Characterization of polyethylene/EPDM/silicon dioxide multicomponent composites by solid-state dynamic mechanical spectroscopy

Various composites of polyethylene, ethylene propylene diene rubber (EPDM), and filler are milled and analysed by solid-state dynamic mechanical spectroscopy. The filler used is silicon powder with an oxidized surface. This filler is a model for materials with siliceous surfaces. The torsion pendulum measurements show that the multicomponent composites exhibited complex viscoelastic behaviour. For composites of polyethylene and silicon dioxide, there is evidence of particle-particle interactions. In composites which include polyethylene, rubber and filler, interactions of the polyethylene and especially of the rubber with the filler surface are significant. Treatment of the filler surface with gamma-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (-APS) or gamma-methacryloxypropyltrimethoxysilane (-MPS) has a significant influence on the resultant composite dynamic mechanical spectrum. Maleic anhydride grafting of the EPDM rubber also changes the character of the composites. These composites appear to exhibit complex morphologies, which may be controlled to a certain extent by filler surface treatment and grafting to the rubber. There is evidence for a chemical reaction between the maleic anhydride modification of the EPDM and -APS during processing on the roll mill. Prediction of the composite properties using the extended van der Poel model is qualitatively useful.     

Pb-Free solders: Part 1. Wettability testing of Sn−Ag−Cu alloys with Bi additions

Maximum bubble pressure, dilatometric, and meniscographic methods were used in the investigations of the surface tension, density, wetting time, wetting force, contact angle, and interfacial tension of liquid alloys of Sn−Ag−Cu eutectic composition with various additions of Bi. Density and surface tension measurements were conducted in the temperature range 250–900 °C. Surface tensions at 250 °C measured under a protective atmosphere of Ar−H₂ were combined with data from meniscographic studies done under air or with a protective flux. The meniscographic data with a nonwetted teflon substrate provided data on interfacial tension (solder-flux), surface tension in air, and meniscographic data with a Cu substrate allowed determinations of wetting time, wetting force, and calculation of contact angle. The calculated wetting angles from meniscographic studies for binary Sn−Ag eutectic and two ternary Sn−Ag−Cu alloys were verified by separate measurements by the sessile drop method under a protective atmosphere with a Cu substrate. Additions of Bi to both ternary alloys improve the wettability and move the parameters somewhat closer to those of traditional Sn−Pb solders.     

Pb-Free solders: Part II. Application of ADAMIS database in modeling of Sn−Ag−Cu alloys with Bi additions

The ADAMIS database was used for calculation of the surface tension of the quaternary Sn−Ag−Cu−Bi liquid alloys by Butler's model. The resultant data were compared with those from the maximum bubble pressure measurements from Part I. The same thermodynamic database was next applied for the calculation of various phase equilibria. It was established that the Bi addition to the ternary Sn−Ag−Cu alloys (Sn-2.6Ag-0.46Cu and Sn-3.13Ag-0.74Cu in at.%; Sn-2.56Ag-0.26 Cu and Sn-2.86Ag-O.40Cu in mass%) causes lowering of the melting temperature and the surface tension to make the tested alloys closer to, traditional Sn−Pb solders. The simulation of the solidification by Scheil's model showed that the alloys with the higher Bi concentration are characterized by the lifting-off failure due to the segregation of Bi at the solder/substrate boundary. Thus, in modeling of new Pb-free solders, a compromise among various properties should be taken into consideration.     

Interpretation of reflection and transmission spectra for thin films: transmission

The optical behavior of a thin film, that is, peak positions and intensities, is discussed for transmission under a thin-film approximation. The infrared transmission spectra of thin films, both standing films and those on dielectric substrates, are simulated for s and p polarization at various angles of incidence. For spectral simulation, the matrix method is used in conjunction with noise-free complex refractive indices based on the dispersion theory. The peak positions in the simulated spectra are compared with transverse optic and longitudinal optic frequencies based on the macroscopic theory. The simulated peak intensities for the standing films are compared with the prediction based on the thin-film approximation. Furthermore, it is found from the spectral simulation for thin films on dielectric substrates that the peak intensity for a thin film may depend on the thickness and refractive index of the substrate.     

