The transfer of silicon from the gas phase to molten iron in the blast furnace

The mechanism of silicon transfer in a blast furnace has been studied. It is concluded that the contribution of slag-metal reaction to silicon increase in the metal will not be very important because of the slow rate of the reaction and high oxygen potential of slag in a blast furnace. By making use of kinetic and thermodynamic data, it is shown that the reaction of SiO containing gas with liquid iron of high carbon content takes an important role in the silicon transfer in a blast furnace.     

Continuous Processing of Monodispersed Titania Powders

A new continuous precipitation process for monodispersed ceramic powders using a static mixer was developed. Monodispersed TiO₂ powders were prepared continuously with high reproducibility and reliability by controlled hydrolysis of titanium ethoxide. Important steps were uniform and rapid mixing and aging using hydroxypropylcellulose as a dispersant. The concentrations of titanium ethoxide and water suitable to production of monodispersed TiO₂ powders lay within a limited range. A minimum aging period of 10 min was required to obtain monodispersed powders.     

Analysis of 7 Models for the 2-Dissimilar-Unit, Warm Standby, Redundant System

The paper is in 2 parts. In all models the failure rates are constant, but repair rates need not be constant. The method of supplementary variables is used for solving the models. Part I considers the effect of priorities on reliability and availability for 4 basic models; 1) priority in both repair and operation; 2) priority in repair; 3) priority in operation; 4) no priority. Models 1 and 2 treat 2 repair disciplines: a) preemptive-repeat, b) preemptive-resume. We obtain 1) Laplace transforms of availability and reliability and 2) explicit expressions for steady state availability and for mean time to system failure. The effect of priority assignment to maximize steady state availability is discussed. Part II considers the effect of having different repair rates, depending on whether the failure was from standby or from operation. We obtain 1) Laplace transforms of availability and reliability and 2) explicit expressions for mean time to system failure.     

Impact ionisation ratio in In0.73Ga0.27As0.57P0.43

A window structure InGaAsP avalanche photodiode (a.p.d.) has been fabricated by using liquid-phase epitaxy on (111B) InP. Multiplication characteristics show that the impact ionisation rate for electrons is larger than that for holes (?>?). The ionisation ratio ?/? was estimated to be 3?4. A low-noise a.p.d. will be realised by a structure with electron-initiated multiplication.     

FASTBUS Cable Segment Extender Based on TTL

A method to drive a FASTBUS cable segment over long distance is described. The signal level transmitted is converted from standard FASTBUS cable segment signal to a TTL differential output; the scheme increases noise immunity. In addition, the receiver has a wide tolerance of common mode range of +/-15 V. By applying a deskewing mechanism in the extender module, we have achieved more than 1010 transactions of FASTBUS without any error with a cable length of 100 m.     

Automatic motion detection for surveillance

Automatic motion detection features are able to enhance surveillance efficiency and quality. The aim of this research is to recognize and detect motion automatically around a robot's environment in order to equip a mobile robot for a surveillance task. The required information is based on the input obtained from a charge coupled device (CCD) camera mounted on the mobile robot. As the first step toward achieving the goal, it is necessary to have a stationary mobile robot and moving objects. Experiments in a different environment, such as different movements, size of moving objects, and lighting conditions, have also been conducted. The “adjacent pixels comparison” is the proposed method to detect motion in this experiment. The results have verified that the motion detection experiments operate as expected. This work was presented in part at the 11^th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 23–25, 2006     

Influence of natural, electrically neutral lipids on the potentiometric responses of cation-selective polymeric membrane electrodes

Ionophore-free ion exchanger electrodes were found to exhibit quite a high selectivity for the creatininium ion; however, measurements in diluted urine samples revealed large emf drifts. Potentiometric, chromatographic, NMR, and mass spectrometric evidence did not reveal any major cationic interfering agents, and anionic interfering agents cannot trivially explain the consistently positive emf drifts. Ultrafiltration of urine samples showed that the interfering agents have molecular weights below 1000 u. The drifts are apparently caused by electrically neutral lipophilic compounds of low molecular weight that are easily extracted into organic phases. Follow-up experiments showed that p-cresol and cholesterol cause no significant emf responses but that coproporphyrin, phosphatidylserine, taurocholic acid, cholic acid, phosphatidylethanolamine, and octanoic acid cause positive emf drifts of the type that was observed with the urine samples. The extent of the responses and the response time depend not only on the specific compound but also on the cation in the sample solution. These results suggest that the emf drifts are due to extraction of such natural lipids into the organic membrane phase where they interact in an ionophore-like fashion with the analyte and interfering ions. Changes in the potentiometric selectivities after contact with natural lipids support this interpretation. The same effect of natural lipids is also expected for ionophore-based electrodes. Indeed, exposure of a valinomycin-based electrode to a methylene chloride extract of urine resulted in a significant reduction of the Na+ discrimination, increasing log Kpot(K,Na) from -3.9 to -3.1.     

Development of a personified face emotion recognition technique using fitness function

In this article, two subjects, one South East Asian (SEA) and the other Japanese, are considered for face emotion recognition using a genetic algorithm (GA). The parameters relating the face emotions in each case are entirely different. All six universally accepted emotions and one neutral are considered for each subject. Eyes and lips are usually considered as the features for recognizing emotions. This paper has two parts. The first part investigates a set of image processing methods suitable for recognizing face emotion. The acquired images have gone through a few preprocessing methods such as gray-scale, histogram equalization, and filtering. The edge detection has to be sufficiently successful even when the light intensity is uneven. So, to overcome this problem, the histogram-equalized image has been split into two regions of interest (ROI): the eye and lip regions. The two regions have been applied with the same preprocessing methods, but with different threshold values. It was found that the Sobel edge detection method performed very well in segmenting the image. Three feature extraction methods are considered, and their respective performances are compared. The method which is fastest in extracting eye features is adopted. The second part of the paper discusses the way to recognize emotions from eye features alone. Observation of various emotions of the two subjects lead to an unique eye characteristic, that is, the eye exhibits ellipses of different parameters in each emotion. The GA is adopted to optimize the ellipse characteristics of the eye features in each emotion based on an ellipse-based fitness function. This has shown successful emotion classifications, and a comparison is made on the emotions of each subject.