by using the well-known isotherm equations to realize the adsorption characteristics of granular activated carbon. The model, which takes into account the external mass transfer with film-surface diffusion, surface adsorption equilibrium and internal mass transfer, was employed to fit the experimental data of the breakthrough curve. The model agreed with the experimental results very well when the Langmuir isotherm was employed and can be used for design and parametric studies. © 1997 SCI.     

Thermochemical conversion of polymer wastes into hydrocarbon fuels over various fluidizing cracking catalysts

A mixture of hospital post-commercial polymer waste (LDPE/HDPE/PP/PS) was pyrolyzed over various catalysts using a fluidized-bed reactor operating isothermally at ambient pressure. The yield of volatile hydrocarbons with zeolitic catalysts (ZSM-5 > MOR > USY) were higher than with non-zeolitic catalysts (MCM-41 > ASA). MCM-41 with large mesopores and ASA with weaker acid sites resulted in a highly olefinic product mixture with a wide carbon number distribution, whereas USY yielded a saturate-rich product mixture with a wide carbon number distribution and substantial coke levels. The systematic experiments discussed in this paper show that the use of various catalysts improves the yield of hydrocarbon products and provide better selectivity in the product distributions. A novel developed model based on kinetic and mechanistic considerations which take into account chemical reactions and catalyst deactivation for the catalytic degradation of commingled polymer waste has been investigated. This model represents the benefits of product selectivity for the chemical composition such as alkanes, alkenes, aromatics and coke in relation to the performance and the particle size selection of the catalyst used as well as the effect of the fluidizing gas and reaction temperature.     

Polylactic acid (PLA)/banana fiber (BF) biodegradable green composites

In this study, polylactic acid (PLA)/banana fiber (BF) composites were prepared by melt blending method. The BF was conjugated onto PLA chains through the use of a coupling agent and chemical modification. Consequently, the thermal stability and mechanical properties of the PLA were dramatically elevated through the incorporation of BF. Mechanical tests showed that the tensile and flexural strengths of the composites markedly increased with the fiber content, reaching 78.6 and 65.4 MPa when reinforced with 40 phr fiber, approximately 2 and 1.66 times higher, produced by pristine PLA. However, the impact strengths of composites are somewhat decreased with the increased content of fibers. The addition of 40 phr BF into the composite increased the HDT of pure PLA from 62 °C to 139 °C; an improvement of about 122%. Apart from enhancing the mechanical properties and thermal stability, the incorporation of BF can reduce the production cost of materials while meeting the demands of environmental protection agencies.     

Ad Hoc Multicast Routing Algorithm with Swarm Intelligence

Swarm intelligence refers to complex behaviors that arise from very simple individual behaviors and interactions, which is often observed in nature, especially among social insects such as ants. Although each individual (an ant) has little intelligence and simply follows basic rules using local information obtained from the environment, such as ant's pheromone trail laying and following behavior, globally optimized behaviors, such as finding a shortest path, emerge when they work collectively as a group. In this paper, we apply this biologically inspired metaphor to the multicast routing problem in mobile ad hoc networks. Our proposed multicast protocol adapts a core-based approach which establishes multicast connectivity among members through a designated node (core). An initial multicast connection can be rapidly setup by having the core flood the network with an announcement so that nodes on the reverse paths to the core will be requested by group members to serve as forwarding nodes. In addition, each member who is not the core periodically deploys a small packet that behaves like an ant to opportunistically explore different paths to the core. This exploration mechanism enables the protocol to discover new forwarding nodes that yield lower total forwarding costs, where cost is abstract and can be used to represent any metric to suit the application. Simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach and to compare it with certain existing multicast protocols.     

