Comparison of copper emission rates from wood treated with different preservatives to the environment

This study describes a laboratory method for the estimation of emission from preservative-treated wood in the different situations where emissions could enter the environment for use classes 3 (not in contact with ground) and 4 and 5 (in contact with the ground, fresh water or sea water) according to OECD Guidelines. Samples of scotch pine sapwood (Pinus sylvestris L.) were treated with CCA (1% and 2%), ACQ-1900 (3% and 7%), ACQ-2200 (2%), Tanalith E 3491 (2% and 2.8%), and Wolmanit CX-8 (2%).     

An Experimental Investigation into the Feed Rate Capacity of Rotary Valve and Blow Tank Feeders

Industry widely uses rotary valves and blow tanks for the pneumatic conveying of products, each having their pros and cons depending on the specific application. This article shows the differing results obtained when low-velocity conveying a product through a common pipeline using both a drop-through rotary valve and a bottom-discharge blow tank feeder. A number of issues arise in the rotary valve system, the main one being rotary valve air leakage. A blow tank system, on the other hand, does not leak, as it is an enclosed system. The experimental results show dramatic differences in product throughput. Further exploration leads to a novel modification being made to the rotary valve system in an attempt to increase its capacity. The result of this modification shows a slight increase in output tonnage, but still significantly less than that obtained from the blow tank.     

Logistic Regression Analysis of Customer Satisfaction Data

Variation exists in all processes. Significant work has been done to identify and remove sources of variation in manufacturing processes resulting in large returns for companies. However, business process optimization is an area that has a large potential return for a company. Business processes can be difficult to optimize due to the nature of the output variables associated with them. Business processes tend to have output variables that are binary, nominal or ordinal. Examples of these types of output include whether a particular event occurred, a customer's color preference for a new product and survey questions that assess the extent of the survey respondent's agreement with a particular statement. Output variables that are binary, nominal or ordinal cannot be modeled using ordinary least‐squares regression. Logistic regression is a method used to model data where the output is binary, nominal or ordinal. This article provides a review of logistic regression and demonstrates its use in modeling data from a business process involving customer feedback. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Highly oriented star-like patterns observed on GaSe epilayers grown on Si(111)

Epitaxial lamellar gallium selenide (GaSe) semiconductors have been grown on trench-patterned silicon (Si) substrates by molecular beam epitaxy. An intriguing star-like patterned morphology was identified by atomic force microscopy on these epilayers. This non-trivial feature can be correlated with the accumulation of stacking faults of two concurrent epitaxial domains around self-oriented triangular pits developed earlier on the Si(111) surface by the chemical etching. Crystallographic considerations show how the stars can be formed.     

Hydrodynamics of marine current turbines

Various global studies have shown that marine currents have large potential as a predictable sustainable resource for commercial scale generation of electrical power. For successful exploitation of this resource, an understanding of the hydrodynamics of the marine current turbine is of primary importance. Although a lot can be learned from the technology transfer from wind turbines and ship propellers, there has been limited hydrodynamics research for this particular application. A methodology is presented for the hydrodynamic design of horizontal axis marine current turbines. Recent research has investigated the performance of suitable 2D section shapes both experimentally in a cavitation tunnel and with numerical simulations. A numerical model of a typical 3D rotor is used to demonstrate parametric variations of the design parameters and the use of alternative blade sections.     

A Low-Power CMOS Linear-in-Decibel Variable Gain Amplifier With Programmable Bandwidth and Stable Group Delay

This brief presents a new circuit architecture for linear-in-decibel, constant-bandwidth variable gain amplifier (VGA). To obtain high linearity under low-voltage operation, this VGA is a closed-loop structure. In loop amplifier design, two techniques are applied: first, the loop amplifier is given finite input impedance. This arrangement keeps the VGA bandwidth constant under different gain setting. Second, a current-buffered compensation is applied for loop stability. Compared to the Miller compensation, this method achieves wider bandwidth. The prototype chip using 0.18-mum CMOS technology demonstrates that -10- to 20-dB gain and 0.5- to 30-MHz bandwidth can be programmed independently. The group delay difference within 30-dB gain control range is smaller than 1%. The total circuit dissipates 1.35 mA from a 1.8-V supply     

Solving the trade-off between fairness and throughput: Token bucket and leaky bucket-based weighted fair queueing schedulers

In this article, we present two efficient weighted fair queueing (WFQ) scheduling algorithms leaned on the well-known token bucket and leaky bucket shaping/policing algorithms. The performance of the presented algorithms is compared to those of the state-of-the-art WFQ approximations such as weighted round robin (WRR) and the recently proposed bin sort fair queueing (BSFQ). Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithms provide a better fairness at a lower implementation complexity while simultaneously achieving a comparable network utilization.     

Novel tiO2 nanocatalysts for wastewater purification: tapping energy from the sun.

Water treatment using TiO2 semiconductor as a durable heterogeneous photocatalyst has been the focus of environmentalists in recent years. Currently, we developed an inexpensive and highly efficient approach for synthesizing nitrogen-doped TiO2 with lower band-gap energy that can respond to visible light. Doping on the molecular scale led to an enhanced nitrogen concentration of up to 21.8%. Reflectance measurements showed the synthesized N-doped TiO2 nanoparticles are catalytically active with the absorbance that extends into the visible region up to 600 nm. The water purification potential of this new class of compound was evaluated by studying the photodegradation of Acid Orange 7 (AO7) and E. coli. Experiments were conducted to compare the photocatalytic activities of N-doped TiO2 nanocatalysts and commercially available Degussa P25 power under identical solar light exposure. N-doped TiO2 demonstrated superior photocatalytic activities in both chemical compound degradation and bactericidal reactions. The result of this study shows the potential of applying new generations of catalyst for wastewater purification and disinfection.     

Results of a User Study on 2D Hurricane Visualization

We present the results from a user study looking at the ability of observers to mentally integrate wind direction and magnitude over a vector field. The data set chosen for the study is an MM5 (PSU/NCAR Mesoscale Model) simulation of Hurricane Lili over the Gulf of Mexico as it approaches the southeastern United States. Nine observers participated in the study. This study investigates the effect of layering on the observer's ability to determine the magnitude and direction of a vector field. We found a tendency for observers to underestimate the magnitude of the vectors and a counter‐clockwise bias when determining the average direction of a vector field. We completed an additional study with two observers to try to uncover the source of the counter‐clockwise bias. These results have direct implications to atmospheric scientists, but may also be able to be applied to other fields that use 2D vector fields.