Optimizing the processing conditions of sodium potassium niobate thin films prepared by sol-gel spin coating technique

In the present study, potassium sodium niobate (KNN) thin films were synthesized by means of sol-gel spin coating method. Along with the synthesis, the effects of annealing temperature and various number of coating layers on both the structural and electrical properties were looked into. The results of the study revealed that the annealing temperature had a great impact on the properties of KNN. In addition, the XRD diffractograms and texture coefficient of the synthesized films confirmed that a highly oriented orthorhombic perovskite structure was obtained at 650 °C, whereas at a relatively higher temperature (700 °C), a spurious phase of K₄Nb₆O₁₇ was evolved. In addition, the growth of KNN at 650 °C exhibited a reasonable resistivity value for piezoelectric applications. Looking into the results, it was discovered that the KNN thin films also found to be dependent on a number of coating layers. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) showed that KNN with five coating layers was highly crystalline, cracks-free, and had significantly more homogenous surface morphology and the size of grains being uniform, the resistivity of KNN thin films improved with the increasing number of coating layers i.e., up to five.     

Leakage Targets and Socio-Economic Efficiency

During the last few years, the introduction of mandatory leakage targets for UK water companies has had the positive effect of reducing levels of leakage, while requiring the companies to operate at an economic level of leakage. Unfortunately, the determination of company-specific economic levels of leakage have been a source of disagreement between the water companies and the Government, with the Government view that water companies are not using the true long-term marginal costs of water abstraction, and therefore are not safeguarding the environment.
This paper (a) reviews the model which was used to define the economic level of leakage, (b) argues the case for resource management based on the impact of water abstractions on the socio-environmental quality of a resource rather than the myopic focus on leakage reductions, (c) presents the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in relation to socio-environmental quality, and (d) proposes a new methodology which allows the determination of water abstraction rates while maintaining a desired level of socio-environmental quality.     

Sampling-based online motion planning for mobile robots: utilization of Tabu search and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system

Despite the proven advantages of sampling-based motion planning algorithms, their inability to handle online navigation tasks and providing low-cost solutions make them less efficient in practice. In this paper, a novel sampling-based algorithm is proposed which is able to plan in an unknown environment and provides solutions with lower cost in terms of path length, runtime and stability of the results. First, a fuzzy controller is designed which incorporates the heuristic rules of Tabu search to enable the planner for solving online navigation tasks. Then, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is proposed such that it constructs and optimizes the fuzzy controller based on a set of given input/output data. Furthermore, a heuristic dataset generator is implemented to provide enough data for the ANFIS using a randomized procedure. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulation in different motion planning queries. Finally, the proposed planner is compared to some of the similar motion planning algorithms to support the claim of superiority of its performance.

     

Enhanced Mechanical Properties and Corrosion Behavior of Biodegradable Mg-Zn/HA Composite

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A - Magnesium (Mg) and its alloys have shown potential for use in the biomedical industry due to their excellent biological performance and biodegradability...     

Optimisation study of large‐scale enzymatic synthesis of oleyl oleate,a liquid wax ester,by response surface methodology

An optimisation study of the large‐scale enzymatic synthesis of a liquid wax ester from oleic acid and oleyl alcohol using Novozym 435 was carried out. Investigations were performed in batch mode with a stirred tank reactor (STR) with one multi‐bladed impeller. Response surface methodology (RSM) based on a five‐level, three‐variable central composite rotatable design (CCRD) was used to evaluate the interactive effects of various parameters. The parameters are amount of enzyme (A) (90–120 g), impeller speed (B) (100–400 rpm) and temperature (C) (40–60 °C). The optimum conditions derived via RSM at a fixed reaction time of 1 h were successfully optimised as A = 104 g, B = 388.0 rpm and C = 49.7 °C. The actual experimental yield was 96.7% under the optimum conditions, which compared well with the maximum predicted value of 97.6%. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

Lattice Sphere Decoding for Data Transmission Systems with Special Channel Matrices

This paper presents the effects of condition number ( \(\tau \) ) in communication system performance. It has been shown that a small condition number ( \(\tau \) ) results a better performance. The proposed scheme is using special kind of matrices with Lattice Sphere Decoding (LSD) technique for Block Data Transmission Systems (BDTS). Hankel and Toeplitz matrices are used separately as a channel matrix (H) while circulant matrix is used in the previous works. The proposed scheme reduced the condition number ( \(\tau \) ) and, therefore, improve the system performance. As a result; LSD-based BDTS with Toeplitz/Hankel matrix outperforms the LSD-based BDTS with circulant matrix. Complexity analysis is also done which based on lattice dimension and initial radius selection.     

Partner Selection Technique for Wireless Cooperative Communication

In wireless cooperative communication scheme, transmit diversity is achieved by coupling the distributed users. In this paper, a new partner selection algorithm is proposed. The selection scheme utilizes the basic work done by Almawgani on RS coded cooperation for wireless network. Users are classified into weak and strong ones based on the signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) uplink matrix. Users with good uplink channel SNR (strong users) are coupled with those experiencing weak uplink channel conditions (weak users). The proposed algorithm offers an improvement to the outage probability, \(P_{out}\) and power efficiency as compared to the established work. The algorithm shows a significant improvement of \(P_{out}\) at lower values of uplink SNR.     

Quarter-Wavelength Side-Coupled Ring Resonator for Bandpass Filters

This paper deals with a dual-mode ring resonator fed by quarter-wavelength side-coupled lines. The resonator synthesis was developed so as to fix the central frequency, bandwidth, and transmission zeros frequencies, as well as the insertion loss in the passband. Based on this resonator, several bandpass filters were designed, which include the cascaded rings and the combination of such ring resonator with coupled line sections. Simulations are proposed throughout the paper to illustrate the various possibilities offered by the concept. The filters' experimental results in microstrip technology are also presented to validate the idea.