Solid-State Control-Low Voltage Heating of Motors

In recent years, industrial plants have been utilizing more electric motors as drivers because of their high efficiency and reliability and lower maintenance costs. Electrified continuous process plants are using electric motors for both primary and standby drives. When these standby motors are not operating during normal plant runs, their windings collect moisture. Moisture attacks insulation and causes insulation failure. A breakdown of motor insulation may occur when a standby motor is suddenly energized to take the place of the primary motor. When it is not in operation, directly heating the motor winding with a low voltage system, coupled with automatic control, will guard the motor from moisture attack and extend its service life. The experience with low voltage heating of motor windings as described by M. H. Yuen in his article [1] has proved its effectiveness. However, conventional relays, timers, contactors, etc., were utilized in the circuits.     

Controlled density of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes in a triode plasma chemical vapor deposition system

We report on the growth mechanism and density control of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes using a triode plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition system. The deposition reactor was designed in order to allow the intermediate mesh electrode to be biased independently from the ground and power electrodes. The CNTs grown with a mesh bias of + 300 V show a density of ∼ 1.5 μm^− 2 and a height of ∼ 5 μm. However, CNTs do not grow when the mesh electrode is biased to − 300 V. The growth of CNTs can be controlled by the mesh electrode bias which in turn controls the plasma density and ion flux on the sample.     

Fabrication of Er3+/Pr3+ Co-doped soda-lime glass thin films using RF magnetron sputtering method and optical property characterization

Er^3+/Pr³⁺ co-doped soda-lime glass thin films have been fabricated using RF magnetron sputtering method and their structural and optical properties have been studied. Deposition rate, crystallinity, and composition of glass thin films were investigated by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and electron probe micro area analysis. Refractive index, birefringence and binding characteristics have been investigated using a prism coupler and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Er³⁺/Pr³⁺ co-doped soda lime glass thin films were prepared by changing substrate temperature (room temp. ∼550^∘C), RF power (90 W–130 W), and Ar/O₂ gas flow ratio at processing pressure of 4 mTorr. Glass thin films could be obtained at the optimized processing condition at 350^∘C, RF power of 130 W, and gas flow of Ar:O₂ = 40:0 with maximum deposition rate of 1.6 μm/h. Refractive index and birefringence increased from 1.5614 to 1.5838 and from 0.000154 to 0.000552, respectively, as the content of Pr³⁺ increased. Binding energy of Pr3d also increased as the content of Pr³⁺ increased.     

Preparation of lithium-ion polymer battery using LiNi1/3Co1/3Mn1/3O2 as a cathode material and its electrochemical properties

In this work, LiNi_1/3Mn_1/3Co_1/3O₂ powders were synthesized from co-precipitated spherical metal hydroxide. In the voltage range of 2.8–4.2, 2.8–4.4, and 2.8–4.6 V, the discharge capacities of LiNi_1/3Mn_1/3Co_1/3O₂ electrode were 163, 177, and 193 mAh⋅g⁻¹, respectively. A gel polymer electrolyte (GPE) was also prepared using polyoxyalkylene glycol acrylate (POAGA) as a macromonomer. LiNi_1/3Mn_1/3Co_1/3O₂/GPE/graphite cells were prepared and their electrochemical properties were evaluated at various current densities and temperatures. The ionic conductivity of the GPE was more than 6.2 × 10⁻³ S⋅cm⁻¹ at room temperature. POAGA-based cells were showed good electrochemical performances such as rate capability, low-temperature performance, and cycleability.     

Preparation of a sensor substrate using functionalized mesoporous silica on a gold film for surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy

The use of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy has been applied to a wide variety of fields such as biosensors and surface analysis instruments. In general, a SPR substrate is prepared using self-assembled monolayer (SAM) method of organic molecules as receptor for the target on a layer of gold or silver. However, mesoporous inorganic materials such as SBA-15 have benefits as sensor substrate for SPR. Mesoporous silica has a large surface area which receptor molecule can be attached and has a rigid body which has an excellent stability in the extreme condition compared to organic sensing layer. We prepared an organic modified mesoporous silica and successfully immobilized it on a gold surface, in an attempt to use as a substrate for SPR spectroscopy. For the comparison of sensitivity of prepared substrate, Pt²⁺ detection was selected as a model system. Substrate prepared in this study exhibited the capability of selective sensing for Pt²⁺ ions.     