A novel hybrid of adaptive array and equalizer for mobilecommunications

The combination of the adaptive array and equalizer (AE) has been developed for suppressing the cochannel interference and the intersymbol interference (ISI) in mobile communications. In this paper, a novel hybrid of the adaptive array and equalizer (NHAE) system is proposed to combat the problems of insufficient degrees of freedom and mainbeam multipath interferers. The NHAE utilizes a modified training sequence to adjust the weight vector of the array that leads the array to cancel only the cochannel interferers. The ISI which is caused by the multipath interferers and the transmission system is removed by the equalizer following the array. Therefore, the array in the NHAE may need a fewer number of the elements than the conventional array which cancels both the cochannel interferers and multipath interferers. Besides, the presence of the mainbeam multipath interferers, which may seriously degrade the performance of the AE, has much less effect on the NHAE since it is suppressed by the equalizer instead of by the array. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the merits of the NHAE     

On Concurrent Test of Core-Based SOC Design

In this paper, a method to solve the resource allocation and test scheduling problems together in order to achieve concurrent test for core-based System-On-Chip (SOC) designs is presented. The primary objective for concurrent SOC test is to reduce test application time under the constraints of SOC pins and peak power consumption. The methodology used in this paper is not limited to any specific Test Access Mechanism (TAM). Additionally, it can also be applied to SOC budgeting at design phase to predict a tradeoff between test application time and SOC pins needed. The contribution of this paper is the formulation of the problem as a well-known 2-dimensional bin-packing problem. A best-fit heuristic algorithm is adopted to achieve optimal solution.     

Connection management for multiwavelength optical networking

This paper describes the connection management research done by the Network Control and Management (NC&M) task force under the multiwavelength optical networking (MONET) program. MONET is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) the US Government Department of Defense, with participation from Bellcore, AT&T, Lucent Technologies, several government agencies, and regional Bell operating companies. MONET's vision is to develop a flexible reliable high-capacity high-performance cost-effective national optical network based on multiwavelength fiber optic technology. As an important component in realizing this vision, the MONET program includes the architecture and design of a prototype network control and management system for MONET's reconfigurable wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) all-optical network. The primary objectives of the prototype research work are to develop the architecture and framework for managing national-scale transparent reconfigurable WDM optical networks and to demonstrate the feasibility of the NC&M prototype system in a field experiment network in Washington, DC. This prototype system allows the program participants to conduct experiments and gain experience in the management and operations of reconfigurable optical networks. This paper describes the connection management aspects of the prototype system, addressing issues such as the management architecture, information model, and provisioning algorithms of the prototype management system     

Low cost fabrication of the large-area anti-reflection films from polymer by nanoimprint/hot-embossing technology

In this paper, we present a low cost approach to produce large-area polymer sheets with sub-wavelength nanostructures. The fabricated polymer films would have great potentials to attach to optical or solar-cell-related consumer products when anti-reflection/anti-glaring is mandatory. We employed a special electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma process to fabricate the SWSs with large area directly on silicon substrates. Homogeneously distributed nanotips on the full 4 inch silicon substrate were fabricated by using gas mixtures of silane, methane, argon and hydrogen. An Ni-Co metal mold with a hardness of 550 HV was produced through the replication of the Si mold by electroplating. Afterwards, the molding process was applied to manufacture the nanostructures in PMMA plates in large volume. The nanostructures in PMMA plates with aspect ratios of 4 and diameters of 150?nm were fabricated. The fabricated PMMA sheets could generate the gradient of the refractive indices, absorb the light and greatly reduce the reflectivity. Compared with the PMMA without SWSs, the reflectivity of PMMA with SWSs decreased dramatically from 4.25% to 0.5% at the wavelength of light from 400 to 800?nm.     

Interfacial Stress Intensity Factors for Edge-Cracked Bonded Semicircles and Strips Under Out-of-Plane Shear

Analytical expressions of the mode III interfacial stress intensity factor are derived for the edge-cracked problems in bonded semicircles and strips. The results are extracted from the solutions of the bonded finite sector by the conformal mapping method. Based on the method, the stress intensity factors for the problems with various crack lengths are achieved, and two corresponding cases are presented and discussed. The obtained solutions can serve as a reference for related crack problems.