An electric power purchase strategy for bilateral contracts focusing on reliability of customers

With the introduction of the competitive electrical power market, large‐scale customers can select electric power suppliers. Customers need to consider not only the economical efficiency but also reliability, to decide the amount of electrical power to purchase. This paper develops an economic electric power purchase strategy for customers focusing on reliability. A bilateral contract model expressing electric power suppliers as generators with a forced outage rate is proposed and introduced to assess potential outage risks of the bilateral contract between an electric power supplier and a customer. The outage‐related cost, consisting of potential outage risks and the estimated outage cost, is also proposed and introduced as an index of the reliability on the customer side, and an optimal reliability level of a customer is obtained by using the index. Several numerical examples demonstrate the availability of the proposed electric power purchase decision method and reliability improvement strategies for customers are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 156(4): 9–21, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.20345     

Further studies on the electrodiagnosis of diabetic peripheral polyneuropathy using discriminant function analysis

BACKGROUND: According to the D2 dopamine receptor hypothesis of schizophrenia, there is an increased number of D2 receptors in the brains of schizophrenic patients than in those of healthy controls. We tested this hypothesis in 13 newly admitted neuroleptic-naive schizophrenic patients and 10 healthy volunteers using positron emission tomography. METHOD: The quantification of striatal D2 dopamine receptor density (Bmax) and affinity (Kd) was done using an equilibrium model described for raclopride labeled with carbon 11. RESULTS: No statistically significant alterations were found in D2 receptor densities or affinities between the patient and control groups. However, a subgroup of four patients with a relatively high striatal D2 dopamine density was identified. Two patients, especially, had D2 dopamine densities almost twice as high as the mean control Bmax value. The Kd values also tended to be higher in this subset of patients than in the controls. No consistent striatal D2 dopamine receptor laterality was observed in schizophrenic patients or controls. However, an association of high D2 dopamine density in the left striatum and the mass of raclopride injected in the scan with low-specific radioactivity was observed in patients but not in controls. CONCLUSIONS: There are no general changes in D2 dopamine receptor Bmax or Kd values in neuroleptic-naive schizophrenics, but there may be a subgroup of patients with aberrant striatal D2 dopamine receptor characteristics in vivo.     

A 7-GHz 1.8-dB NF CMOS low-noise amplifier

A 7-GHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) was designed and fabricated using 0.25-μm CMOS technology. A cascode configuration with a dual-gate MOSFET and shielded pads were adopted to improve the gain and the noise performance. The effects of the dual-gate MOSFET and the shielded pads are discussed quantitatively. An associated gain of 8.9 dB, a minimum noise figure of 1.8 dB, and an input-referred third-order intercept point of +8.4 dBm were obtained at 7 GHz. The LNA consumes 6.9 mA from a 2.0-V supply voltage. These measured results indicate the feasibility of a CMOS LNA employing these techniques for low-noise and high-linearity applications at over 5 GHz     

Admittance and Impedance Representations of Friction Based on Implicit Euler Integration

Modeling of friction force is cumbersome because of its discontinuity at zero velocity. This paper presents a set of discrete-time friction models for the purpose of haptic rendering and virtual environment construction. These models allow friction to be treated as an admittance-type or impedance-type element of a virtual environment. They are derived from implicit Euler integration of Coulomb-like discontinuous friction and linear mass-spring-damper dynamics, and have closed-form expressions. They include rate-dependent friction laws, and their extension to multidimensional cases is easy in most practical cases. The validity of the models is demonstrated through numerical examples and implementation experiments     

Two-photon excitation of excitons in CuCl in total reflection geometry

We have observed emission spectra of a CuCl film on a TiO₂ prism surface(110) associated with the two‐photon excitation of the exciton system in total reflection geometry. The I₁ bound exciton emission, which resonantly appeared at the two‐photon excitation of the Z₃‐longitudinal excitons and Z_1,2‐exciton band, was observed. The dependence of the emission intensities on the polarization of the excitation light was explained from the field intensity and the penetration depth of the evanescent light in CuCl accompanying the totally reflected light at the TiO₂/CuCl interface.     

A study of the flywheel capacity of the power compensator for the wind turbine generator

Nowadays, the Wind Turbine Generator (WTG) system is remarkably increasing as a renewable energy resource in Japan. But in the WTG, the power fluctuations caused by the wind speed fluctuation are the most crucial issue in providing their energy to the utility. It was found that a power compensation system (PCS) of suitable capacity is not yet available. In this paper, the time range and standardized wind speed including fluctuations are discussed. We estimated the storage capacity of PCS at different wind profiles by standardization of wind speed and verified the validity of their capacities using a computer simulation. In this way we determined the suitable capacity of the power compensation system. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 143(4): 64–71, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.10122     

Assembly Process Design for Managing Manufacturing Complexities Because of Product Varieties

This paper comprehensively studies assembly process design (APD) to handle variety and presents a new approach to strategically manage manufacturing complexities because of product varieties. It links the chronological steps of APD to a general approach with a view to reduce both short and long term wastes. It synthesizes two strategic approaches, product and process-based, while exploiting the APD of an entire product family. A new evaluation method for measuring the complexities of an assembly system at different stages of design has been introduced by applying information entropy. The developed evaluation methodology explains the available techniques related to design, interprets them from a design for variety point of view, and leads to techniques to manage complexities in manufacturing. The suggested methodology has been applied to examples from automobile part manufacturers and has been found to be effective in understanding the complexities in manufacturing and leading to some strategies to manage variety.