Electron‐beam deposition of MgO on plastic substrate and manufacturing flexible flat fluorescent lamp

Abstract— A flexible fluorescent lamp that utilizes the same plasma discharge mode as in PDPs has been manufactured. The structure of the flexible lamp is simple and easy to manufacture. All‐plastic materials including plastic substrates, barrier ribs (spacers), and sealants for low‐temperature manufacturing processing have been adopted except for the phosphor and MgO thin film. The MgO thin films were coated on the plastic substrates as a protection layer against the plasma discharge. The adhesion and biaxial texture of MgO thin film deposited on the plastic substrates, poly‐ethyle‐nenaphthalate (PEN) and polycarbonate (PC), at low temperature (100–180°C) has been characterized. The MgO film on PEN shows good adhesion under a repeated bending test. The manufactured flexible lamp consists of two plastic substrates of about 3 in. on the diagonal, barrier rib (spacer), and external ITO electrodes. The Ne‐Xe (5%) gas mixture at 100–200 Torr was used for the discharge gas. A maximum surface luminance of about 100 cd/m² was achieved for a 1 ‐kHz AC pulse.     

Thin‐film barriers using transparent conducting oxides for organic light‐emitting diodes

Abstract— This study covers thin‐film barriers using inorganic barriers of transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) such as zinc oxide (ZnO) and indium tin oxide (ITO). The TCOs were fabricated using a sputtering method with a process gas of pure argon at room temperature. ITO showed better properties as a barrier than the ZnO and exhibited the electronic performance necessary to perform additional functions. The ITO has superior barrier performance because it has a lower crack density due to its partial amorphous phase. For organic/inorganic multilayer barriers, the organic underlayer decreased the water‐vapor transmission rate (WVTR) more than the organic upper layer, indicating that the planarization effect was important in reducing the WVTRs. The results of this organic/ITO multilayer barrier study are expected to be useful in finding a practical solution to OLED encapsulation.     

EvoOligo: Oligonucleotide Probe Design With Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms

Probe design is one of the most important tasks in successful deoxyribonucleic acid microarray experiments. We propose a multiobjective evolutionary optimization method for oligonucleotide probe design based on the multiobjective nature of the probe design problem. The proposed multiobjective evolutionary approach has several distinguished features, compared with previous methods. First, the evolutionary approach can find better probe sets than existing simple filtering methods with fixed threshold values. Second, the multiobjective approach can easily incorporate the user's custom criteria or change the existing criteria. Third, our approach tries to optimize the combination of probes for the given set of genes, in contrast to other tools that independently search each gene for qualifying probes. Lastly, the multiobjective optimization method provides various sets of probe combinations, among which the user can choose, depending on the target application. The proposed method is implemented as a platform called EvoOligo and is available for service on the Web. We test the performance of EvoOligo by designing probe sets for 19 types of Human Papillomavirus and 52 genes in the Arabidopsis Calmodulin multigene family. The design results from EvoOligo are proven to be superior to those from well-known existing probe design tools, such as OligoArray and OligoWiz.     

Pharmacophore and docking-based combined in-silico study of KDR inhibitors

The growth and metastasis of solid tumors is dependent on angiogenesis. The vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and its cell surface receptor in human KDR (kinase domain containing receptor or VEGFR-2) have particular interest because of their importance in angiogenesis. The development of novel inhibitors of VEGFR-2 would be helpful to check the growth of tumors. Quantitative structure activity relationship (QSAR) analyses used to understand the structural factors affecting inhibitory potency of thiazole-substituted pyrazolone derivatives. Several pharmacophore-based models indicated the importance of steric, hydrophobic and hydrogen bond acceptor groups to inhibitory activity. The comparative molecular field analyses (CoMFA) and comparative molecular similarity indices analyses (CoMSIA) based 3D-QSAR models were derived using pharmacophore-based alignment. Both CoMFA (q² = 0.70, r² = 0.97 and ) and CoMSIA (q² = 0.54, r² = 0.82 and ) gave reasonable results. The molecular docking (receptor-guided technique) with a recently reported receptor structure (PDB = 1YWN) were performed. The docked alignment was subsequently used for 3D-QSAR (CoMFA; q² = 0.56, r² = 0.97, , CoMSIA; q² = 0.58 r² = 0.91, ). The overall both studies were indicated, steric, electrostatic and hydrogen bond acceptor effects contribute to the inhibitory activity. CoMFA and CoMSIA models suggested that a positive bulk with hydrophobic effect is desirable around position 4 and 5 and hydrogen bond acceptor groups around pyrazolones ring will be helpful.     

