Absorption of silicone fluid in a silicone elastomer

Measurements have been made of the absorption properties of a silicone fluid in a silicone elastomer, Aircast 3700, at temperatures between 0 and 150 °C. It was found that the diffusivity could be described by Arrhenius' law. The saturation fluid content was 20% at 0 °C, decreasing to 17% at 120 °C. The swelling was large, up to 26% at saturation, and approximately equalled the volume of fluid absorbed. A reverse thermal effect was observed and an attempt has been made to explain it.     

Service outage based power and rate allocation for parallel fading channels

The service outage based allocation problem explores variable-rate transmission schemes and combines the concepts of ergodic capacity and outage capacity for fading channels. A service outage occurs when the transmission rate is below a given basic rate r/sub o/. The allocation problem is to maximize the expected rate subject to the average power constraint and the constraint that the outage probability is less than /spl epsi/. A general class of probabilistic power allocation schemes is considered for an M-parallel fading channel model. The optimum power allocation scheme is derived and shown to be deterministic except at channel states of a boundary set. The resulting service outage achievable rate ranges from 1-/spl epsi/ of the outage capacity up to the ergodic capacity with increasing average power. Two near-optimum schemes are also derived by exploiting the fact that the outage probability is usually small. The second near-optimum scheme significantly reduces the computational complexity of the optimum solution; moreover, it has a simple structure for the implementation of transmission of mixed real-time and non-real-time services.     

The Parlay network API specification

New business opportunities have emerged for network operators to offer a new generation of interfaces directly to solution providers that expose information and control in various intelligent networks. The paper describes the commercial rationale and operational benefits of these application level interfaces. The Parlay Group has defined application programming interfaces (APIs) to expose network capabilities including wireline, mobile, IP QoS, and messaging to external enterprises. The Parlay Group and the API specification are described, together with an illustration of how the API could be used to create an enterprise workflow solution that integrates capabilities in different networks.     

A comparison of the noise sensitivity of nine QRS detectionalgorithms

The noise sensitivities for nine different QRS detection algorithms were measured for a normal, single-channel lead II, synthesized ECG corrupted with five different types of synthesized noise. The noise types were electromyographic interference, 60 Hz powerline interference, baseline drift due to respiration, abrupt baseline shift, and a composite noise constructed from all of the other noise types. The percentage of QRS complexes detected, the number of false positives, and the detection delay were measured. None of the algorithms were able to detect all QRS complexes without any false positives for all of the noise types at the highest noise level. Algorithms based on amplitude and slope had the highest performance for EMG-corrupted ECG. An algorithm using a digital filter had the best performance for the composite noise corrupted data.     

Cooperative multihop broadcast for wireless networks

We address the minimum-energy broadcast problem under the assumption that nodes beyond the nominal range of a transmitter can collect the energy of unreliably received overheard signals. As a message is forwarded through the network, a node will have multiple opportunities to reliably receive the message by collecting energy during each retransmission. We refer to this cooperative strategy as accumulative broadcast. We seek to employ accumulative broadcast in a large scale loosely synchronized, low-power network. Therefore, we focus on distributed network layer approaches for accumulative broadcast in which loosely synchronized nodes use only local information. To further simplify the system architecture, we assume that nodes forward only reliably decoded messages. Under these assumptions, we formulate the minimum-energy accumulative broadcast problem. We present a solution employing two subproblems. First, we identify the ordering in which nodes should transmit. Second, we determine the optimum power levels for that ordering. While the second subproblem can be solved by means of linear programming, the ordering subproblem is found to be NP-complete. We devise a heuristic algorithm to find a good ordering. Simulation results show the performance of the algorithm to be close to optimum and a significant improvement over the well known BIP algorithm for constructing energy-efficient broadcast trees. We then formulate a distributed version of the accumulative broadcast algorithm that uses only local information at the nodes and has performance close to its centralized counterpart.     

The determination of active filter aid adsorption sites by temperature-programmed desorption

Temperature programmed desorption (TPD) was used to evaluate the active sites of several filter aids that have been promoted for use by the deep-frying industry: activated carbon, aluminas, bleaching earths, diatomaceous earth, silica and synthetic magnesium silicate. TPD analysis determines both the total surface concentration of the active sites and the details of their intensity distribution. A correlation analysis was made between the adsorbents' oil treatment performance and the observed acidic/basic sites. For some of the adsorbents, the adsorption of free fatty acids and the percent change in the color of the oil was shown to relate to the total basic sites and acid sites, respectively. The study also showed that other factors might affect these adsorptivities.     

Effect of a nitric oxide synthase inhibitor and a glucocorticosteroid on exhaled nitric oxide

Nitric oxide (NO) is produced by a variety of cells within the respiratory tract, including inflammatory epithelial cells. NO has been detected in the exhaled air of normal human subjects, and its concentration is raised in asthmatic patients. To study whether exhaled NO arises from the respiratory tract, we administered a NO synthase (NOS) inhibitor, NG-monomethyl-L-arginine (L-NMMA), by inhalation (490 mg) in a double-blind randomized manner in nine normal and six asthmatic subjects. Because exhaled NO may arise from an inducible isoform of NO synthase that may be inhibited by glucocorticosteroids, we also studied the effects of oral prednisolone (30 mg orally for 3 d) in seven normal and six asthmatic subjects in a separate double-blind crossover study with matched placebo. After nebulized L-NMMA, there was a significant fall in peak exhaled NO compared with saline control values, with a mean fall of 43.6 +/- 5.6% in normal subjects (p < 0.01) and of 39.7 +/- 6.5% (p < 0.01) in asthmatic subjects, which persisted for 4 h. There were no effects of L-NMMA inhalation on heart rate, blood pressure, or FEV1 in either normal or asthmatic patients. Administration of oral prednisolone (30 mg) resulted in a fall in exhaled NO concentrations in asthmatic subjects by 21.6 +/- 5.0% at 48 h (p < 0.01) but no significant change in normal subjects. These data suggest that NOS inhibitors may be safely given in normal and asthmatic patients and that the increased exhaled NO seen in asthmatic patients is likely to be caused by induction of inducible NOS.     

Deposition of thin film SnO2:F onto aluminium foil for use in flexible tandem solar cells

Atmospheric pressure Chemical Vapour Deposition has been used to deposit polycrystalline thin films of SnO₂:F on aluminium foil. This foil is used commercially as a temporary substrate in the production of flexible solar cells. The resulting thin films were characterised and fabricated into a-Si:H/μc-Si:H tandem solar cells. These devices gave promising initial energy conversion efficiencies up to 7.5% and high current densities. Spectral response measurements showed good blue response indicating sufficient transparent conducting oxide/p-interface and excellent current values for the bottom cell as a result of the high quality of the SnO₂:F.     

OptaDOS: A tool for obtaining density of states,core-level and optical spectra from electronic structure codes

We present OptaDOS, a program for calculating core-electron and low-loss electron energy loss spectra (EELS) and optical spectra along with total-, projected- and joint-density of electronic states (DOS) from single-particle eigenenergies and dipole transition coefficients. Energy-loss spectroscopy is an important tool for probing bonding within a material. Interpreting these spectra can be aided by first principles calculations. The spectra are generated from the eigenenergies through integration over the Brillouin zone. An important feature of this code is that this integration is performed using a choice of adaptive or linear extrapolation broadening methods which we show produces higher accuracy spectra than standard fixed-width Gaussian broadening. OptaDOS  may be straightforwardly interfaced to any electronic structure code. OptaDOS  is freely available under the GNU General Public licence from http://www.optados.org.