Customization of a Commercially Available Prep Scale SFC System to Provide Enhanced Capabilities

Preparative Scale Supercritical Fluid Chromatography is emerging as a powerful alternative to HPLC for the purification and separation of complex chemical reaction mixtures. Advantages include greatly reduced solvent usage (and thus lower cost and environmental impact), higher throughput, and in some cases higher resolution. While there are commercially available prep SFC instruments, none currently offer all the features desired by many medicinal chemists engaged in the drug discovery process. These include: the ability to collect an unlimited number of fractions per sample with high recovery and negligible carryover, fully automated capacity to collect several hundred fractions, and the ability to collect fractions into the same disposable test tubes and racks which are already employed in HPLC. This article describes the customization of a preparatory scale SFC system purchased from Berger Instruments, Inc., Newark, DE. (a subsidiary Mettler-Toledo International, Inc., of Greifensee, Switzerland) in order to provide these capabilities.     

Perception,navigation, and manipulation in the team KAUST approach to the MBZIRC ground robotics challenge

The ground robotics challenge in the Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge required a ground vehicle equipped with a robotic arm to autonomously locate a panel, select a proper size wrench among several options mounted on the panel, and use the wrench to rotate a valve. Autonomy was the critical factor in this challenge, which required the teams to devise algorithms that can operate successfully in a semistructured environment without human supervision. This paper presents the approaches taken by team KAUST to meet this challenge, ranging from in‐house hardware designs to algorithm integration and customization. We separated the whole objective into three interconnected tasks: Navigation, perception, and manipulation. For the navigation task, we developed a basic robotic exploration scheme to find the panel front side where the wrenches were present. For the perception task, we integrated common object detection algorithms with neural networks to identify the proper size wrench precisely. For successful manipulation, we designed and built a custom gripper, which was inspired by the common grasping behavior of a human hand under tight clearance conditions. The modular structure of the proposed approach allowed the team to progress in several subtasks simultaneously. However, the interconnection between the subtasks necessitated a reliable integration framework between these modules for effective implementation. We tuned our algorithms in extensive experimental studies and eventually obtained 10 consecutive successful navigation runs, 96% true wrench detection rate, and high success rate in wrench grasping. Furthermore, successful complete tests proved the reliability and repeatability of our system.     

MEMS陀螺仪在恶劣高温环境下提供准确的惯性检测

越来越多的应用需要从处于高温环境中的传感器收集数据.相比同等的分立式传感器,MEMS通常更小巧,功耗和成本都更低.此外,它们还可以在同样大小的半导体封装内集成信号调理电路.除了可以提供高精度倾斜(倾角)测量,还需要更加灵活和自由,以准确测量系统在严苛环境应用下的移动,在这些环境下,最终产品可能遭受冲击、振动和剧烈移动....     

The microstructure of rapidly solidifiedβ-phase Cu-Zn-Al alloys

The structure of theβ phase in rapidly solidified Cu-Zn-Al alloys was studied by transmission electron microscopy. The structure is observed to contain many unusual features not found in normal solid-solutioned material. The microstructure is very fine-grained, homogeneous in composition, only partially ordered, and contains an abnormally high density of dislocations. No metastable phases are seen. The grain structure is refined about two orders of magnitude in grain size and is quite variable in size and shape in a given sample. The grain boundaries are highly structured, with drastic curvatures and large steps. Dislocations are seen to be emitted by grain boundaries, contributing to the higher than usual dislocation density. Subgrain structures and low-angle boundaries are present in some regions and isolated martensite plates are observed well above the measuredM _stemperature.     

State observability and condition observability for a class of interacting discrete event systems

This paper introduces the concepts of state observability and condition observability for condition systems, a class of systems composed of discrete state components which interact via discrete binary signals called conditions. Given a set of externally observed conditions, state observability implies that the state of the system can be determined from the observations, and condition observability implies that all unobserved input and output conditions of the system can be determined from the observations. In this paper, we present a class of systems which is state observable and condition observable. We present a method to synthesize an observer system to provide state and condition signal estimates for a single component subsystem.     

Multi-Fault Tolerance for Cartesian Data Distributions

Faults are expected to play an increasingly important role in how algorithms and applications are designed to run on future extreme-scale systems. Algorithm-based fault tolerance is a promising approach that involves modifications to the algorithm to recover from faults with lower overheads than replicated storage and a significant reduction in lost work compared to checkpoint-restart techniques. Fault-tolerant linear algebra algorithms employ additional processors that store parities along the dimensions of a matrix to tolerate multiple, simultaneous faults. Existing approaches assume regular data distributions (blocked or block-cyclic) with the failures of each data block being independent. To match the characteristics of failures on parallel computers, we extend these approaches to mapping parity blocks in several important ways. First, we handle parity computation for generalized Cartesian data distributions with each processor holding arbitrary subsets of blocks in a Cartesian-distributed array. Second, techniques to handle correlated failures, i.e., multiple processors that can be expected to fail together, are presented. Third, we handle the colocation of parity blocks with the data blocks and do not require them to be on additional processors. Several alternative approaches, based on graph matching, are presented that attempt to balance the memory overhead on processors while guaranteeing the same fault tolerance properties as existing approaches that assume independent failures on regular blocked data distributions. Evaluation of these algorithms demonstrates that the additional desirable properties are provided by the proposed approach with minimal overhead.     

How to Trap the Network Intruder

Abstract

There is a level of sensitivity to almost all data, but what is most important — keeping sensitive data sensitive or guaranteeing the integrity of the data? When it comes to sensitivity or integrity, access control models have provided several options. Yet, wouldn't a combination of access control models provide a more desirable result than just settling for one? Is it possible to have a slice of data sensitivity with a dollop of data integrity? In finding the answer to this question it must be understood exactly what an access control model is and, in terms of sensitivity and integrity, which models provide the best security.     

Closing the loop: Empirical evidence for a positive feedback model of IT business value creation

Researchers have established that information technology (IT) can improve firms’ productivity. Whether improved productivity leads to additional investment in IT, however, remains largely uninvestigated. In this paper, we consider whether the relationship between productivity and subsequent IT investment might be positive, negative, or ad hoc, and hypothesize that this relationship is positive. We analyze seven years of panel data from 1236 healthcare firms and present empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis. When our finding is combined with extant research, it becomes reasonable to propose that unidirectional causality does not fully describe the process of IT business value creation. Instead, we argue that existing static models of IT business value with unidirectional causality can be recast as dynamic models that explicitly incorporate multiple time periods and a positive feedback relationship to more accurately capture the complexity of this process. The creation of IT business value can thus be understood as a positive feedback model where IT investment in a given time period builds the stock of IT inputs, where those IT inputs then impact productivity, and where productivity leads to IT investment in a future time period, beginning the cycle anew.