Thermal conductivity of non-stoichiometric americium oxide: A molecular dynamics study

The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of multi-valency of americium in its oxide for the lowering of the thermal conductivity and the uncertainty in measurement. In the present study, thermal conductivity of non-stoichiometric americium oxide was evaluated up to 2000 K by the non-equilibrium molecular dynamics calculations using the Born-Mayer-Huggins interatomic potential with the partially ionic model. The oxygen-to-americium ratio (O/Am) was varied from 1.6 to 1.9, which corresponded to the variation of the ratio of Am³⁺/Am⁴⁺. So, we prepared potential parameters for both Am³⁺ and Am⁴⁺. The calculated thermal conductivity of non-stoichiometric americium oxide decreased with an increase of temperature, and the degree of the temperature dependence became smaller with a decrease of the O/Am ratio. This was mainly caused by the phonon-scattering due to oxygen vacancies induced with Am³⁺ ions. Comparing two supercells in which (1) short-range ordered Am³⁺ clusters were contained and (2) Am³⁺ ions were randomly distributed, the thermal conductivity of the former seemed to be somewhat larger than that of the latter.     

Fast quadratic increase of multiport-storage-cell area with portnumber

It is shown that the space required for wordline/bitline routing leads to a quadratic multiport-storage-cell area increase with port number N, dominating from as little as N=2, N=6 for small ROM and large SRAM cell types, respectively. Larger N results in enormous area increases (e.g. by a factor of 80 for a 32-port SRAM)I making conventional multiport memories unacceptable for most practical applications     

A numerical integration method for long-term power system dynamic simulation

Large power system frequency/voltage fluctuations due to severe faults in trunk transmission lines or major generating units may trip-off other facilities and result in large-scale power system blackout. To prevent such blackout, development of an accurate and fast long-term power system dynamic simulation tool is required. With respect to the development stage, selection of a numerical integration method available for step-size adjustment, and the development of a scheme for the adjustment are principal subjects. The trapezoidal and the second-order Gear methods were selected as possible candidates for the step-size adjustment from the viewpoint of numerical stability. The trapezoidal method is selected from the viewpoint of accuracy and applicability to power system dynamic simulations. A new scheme for the automatic step-size adjustment is proposed for the trapezoidal method to achieve fast simulation of the long-term power system dynamics. The validity of the proposed scheme is verified through simulation studies on a single-machine-to-infinite bus system.     

Impact of systemic depulsation on tissue perfusion and sympathetic nerve activity

BACKGROUND: We postulated that pathophysiologic processes under nonpulsatile circulation are related to the behavior of the sympathetic nerve activity that regulates tissue perfusion. METHODS: Pulsatile and nonpulsatile pumps were installed in parallel in the left heart bypass circuit of anesthetized goats (n = 9) so that pulsatile circulation could be converted to nonpulsatile circulation instantly. At 5 minutes before and after systemic depulsation, we measured hemodynamic indices, renal nerve activity, and regional blood flow of the brain, heart, and renal cortex. RESULTS: Renal nerve activity was significantly elevated after systemic depulsation (15.6 +/- 9.3 versus 19.4 +/- 9.8 microV), when mean aortic pressure remained almost constant. The renal cortical flow was significantly reduced after depulsation (3.61 +/- 1.23 versus 2.93 +/- 1.19 mL.min-1.g-1), whereas no significant difference was found in the regional blood flow of the brain or the heart. CONCLUSIONS: The significant reduction of renal cortical blood flow after systemic depulsation is associated with a significant increase in renal nerve activity. Our results suggest that increased renal nerve activity plays an important role in the reduction of renal function after systemic depulsation.     

AE behaviors evaluation with bp neural network

This paper reports our experiment on training a three layer forwards neural network with backpropagation algorithm (BP) to memorise acoustic emission (AE) behaviors of magnesium alloy during fatigue test process and perform the mapping from AE behaviors to fatigue crack propagation. This study reveals the potential possibility of using artificial neural networks for automated AE testing. Simulation results are very encouraging and conclusively in favor of this attempt.     

Hemispherical grained Si formation on in-situ phosphorus dopedamorphous-Si electrode for 256 Mb DRAM's capacitor

The cylindrical capacitor structure with hemispherical grained-Si (HSG-Si) described here reliably achieves a cell capacitance of 30 fF in a 0.4 μm-high storage electrode with a cell area of a 0.72 μm² for 256 Mbit dynamic random access memory. An HSG-Si formation technology using Si₂H₆-molecule irradiation and annealing enables control of the grain density and grain size of HSG-Si fabricated selectively on the whole surface of phosphorus-doped amorphous Si cylindrical electrodes