Standardized preparation of samples and Sapozhnikov plastometric equipment

Careful granulometric preparation of coal samples is required. The sample must contain no more than 30% of the ≤0.5 mm class. The preparation of the plastometric equipment for testing is also considered.     

Renaturation of formyltetrahydrofolate synthetase from urea and guanidinium chloride solutions

Formyltetrahydrofolate synthetase from Clostridium cylindrosporum and Clostridium acidi-urici was denatured in 6 M urea and 4 M guanidinium chloride. Viscometric, fluorimetric and ultracentrifugal measurements were used to determine that the protein is completely unfolded under these conditions. The polypeptide chains refold upon dilution of the denaturant-protein solutions to give final concentrations of 0.5 M urea or 0.1 M guanidinium chloride. In the presence of NH4+, but not in its absence, the refolded proteins associate to produce the catalytically active tetramer. Refolding and reassociation were followed by measuring changes in protein fluorescence and by determination of sedimentation constants. Under most conditions 80% of the enzymic activity is recovered.     

Science and Technology of High Dielectric Constant Thin Films and Materials Integration for Application to High Frequency Devices

Thin films of Ba_1?x Sr _x Ti_1+y O_3+z (BST), were fabricated using both by RF-magnetron sputtering and MOCVD to demonstrate application to high frequency devices. Precise control of composition and microstructure is critical for the production of (Ba _x Sr_1?x )Ti_1+y O_3+z (BST) dielectric thin films with the large dependence of permittivity on electric field, low losses, and high electrical breakdown fields that are required for successful integration of BST into tunable high frequency devices. Here we review results on composition-microstructure-electrical property relationships of polycrystalline BST films produced by magnetron sputter deposition that are appropriate for microwave devices such as phase shifters. BST films with a multilayer structure were also developed with different Ti-elemental ratio in each layer to minimize losses and leakage current. Interfacial contamination from C and H species was studied and implications on electrical properties are highlighted. Finally, York's group at the University of California-Santa Barbara successfully integrated our BST films onto phase shifter arrays. The results show potential of BST films in such applications. Results from initial work on the integration of Cu-electrodes with BST films are also presented.     

MOCVD (BaxSr1−x)Ti1+yO3+z (BST) thin films for high frequency tunable devices

Abstract

We have investigated the structural and electrical characteristics of (Ba_xSr_1?x)Ti_1+yO_3+z (BST) thin films synthesized at 650°C on Pt/SiO₂/Si substrates using a large area, vertical metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) reactor equipped with a liquid delivery system. Films with a Ba/Sr ratio of 70/30 were studied, as determined using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) and Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS). A substantial reduction of the dielectric loss was achieved when annealing the entire capacitor structure in air at 700°C. Dielectric tunability as high as 2.3:1 was measured for BST capacitors with the currently optimized processing conditions.     

Key exchange in IPSec: analysis of IKE

The IPSec (IP Security) protocol is a recently proposed standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing real-time communications on the Internet. The authors explain how its Internet Key Exchange (IKE) mechanism works and suggest improvements     

From the Editors.

We could not imagine a more appropriate inauguration of the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA) going to four issues per year than with a special issue honoring the life and work of the great aesthetician and psychologist, Rudolf Arnheim. PACA is off to a great start. With this move to four issues per year, we are restarting our numbering system, so this special issue is Volume 1, Issue 1. As you read the articles in this issue, we hope that you enjoy reflecting on how much Rudolf Arnheim has contributed to the field of psychology of aesthetics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual simulation of thermal fluid dynamics in a pressurized water reactor

We present a simulation and visualization system for a critical application—analysis of the thermal fluid dynamics inside a pressurized water reactor of a nuclear power plant when cold water is injected into the reactor vessel. We employ a hybrid thermal lattice Boltzmann method (HTLBM), which has the advantages of ease of parallelization and ease of handling complex simulation boundaries. For efficient computation and storage of the irregular-shaped simulation domain, we classify the domain into nonempty and empty cells and apply a novel packing technique to organize the nonempty cells. This method is implemented on a GPU cluster for acceleration. We demonstrate the formation of cold-water plumes in the reactor vessel. A set of interactive visualization tools, such as side-view slices, 3D volume rendering, thermal layers rendering, and panorama rendering, are provided to collectively visualize the structure and dynamics of the temperature field in the vessel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that combines 3D simulation and visualization for analyzing thermal shock risk in a pressurized water reactor.     

Boundary cell-based acceleration for volume ray casting

Several effective acceleration techniques for volume rendering offer efficient means to skip over empty space, providing significant speedup without affecting image quality. The effectiveness of such an approach depends on its ability to accurately estimate the object boundary inside a volume with minimal computational overhead. We propose a novel boundary cell-based acceleration technique for ray casting which skips over empty space by accurately calculating the intersection distance for each ray. Very short distance estimation time is achieved by exploiting a projection template to calculate the parallel-projection values of each boundary cell and the coherency of adjacent cells. Since no hardware acceleration is used, the projection procedure can also be efficiently parallelized. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of our new algorithm.     

Volume-sampled 3D modeling

We present a 3D object-space antialiasing technique for volume graphics. Our approach performs antialiasing once-on a 3D view-independent representation-as part of the modeling stage. Unlike antialiasing of 2D scan-converted graphics, where the main focus is on generating aesthetically pleasing displays, antialiasing of 3D voxelized graphics emphasizes the production of alias-free 3D models for various volume graphics manipulations, including but not limited to the generation of aesthetically pleasing displays