Techniques and Apparatus for Measuring Rotational Core Losses of Soft Magnetic Materials

In many situations such as the cores of a rotating electrical machine and the T joints of a multiphase transformer, the local flux density varies with time in terms of both magnitude and direction, i.e. the flux density vector is rotating. Therefore, the magnetic properties of the core materials under the rotating flux density vector excitation should be properly measured, modeled and applied in the design and analysis of these electromagnetic devices. This paper presents an extensive review on the development of techniques and apparatus for measuring the rotational core losses of soft magnetic materials based on the experiences of various researchers in the last hundred years.     

Piezoelectric Nanogenerators for Self-Powered Nanodevices

A novel approach converts nanoscale mechanical energy into electric energy for self-powering nanodevices.In our own work, we've used piezoelectric zinc-oxide nanowire (ZnO NW) arrays to demonstrate a novel approach for converting nanoscale mechanical energy into electric energy. Here, we review the fundamental principle behind the nanogenerator, present an approach for improving its performance, and discuss some of the challenges we face in pushing this technology to reach its potential.     

塔河渣油高温催化临氢热转化技术研究

以塔河减压渣油（简称塔河减渣）为原料，在实验室小型试验装置和中型连续试验装置上，对在较高温度条件下催化临氢热转化加工塔河减渣的工艺操作条件及改质效果进行了系统研究。采用高分散的油溶性催化剂，在高压釜反应器中考察了反应温度、反应压力、催化剂添加量、溶剂油添加量、反应时间以及助剂添加量对塔河减渣催化临氢热转化反应的转化率和缩合率的影响，优化了操作参数。在优化的操作条件下，进行了塔河减渣催化临氢热转化中型试验，得到初馏点大于524 ℃组分的裂化率为85.2%，馏分油收率为80%，金属（Ni+V）和沥青质脱除率均大于90%。     

Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer and Mobile Agent Security

The mobile agent is a fundamental building block of the mobile computing paradigm. In mobile agent security, oblivious transfer (OT) from a trusted party can be used to protect the agent’s privacy and the hosts’ privacy. In this paper, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer (VDOT), which allows us to replace a single trusted party with a group of threshold trusted servers. The design of VDOT uses a novel technique called consistency verification of encrypted secret shares. VDOT protects the privacy of both the sender and the receiver against malicious attacks of the servers. We also show the design of a system to apply VDOT to protect the privacy of mobile agents. Our design partitions an agent into the general portion and the security-sensitive portion. We also implement the key components of our system. As far as we know, this is the first effort to implement a system that protects the privacy of mobile agents. Our preliminary evaluation shows that protecting mobile agents not only is possible, but also can be implemented efficiently. This work was supported in part by the DoD University Research Initiative (URI) program administered by the Office of Naval Research under grant N00014-01-1-0795. Sheng Zhong was supported by ONR grant N00014-01-1-0795 and NSF grants ANI-0207399 and CCR-TC-0208972. Yang Richard Yang was supported in part by NSF grant ANI-0207399. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the DialM-POMC Joint Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing in 2003. Sheng Zhong received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in the year of 2004. He holds an assistant professor position at SUNY Buffalo and is currently on leave for postdoctoral research at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). His research interests, on the practical side, are security and incentives in data mining, databases, and wireless networks. On the theoretical side, he is interested in cryptography and game theory. Yang Richard Yang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. His research interests include computer networks, mobile computing, wireless networking, sensor networks, and network security. He leads the LAboratory of Networked Systems (LANS) at Yale. His recent awards include a Schlumberger Fellowship and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He received his B.E. degree from Tsinghua University (1993), and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (1998 and 2001).     

Stability analysis of network-based cooperative resource allocation strategies

Resource allocation involves deciding how to divide a resource of limited availability among multiple demands in a way that optimizes current objectives. In this brief paper we focus on one type of distributed resource allocation problem where via an imperfect communication network multiple processors can share the load presented by multiple task types. We introduce asynchronous “cooperative” resource allocation strategies, and show that they lead to a bounded cumulative demand.     

Nonpathological Lyapunov functions and discontinuous Carathéodory systems

Differential equations with discontinuous right-hand side and solutions intended in Carathéodory sense are considered. For these equations, sufficient conditions which guarantee both Lyapunov stability and asymptotic stability in terms of nonsmooth Lyapunov functions are given. An invariance principle is also proven.     

Bullwhip reduction for ARMA demand: The proportional order-up-to policy versus the full-state-feedback policy

A ‘proportional’ order-up-to policy reacting to ARMA demand is analyzed using stochastic optimal control theory. This policy is compared with a full-state-feedback order-up-to policy. Necessary conditions for an optimum of a weighted sum of the inventory and the ordering variances for both policies are formulated. Based on this a relatively simple expression for the ‘full-state’ policy is derived. The comparison between the two policies demonstrates that the ‘intuitively’ designed proportional policy does not fulfill the objective of controlling both the inventory and ordering variance for all parameter values of the demand model as well as the full-state-feedback policy. The full-state-feedback policy outperforms the proportional policy in several aspects.     

Fischer-Tropsch synthesis on Fe-Mn ultrafine catalysts

The Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis on Fe-Mn ultrafine catalysts prepared by a special degradation method of Fe-Mn complexes is presented. The effects of preparation method and Mn content on the FT performance are examined and the active phases and the role of Mn are elucidated.