Harvesting small trees and forest residues

Eight countries collaborated and shared technical information on the harvesting of small trees and forest residues in a three year program. Proceedings and reports from workshops and reviews are summarized in a review of activities and harvesting systems of the participating countries. Four databases were developed for harvesting and transportation of these materials.     

Analysis of a resonant-cavity enhanced GaAs/AlGaAs MSMphotodetector

The authors have developed a 2-D device simulator for heterostructure metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) photodetectors. They have incorporated a model of multilayer optics into the simulator and used it to analyze the temporal response of a resonant-cavity enhanced heterostructure with a confining buffer layer and a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR). The authors show that through fine tuning the layer thicknesses, optical resonance enhancement of the light absorption can be obtained     

Three-dimensional fracture simulation with a single-domain,direct boundary element formulation

An efficient hypersingular boundary integral equation method for three-dimensional fracture mechanics was presented in a previous paper. The details of the numerical implementation of this method are further discussed herein. In particular, an algorithm for achieving the required differentiability of the crack surface displacement function is discussed. To illustrate the utility of the method, computational results for several strongly interacting multiple-crack geometries are presented. The calculated stress intensity factors are in excellent agreement with those obtained by an approximate analytical method due to Kachanov and Laures.     

Numerical and asymptotic solutions for the thermal wall jet

This paper considers the evolution of the velocity and temperature fields within a jet of fluid on a thermally insulated wall. Numerical solutions are obtained for a range of Prandtl numbers and for a class of initial velocity and temperature profiles relevant to intrusion jets observed in certain thermal cavity flows. Numerical results are compared with asymptotic solutions which describe the initial structure of the jet and its subsequent diffusion at large distances downstream.     

Diffraction characteristics of superimposed holographic gratings inplanar optical waveguides

A coupled-mode analysis of superimposed holographic transmission gratings in single-mode planar optical waveguides is presented. The diffraction characteristics are shown to be sensitive to the polarization of the incident wave, the angular separation of the output waves and the relative index modulation between the gratings. The coupling between gratings affects the diffraction efficiencies and decreases the angular and wavelength selectivities. Nevertheless, good channel separation and high fanout can be obtained together     

A general identification technique for nonlinear differential equations of motion

This paper develops and demonstrates by computer simulations new nonlinear system stochastic techniques to determine the amplitude-domain and frequency-domain properties of nonlinear systems as described in nonlinear differential equations of motion. From measurements of input excitation data and output response data, this new method, based upon multiple-input/single-output (MI/SO) linear analysis of reverse dynamic systems, allows for the efficient identification of different nonlinear systems. Nonlinear systems simulated here include Duffing, Van der Pol, Mathieu, and Dead-Band systems. Features of this new method are: (1) it can be implemented using established MI/SO linear procedures and computer programs; (2) it determines nonlinear system amplitude properties separate from nonlinear system frequency properties; (3) it quantifies relative contributions from different nonlinear terms by using appropriate coherence functions; (4) it gives results that are independent of the input or output probability distributions, spectral properties, and input excitation levels.     

Recursive optimal pruning with applications to tree structuredvector quantizers

A pruning algorithm of P.A. Chou et al. (1989) for designing optimal tree structures identifies only those codebooks which lie on the convex hull of the original codebook's operational distortion rate function. The authors introduce a modified version of the original algorithm, which identifies a large number of codebooks having minimum average distortion, under the constraint that, in each step, only modes having no descendents are removed from the tree. All codebooks generated by the original algorithm are also generated by this algorithm. The new algorithm generates a much larger number of codebooks in the middle- and low-rate regions. The additional codebooks permit operation near the codebook's operational distortion rate function without time sharing by choosing from the increased number of available bit rates. Despite the statistical mismatch which occurs when coding data outside the training sequence, these pruned codebooks retain their performance advantage over full search vector quantizers (VQs) for a large range of rates.     

Performance evaluation of a teletext system

Four parameters are defined to measure the performance of a teletext system, namely, the probability of delivering a message within specified time, the transmission efficiency, the average number of errors per page, and the throughput. Each of them is derived and computational results are presented taking the UK teletext system as an example. These parameters are compared in their ability to characterize the performance of the teletext system