Preparation of a sensor substrate using functionalized mesoporous silica on a gold film for surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy

The use of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy has been applied to a wide variety of fields such as biosensors and surface analysis instruments. In general, a SPR substrate is prepared using self-assembled monolayer (SAM) method of organic molecules as receptor for the target on a layer of gold or silver. However, mesoporous inorganic materials such as SBA-15 have benefits as sensor substrate for SPR. Mesoporous silica has a large surface area which receptor molecule can be attached and has a rigid body which has an excellent stability in the extreme condition compared to organic sensing layer. We prepared an organic modified mesoporous silica and successfully immobilized it on a gold surface, in an attempt to use as a substrate for SPR spectroscopy. For the comparison of sensitivity of prepared substrate, Pt²⁺ detection was selected as a model system. Substrate prepared in this study exhibited the capability of selective sensing for Pt²⁺ ions.     

High performance series-resonance energy-recovery circuit for plasma display panel

A new high performance series-resonance energy-recovery circuit (ERC) for a plasma display panel (PDP) is proposed. Two different ERCs are used for both sides of the PDP, and the slow falling and fast rising times are employed. Therefore, it features the zero voltage switching, low electromagnetic interference, low current stress, no severe voltage notch, and high energy-recovery capability.     

Discrete-time analysis of a CPCH access scheme in W-CDMA

Common packet channel (CPCH) access is an efficient approach to support packet data transmissions in a wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) system. Rather than using a continuous-time analysis approach, this paper presents a discrete-time analysis of the CPCH access scheme to fully characterize the complete CPCH operation process. Previous studies using the continuous-time analysis only models a portion of the CPCH process. We assume that a packet arrival process is Poisson distributed and the service time of each packet is geometrically distributed. The study focuses on examining the number of packet arrivals in each CPCH access slot. Performance is evaluated in terms of normalized throughput and it is observed that CPCH performs better when packet mean service time is larger. The performance results are also compared with previous studies using continuous-time analyses     

Enhancement of Electrical Properties of Electrically Conductive Adhesives (ECAs) by Using Novel Aldehydes

To improve the electrical properties of electrically conductive adhesives (ECAs), different types of aldehydes, salicylaldehyde and transcinnamaldehyde, were introduced into ECA formulations. During the curing process, the aldehydes acted as a reducing agent and reduced metal oxide in ECAs. At the same time, aldehydes could consume ambient oxygen and prevent the oxidation of the metal fillers in the ECA. The oxidation product of aldehydes, carboxylic acids with shorter molecular chains, could partially replace or remove the long chain stearic acid (C ₁₈) surfactant on the lubricated Ag flakes and enhance the electrons tunneling between the Ag flakes in the ECAs. As such, the multiple effects of aldehydes in ECAs improved the conductivity significantly. Dynamic mechanical analysis and thermomechanical analysis studies indicated the improved performance for mechanical and physical properties of ECAs as well     

Modeling growth rate of HfO2 thin films grown by metal-organic molecular beam epitaxy

HfO₂ dielectric layers were grown on the p-type Si (100) substrate by metal-organic molecular beam epitaxy (MOMBE). Hafnium-tetra-butoxide, Hf(O·t-C₄H₉)₄ was used as a Hf precursor and Argon gas was used as a carrier gas. The thickness of the HfO₂ film and intermediate SiO₂ layer were measured by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). The properties of the HfO₂ layers were evaluated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), high frequency (HF) capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurement, and current-voltage (I-V) measurement. C-V and I-V measurements have shown that HfO₂ layer grown by MOMBE has a high dielectric constant (k) of 20-22 and a low-level of leakage current density. The growth rate is affected by various process variables such as substrate temperature, bubbler temperature, Ar and O₂ gas flows and growth time. Since the ratio of O₂ and Ar gas flows are closely correlated, the effect of variations in O₂/Ar flow ratio on growth rate is also investigated using statistical modeling methodology.     