Gap symmetry and intrinsic intraplane pinning of untwinned YBa2Cu3O7 single crystals

The interplane (cb) and intraplane (ab) anisotropy of untwinned YBa₂ Cu₃0₇ single crystals has been investigated by means of the torque magnetometry. To extract the reversible and irreversible components, the torque was measured as a function of increasing angle as well as decreasing angle. The interplane irreversible torque _irr shows two-fold peaks at _c =90 ° and270 ° (of half width11 ° at77 K) due to the well-known intrinsic interplane pinning. A novel intrinsic pinning has been discovered in the intraplane irreversible torque, i.e., _irr shows four-fold peaks of half width20° at77 K when _a =0 °, 90 °, 180 ° and270 °. We argue that the intrinsic intraplane pinning comes from the four-fold nature of the gap parameter.     

A Hilbert warping method for handwriting gesture recognition

We propose a novel sequence alignment algorithm for recognizing handwriting gestures by a camera. In the proposed method, an input image sequence is aligned to the reference sequences by phase-synchronization of analytic signals which are transformed from original feature values. A cumulative distance is calculated simultaneously with the alignment process, and then used for the classification. A major benefit of this method is that over-fitting to sequences of incorrect categories is restricted. The proposed method exhibited higher recognition accuracy in handwriting gesture recognition, compared with the conventional dynamic time warping method which explores optimal alignment results for all categories.     

The evaluation of speckle contrast with variable speckle generator

Abstract— While laser projection has many advantages, there is a problem with speckle patterns generated as a result of interference of the laser beam and results in bad effects to observers. In 2010, a variable speckle generator, which produces an angular shift of incident light to the screen and generates variable speckle patterns, was suggested. In this study, the performance of a variable speckle generator by using a volume phase holographic beam shaper and scanning mirror was investigated in detail by evaluating both the objective and subjective speckle contrast. The morphology of the speckle pattern was also investigated when the variable speckle generator was activated. With a scanning VPH beam shaper, the objective speckle was effectively reduced because each point of the VPH beam shaper generated different speckle patterns and coherency among each pattern disappeared by using the scan process. On the other hand, subjective speckle was also dramatically reduced by changing the incident angle on the screen, which resulted in generating variable subjective speckle. It was also shown that the speckle reduction rate by using a variable speckle generator did not depend on the coherent length of a laser by evaluating the normalized speckle contrast against the angular shift on the screen.     

Implementation of a decision support system using an interactive large-scale high-resolution display

In this research, we propose and evaluate a decision support system using an interactive large-scale high-resolution display. This decision support system supports the summarization and decision-making of a large amount of disaster information during the occurrence of a large-scale natural disaster. Municipal employees at the disaster control headquarters can display disaster information on the large-scale display with a touch or flick on a laptop or tablet. To evaluate the operability, readability, functionality, and necessity of the decision support system, we surveyed 23 municipal employees in the disaster prevention division using a questionnaire. The system received a great evaluation in all the evaluation items.     

Generation of templates for low-resolution text recognition using a hypothesis graph

We propose a recognition method of character-string images captured by portable digital cameras. A challenging task in character-string recognition is the segmentation of characters. In the proposed method, a hypothesis graph is used for recognition-based segmentation of the character-string images. The hypothesis graph is constructed by the subspace method, using eigenvectors as conditionally elastic templates. To obtain these templates, a generation-based approach is introduced in the training stage. Various templates are generated to cope with low-resolution. We have experimentally proved that the proposed scheme achieves high recognition performance even for low-resolution character-string images. The text was submitted by the authors in English. Hiroyuki Ishida. Received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Information Engineering and from the Graduate School of Information Science, respectively, at Nagoya University. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Science at Nagoya University. Ichiro Ide. Received his B.S. degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, his M.S. degree from the Department of Information Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Tokyo. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Information Science at Nagoya University. Tomokazu Takahashi. Received his B.S. degree from the Department of Information Engineering at Ibaraki University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Ibaraki University. His research interests include computer graphics and image recognition. Hiroshi Murase. Received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Graduate School of Electrical Engineering at Nagoya University. He is currently a Professor in the Graduate School of Information Science at Nagoya University. He received the Ministry Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan in 2003. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.     

Antibody-based computing: an application to the stable marriage problem

Antibodies, among other things, are important components of the immune system. This paper proposes using the specific recognition capability exhibited by antibodies for computation, in particular, for solving the stable marriage problem, which has been studied as a combinatorial computational problem. Antibody-based computation is proposed by integrating the recognition capabilities of antibodies. The computation is carried out on an array form that is suitable not only for expressing stable marriage problems, but also for further integration to antibody microarrays. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007