High performance series-resonance energy-recovery circuit for plasma display panel

A new high performance series-resonance energy-recovery circuit (ERC) for a plasma display panel (PDP) is proposed. Two different ERCs are used for both sides of the PDP, and the slow falling and fast rising times are employed. Therefore, it features the zero voltage switching, low electromagnetic interference, low current stress, no severe voltage notch, and high energy-recovery capability.     

Discrete-time analysis of a CPCH access scheme in W-CDMA

Common packet channel (CPCH) access is an efficient approach to support packet data transmissions in a wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) system. Rather than using a continuous-time analysis approach, this paper presents a discrete-time analysis of the CPCH access scheme to fully characterize the complete CPCH operation process. Previous studies using the continuous-time analysis only models a portion of the CPCH process. We assume that a packet arrival process is Poisson distributed and the service time of each packet is geometrically distributed. The study focuses on examining the number of packet arrivals in each CPCH access slot. Performance is evaluated in terms of normalized throughput and it is observed that CPCH performs better when packet mean service time is larger. The performance results are also compared with previous studies using continuous-time analyses     

Modeling growth rate of HfO2 thin films grown by metal-organic molecular beam epitaxy

HfO₂ dielectric layers were grown on the p-type Si (100) substrate by metal-organic molecular beam epitaxy (MOMBE). Hafnium-tetra-butoxide, Hf(O·t-C₄H₉)₄ was used as a Hf precursor and Argon gas was used as a carrier gas. The thickness of the HfO₂ film and intermediate SiO₂ layer were measured by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). The properties of the HfO₂ layers were evaluated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), high frequency (HF) capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurement, and current-voltage (I-V) measurement. C-V and I-V measurements have shown that HfO₂ layer grown by MOMBE has a high dielectric constant (k) of 20-22 and a low-level of leakage current density. The growth rate is affected by various process variables such as substrate temperature, bubbler temperature, Ar and O₂ gas flows and growth time. Since the ratio of O₂ and Ar gas flows are closely correlated, the effect of variations in O₂/Ar flow ratio on growth rate is also investigated using statistical modeling methodology.     

A simple receding horizon control for state delayed systems and its stability criterion

In this paper, a simple receding horizon (or model predictive) control for state delayed systems is presented and its solution is given in a closed form by a reduction method. While the control for a time-delay system is usually complex, the proposed controller is simple to construct and therefore can be simply implemented in real applications. To check the closed-loop stability of the proposed controller, a sufficient condition is provided by linear matrix inequalities. In addition, a numerical algorithm is presented for computing the eigenvalues of systems with distributed time delays, which can be used as a necessary and sufficient condition to check closed-loop stability. It is shown by simulation that this simple control can be a stabilizing control for time-delay systems.     

Scalability analysis of declustering methods for multidimensionalrange queries

Efficient storage and retrieval of multi-attribute data sets has become one of the essential requirements for many data-intensive applications. The Cartesian product file has been known as an effective multi-attribute file structure for partial-match and best-match queries. Several heuristic methods have been developed to decluster Cartesian product files across multiple disks to obtain high performance for disk accesses. Although the scalability of the declustering methods becomes increasingly important for systems equipped with a large number of disks, no analytic studies have been done so far. The authors derive formulas describing the scalability of two popular declustering methods-Disk Module and Fieldwise Xor-for range queries, which are the most common type of queries. These formulas disclose the limited scalability of the declustering methods, and this is corroborated by extensive simulation experiments. From the practical point of view, the formulas given in the paper provide a simple measure that can be used to predict the response time of a given range query and to guide the selection of a declustering method under various conditions