Edge‐adaptive color interpolation for complementary color filter array

Complementary color filter array (CCFA) is widely used in consumer‐level digital video cameras, since it not only has high sensitivity and good signal‐to‐noise ratio in low‐light condition but also is compatible with the interlaced scanning used in broadcast systems. However, the full‐color images obtained from CCFA suffer from the color artifacts such as false color and zipper effects. These artifacts can be removed with edge‐adaptive color interpolation (ECI) approaches which are generally used in primary color filter array (PCFA). Unfortunately, the unique array pattern of CCFA makes it difficult that CCFA adopts ECI approaches. Therefore, to apply ECI approaches suitable for CCFA to color interpolation is one of the major issues to reconstruct the full‐color images. In this paper, we propose a new ECI algorithm for CCFA. To estimate an edge direction precisely and enhance the quality of the reconstructed image, a function of spatial variances is used as a weight, and new color conversion matrices are presented for considering various edge directions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional method with respect to both objective and subjective criteria. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 16, 92–102, 2006     

Flooding limited CHF in a vertical 3 × 3 rod bundle with non-uniform axial heat flux

KAERI has performed an experimental study on the critical heat flux (CHF) under zero flow conditions with a non-uniformly heated 3 × 3 rod bundle. Experimental conditions are in the range of a system pressure from 0.50 to 14.96 MPa and inlet water subcooling enthalpies from 68 to 352 kJ/kg. The test section used in the present experiments consisted of a vertical flow channel, upper and lower plenums, and a non-uniformly heated 3 × 3 rod bundle. The experimental results show that the CHFs in low-pressure conditions are somewhat scattered within a narrow range. As the system pressure increases, however, the CHFs show a good parametric trend. The CHFs occur in the upper region of the heated section, but the locations of the detected CHFs move gradually in a downward direction with the increase of the system pressure. Even though the effects of the inlet water subcooling enthalpies and system pressure of the flooding CHF are relatively smaller than those of the flow boiling CHF, the CHF increases by increasing the inlet water subcooling enthalpies. Several existing correlations for the countercurrent flooding CHF based on Wallis's flooding correlation and Kutateladze's criterion for the onset of flooding are compared with the CHF data obtained in the present experiments to examine the applicability of the correlations.     

Multidisciplinary design optimization based on independent subspaces

Optimization has been successfully applied to systems with a single discipline. Since many disciplines are involved in a coupled fashion in modern engineering, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) technology has been developed. MDO algorithms are designed to solve the coupled aspects generated from the interdisciplinary relationship. In a general MDO algorithm, a large design problem is decomposed into smaller ones which can be easily solved. Although various methods have been proposed for MDO, research is still in the early stage. This study proposes a new MDO method which is named MDO based on independent subspaces (MDOIS). Many real engineering problems consist of physically separate components and they can be independently designed. The inter‐relationship occurs through coupled physics. MDOIS is developed for such problems. In MDOIS, a large system is decomposed into small subsystems. The coupled aspects are solved via system analysis which solves the coupled physics. The algorithm is mathematically validated by showing that the solution satisfies the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker condition. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A simple receding horizon control for state delayed systems and its stability criterion

In this paper, a simple receding horizon (or model predictive) control for state delayed systems is presented and its solution is given in a closed form by a reduction method. While the control for a time-delay system is usually complex, the proposed controller is simple to construct and therefore can be simply implemented in real applications. To check the closed-loop stability of the proposed controller, a sufficient condition is provided by linear matrix inequalities. In addition, a numerical algorithm is presented for computing the eigenvalues of systems with distributed time delays, which can be used as a necessary and sufficient condition to check closed-loop stability. It is shown by simulation that this simple control can be a stabilizing control for time-delay systems.     

Scalability analysis of declustering methods for multidimensionalrange queries

Efficient storage and retrieval of multi-attribute data sets has become one of the essential requirements for many data-intensive applications. The Cartesian product file has been known as an effective multi-attribute file structure for partial-match and best-match queries. Several heuristic methods have been developed to decluster Cartesian product files across multiple disks to obtain high performance for disk accesses. Although the scalability of the declustering methods becomes increasingly important for systems equipped with a large number of disks, no analytic studies have been done so far. The authors derive formulas describing the scalability of two popular declustering methods-Disk Module and Fieldwise Xor-for range queries, which are the most common type of queries. These formulas disclose the limited scalability of the declustering methods, and this is corroborated by extensive simulation experiments. From the practical point of view, the formulas given in the paper provide a simple measure that can be used to predict the response time of a given range query and to guide the selection of a declustering method under various conditions