Giant Magnetoelectric Effect in Thin‐Film Composites

Highly sensitive AC magnetic field sensors are presented using magnetoelectric composites consisting of magnetostrictive and piezoelectric phases. They are offering passive nature, high sensitivity, large effect enhancement at mechanical resonance, and large linear dynamic range. Thin‐film magnetoelectric 2‐2 composites benefit from perfect coupling between the piezoelectric and magnetostrictive phases and from the reduction in size which is essential for high spatial resolution. Their design uses AlN and a plate capacitor or PZT with interdigital electrodes and magnetostrictive amorphous FeCoSiB single layers or exchanged biased multilayers. At mechanical resonance and depending on the geometry, extremely high ME coefficients of up to 9.7 kV/cm Oe in air and up to 19 kV/cm Oe under vacuum were obtained. To avoid external DC magnetic bias fields, composites consisting of exchanged biased multilayers serving as the magnetostrictive component with a maximum magnetoelectric coefficient at zero magnetic bias field are employed. Furthermore, the anisotropic response of these exchanged biased composites can be utilized for three‐dimensional vector field sensing. Sensitivity and noise of the sensors revealed limits of detection as good as to 2.3 pT/Hz^1/2 at mechanical resonance. Sensitivity between 0.1 and 1000 Hz outside resonance can be enhanced through frequency conversion using AC magnetic bias fields.     

自动驾驶汽车货物运输时的问题处理

<正>有关自动驾驶汽车运输货物的讨论与日俱增。但是,当控制自动驾驶车辆的电子系统出现故障并导致货物损失时应由谁来承担责任？在德国,法律法规和司法判例一致认为：运输公司在运输工业、商业和物流物资时对运输过程中属于运输公司保管下的物资损坏承担主要责任。例如,物流承运人应对货物固定不牢固而造成的损失负责。然而还有许多法律法规没法回答的问题,     

Pharmacology of Free Fatty Acid Receptors and Their Allosteric Modulators

The physiological function of free fatty acids (FFAs) has long been regarded as indirect in terms of their activities as educts and products in metabolic pathways. The observation that FFAs can also act as signaling molecules at FFA receptors (FFARs), a family of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), has changed the understanding of the interplay of metabolites and host responses. Free fatty acids of different chain lengths and saturation statuses activate FFARs as endogenous agonists via binding at the orthosteric receptor site. After FFAR deorphanization, researchers from the pharmaceutical industry as well as academia have identified several ligands targeting allosteric sites of FFARs with the aim of developing drugs to treat various diseases such as metabolic, (auto)inflammatory, infectious, endocrinological, cardiovascular, and renal disorders. GPCRs are the largest group of transmembrane proteins and constitute the most successful drug targets in medical history. To leverage the rich biology of this target class, the drug industry seeks alternative approaches to address GPCR signaling. Allosteric GPCR ligands are recognized as attractive modalities because of their auspicious pharmacological profiles compared to orthosteric ligands. While the majority of marketed GPCR drugs interact exclusively with the orthosteric binding site, allosteric mechanisms in GPCR biology stay medically underexploited, with only several allosteric ligands currently approved. This review summarizes the current knowledge on the biology of FFAR1 (GPR40), FFAR2 (GPR43), FFAR3 (GPR41), FFAR4 (GPR120), and GPR84, including structural aspects of FFAR1, and discusses the molecular pharmacology of FFAR allosteric ligands as well as the opportunities and challenges in research from the perspective of drug discovery.     

Background Orientated Schlieren Method Applied for Liquid Systems of Strong Refractive Gradients

A simple schlieren technique is used to visualize strong gradients of refractive index in liquids under atmospheric conditions and elevated pressure. The gradients are mainly caused by concentration differences within a thin liquid sheet. A simple system using Matlab and open source applications is designed and applied to demonstrate the challenges and limitations of a quantitative approach for strong gradients in liquids. Possibilities for the optimization regarding the detection of strong gradients are shown, but rather qualitative than quantitative results are obtained.     

Microprocesses of metal dusting on iron‐nickel alloys and their dependence on the alloy composition

Metal dusting of iron proceeds via the formation and disintegration of the metastable carbide Fe₃C, and the resulting fine Fe particles in the coke further catalyse carbon deposition. By contrast, nickel disintegrates directly, and larger grains are released. As revealed by TEM and AEM techniques, in both cases the disintegration proceeds by inward growth of thin graphite filaments, the atomic basal planes of which being oriented perpendicular to the surface thus effecting a high reactivity at the growth front. Consequently, successive alloying of iron with nickel should lead to a change over from one disintegration mechanism to the other, and, in fact, we could evidence that the carbide formation takes place only up to a nickel content of about 5 wt.%. Already at a Ni concentration of 10 wt.% a direct disintegration of the metal proceeds, as it is typical for pure nickel. Furthermore, in all investigated Ni‐Fe alloys a surface‐near enrichment of Ni was observed which indicates a selective corrosion of Fe, decreasing with increasing Ni content of the basic alloy.     

Molecular intermediates in glow discharge polymerization

Mass spectral analysis of gaseous effluents from glow discharge polymerization of propylene confirms the formation of molecular propyne as an intermediate in the polymerization reaction. Observation of oligomeric species of mass number 138 or higher at the lowest monomer feed rate of the study indicates that a certain fraction of polymerization occurs in the gas phase.     

A new iterative soft-output Viterbi algorithm and its application to the “dicode” channel

We present an iterative soft-output decoding algorithm for serially concatenated coding systems. It has better performance than the conventional noniterative decoding algorithm. When applied together with an outer convolutional code to the dicode channel with partial response (1 — D), we obtain an additional coding gain of about 1 dB at a bit-error rate of 10^-4 after two iterations. This new algorithm can also be applied advantageously to satellite communication and fading channels.