Use of competition detection in TCP for simple topology networks

The fairness (or TCP-friendliness) of recent high-speed TCP proposals for high bandwidth-delay product networks is generally poor. We believe that the lack of TCP-friendliness of high-speed TCP proposals stems from their ineffectiveness in detecting competing TCP flows. We suggest a competition detection mechanism for a single TCP flow to detect the presence of competing TCP flows. We propose a new TCP, called Adaptive TCP (A-TCP) to demonstrate the usefulness of the competition detection mechanism. A-TCP uses the competition detection mechanism to control its aggressiveness: If it does not detect competing flows, a single A-TCP flow increases its sending rate aggressively in order to highly utilize the network. Otherwise, it behaves like a standard TCP flow to fairly share network resources with competing flows. We implemented A-TCP as part of Linux as well as in ns-2. Experimental results show that A-TCP achieves better fairness than existing high-speed TCP proposals when they compete against standard TCP in simple topology networks.     

Multi-criterion Pareto based particle swarm optimized polynomial neural network for classification: A review and state-of-the-art

In this paper, we proposed a multi-objective Pareto based particle swarm optimization (MOPPSO) to minimize the architectural complexity and maximize the classification accuracy of a polynomial neural network (PNN). To support this, we provide an extensive review of the literature on multi-objective particle swarm optimization and PNN. Classification using PNN can be considered as a multi-objective problem rather than as a single objective one. Measures like classification accuracy and architectural complexity used for evaluating PNN based classification can be thought of as two different conflicting criterions. Using these two metrics as the criteria of classification problem, the proposed MOPPSO technique attempts to find out a set of non-dominated solutions with less complex PNN architecture and high classification accuracy. An extensive experimental study has been carried out to compare the importance and effectiveness of the proposed method with the chosen state-of-the-art multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm using several benchmark datasets. A comprehensive bibliography is included for further enhancement of this area.     

3-D manipulation of millimeter- and micro-sized objects using an acoustically excited oscillating bubble

This communication describes novel 3-D manipulations of objects using an acoustically excited oscillating bubble deposited on a hydrophobic rod tip. The oscillating bubble captures various millimeter- and micron-sized neighboring objects including glass and polystyrene beads (~100 μm), fish egg, and live water flea (~1 mm). The captured objects are carried in a 3-D space by traversing the bubble tip, and released at desired positions by simply turning off the oscillation. Carrying performance is characterized along with high-speed imaging of oscillating bubbles by varying the frequency and amplitude of the acoustic excitation and the carrying speed. The higher the oscillation amplitude, the higher the carrying efficiency. The maximum carrying speed is measured at over 3 mm/s. This method is effective with a low-level acoustic excitation (bubble oscillation amplitude relative to the diameter ≤5%), possibly providing a cost-effective, soft-contact manipulating tool for handling biological objects.     

A -based layout design for gratings allocation

In the design process of gratings, the grating layout design is the most important activity influencing manufacturing cost. In the grating layout design, the key to saving manufacturing cost is to find a design with a minimal number of cutting operations. This paper presents an application of the A^* algorithm in grating layout design. The design problem is represented as the space search problem of design alternatives. A^* explores the feasible alternatives within the space, until an optimal solution is obtained.     

Designing Metallic and Insulating Nanocrystal Heterostructures to Fabricate Highly Sensitive and Solution Processed Strain Gauges for Wearable Sensors

All‐solution processed, high‐performance wearable strain sensors are demonstrated using heterostructure nanocrystal (NC) solids. By incorporating insulating artificial atoms of CdSe quantum dot NCs into metallic artificial atoms of Au NC thin film matrix, metal–insulator heterostructures are designed. This hybrid structure results in a shift close to the percolation threshold, modifying the charge transport mechanism and enhancing sensitivity in accordance with the site percolation theory. The number of electrical pathways is also manipulated by creating nanocracks to further increase its sensitivity, inspired from the bond percolation theory. The combination of the two strategies achieves gauge factor up to 5045, the highest sensitivity recorded among NC‐based strain gauges. These strain sensors show high reliability, durability, frequency stability, and negligible hysteresis. The fundamental charge transport behavior of these NC solids is investigated and the combined site and bond percolation theory is developed to illuminate the origin of their enhanced sensitivity. Finally, all NC‐based and solution‐processed strain gauge sensor arrays are fabricated, which effectively measure the motion of each finger joint, the pulse of heart rate, and the movement of vocal cords of human. This work provides a pathway for designing low‐cost and high‐performance electronic skin or wearable devices.