Flight-vehicle structures education in the united states—Assessment and recommendations

An assessment is made of the technical contents of flight-vehicle structures curricula at 41 U.S. universities with accredited aerospace engineering programs. The assessment is based on the technical needs for the new and projected aeronautical and space systems as well as on the likely characteristics of the aerospace engineering work environment. A number of deficiencies and areas of concern are identified and recommendations are presented for enhancing the effectiveness of flight-vehicle structures education. A number of government supported programs that can help aerospace engineering education are listed in the appendix.     

Autoscan: a scan design without external scan inputs or outputs

We propose a design-for-testability technique for synchronous sequential circuits called autoscan. Autoscan uses scan chains similar to conventional scan. However, it gives up the external scan inputs and outputs in order to eliminate the test data volume associated with them. Scan operations under autoscan improve the circuit testability by allowing the circuit state to be modified through shifting. Due to the removal of the scan inputs and outputs, synthesis of scan chains under autoscan does not have to satisfy all the constraints imposed on conventional scan chains. We describe a synthesis procedure for autoscan chains, and demonstrate that autoscan allows us to detect almost all the faults that are detectable using conventional scan. We use random sequences in order to show that sequential test generation is not necessary under autoscan. We also describe a test generation procedure, and discuss the effect of autoscan on fault diagnosis.     

Modelling biological processes under anaerobic conditions through integrating titrimetric and off-gas measurements-applied to EBPR systems.

An innovative method for modelling biological processes under anaerobic conditions is presented and discussed. The method is based on titrimetric and off-gas measurements. Titrimetric data is recorded as the addition rate of hydroxyl ions or protons that is required to maintain pH in a bioreactor at a constant level. An off-gas analysis arrangement measures, among other things, the transfer rate of carbon dioxide. The integration of these signals results in a continuous signal which is solely related to the biological reactions. When coupled with a mathematical model of the biological reactions, the signal allows a detailed characterisation of these reactions, which would otherwise be difficult to achieve. Two applications of the method to the enhanced biological phosphorus removal processes are presented and discussed to demonstrate the principle and effectiveness of the method.     

Kinetics of small fatigue cracks in steel during cyclic loading

The kinetics of development of fatigue microcracks in a high-strength 08Kh14AN4MD steel is studied when a cantilever specimen with several notches is subjected to rotational bending tests. The specific feature of the tests consists in the fact that, when the specimen is loaded at a constant load, different stress amplitudes are realized in different notches. As a result, after the sample has failed across the section with the maximum stress, a longitudinal polished section of the specimen contains fatigue cracks having nucleated in the mouths of the other notches at lower stress amplitudes. A relation between inflection points in the fatigue curve and the conditions of local and developed yield in a notch has been established. Fatigue fracture mechanisms at a superhigh number of loading cycles are studied, and their relation to the structure near a crack is found. A rapid method for estimating the fatigue limit at a superhigh number of loading cycles is proposed.     

Termites live in a material world: exploration of their ability to differentiate between food sources.

Drywood termites are able to assess wood size using vibratory signals, although the exact mechanism behind this assessment ability is not known. Important vibratory characteristics such as the modal frequencies of a wooden block depend on its geometry and boundary conditions; however, they are also dependent on the material characteristics of the block, such as mass, density and internal damping. We report here on choice experiments that tested the ability of the drywood termite Cryptotermes secundus to assess wooden block size using a solid wooden block paired with a composite block, the latter made of either wood and aluminium or wood and rubber. Each composite block was constructed to match mass or low-frequency vibratory modes (i.e. fundamental frequency) of the solid wooden block. The termites always chose the blocks with more wood; they moved to the solid wooden blocks usually within a day and then tunnelled further into the solid wooden block by the end of the experiment. Termites offered composite blocks of wood and rubber matched for mass were the slowest to show a preference for the solid wooden block and this preference was the least definitive of any treatment, which indicated that mass and/or damping may play a role in food assessment. This result clearly shows that the termites were not fooled by composite blocks matched for mass or frequency, which implies that they probably employ more than a single simple measure in their food assessment strategy. This implies a degree of sophistication in their ability to assess their environment hitherto unknown. The potential importance of alternative features in the vibrational signals is discussed.     

Fast numerically stable computation of orthogonal Fourier?Mellin moments

An efficient algorithm for the computation of the orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments (OFMMs) is presented. The proposed method computes the fractional parts of the orthogonal polynomials, which consist of fractional terms, recursively, by eliminating the number of factorial calculations. The recursive computation of the fractional terms makes the overall computation of the OFMMs a very fast procedure in comparison with the conventional direct method. Actually, the computational complexity of the proposed method is linear O(p) in multiplications, with p being the moment order, while the corresponding complexity of the direct method is O(p²). Moreover, this recursive algorithm has better numerical behaviour, as it arrives at an overflow situation much later than the original one and does not introduce any finite precision errors. These are the two major advantages of the algorithm introduced in the current work, establishing the computation of the OFMMs to a very high order as a quite easy and achievable task. Appropriate simulations on images of different sizes justify the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the conventional algorithm currently used     

Reduction of optical beat interference using gain-saturated RSOA in upstream WDM/SCM optical links

A new scheme for reducing optical beat interference (OBI) noise in optical network units is proposed for subcarrier multiplexing-based access network applications. The optical spectrum of the transmit lasers is broadened by using a radio frequency (RF) clipping tone with a modulation depth greater than one. This reduces the impact of the OBI noise. The distortions caused by an RF clipping tone are also suppressed by introducing a gain-saturated reflective optical amplifier, which shows the characteristics of high-pass filter. The proposed scheme has been verified by measuring the error vector magnitude of 16QAM signal with 20 Mbps. Error-free transmission has been achieved even when the light of OBI-noise-causing lasers is stronger than that of the signal laser by 7 dB