Complex radioelectronic equipment restoration cost optimization

The restoration system considered includes complex radioelectronic equipment, repair body and spares kit. The problem considered is how to optimize the total cost of the repair body and spares kit while maintaining the predetermined reliability of the radioelectronic equipment.     

Internal stress superplasticity in anisotropic polycrystalline zinc and uranium

Internal stress superplasticity is assessed in powder metallurgy and wrought polycrystalline Zn and in polycrystalline α-U. These materials are anisotropic in their thermal expansion coefficients, and, as a result, internal stresses are generated during thermal cycling. A creep model is developed based on the contribution of internal stress to the enhancement and inhibition of normal plastic flow. This creep model, which has no disposable parameters, is shown to describe quantitatively the flow behavior of anisotropic materials under thermal cycling conditions, and correctly predicts the attainment of Newtonian flow characteristics at low stresses. It is predicted that certain polycrystalline ceramics can be made superplastic in tension when thermally cycled under small applied stress.     

Terahertz Switching Focuser Based on Thin Film Vanadium Dioxide Zone Plate

In this paper, we propose a switchable focuser device based on a Fresnel zone plate (FZP) structure for terahertz (THz) applications. Each FZP contains seven rings, etched in thin VO₂ film with the designed focal lengths of 50 and 100 mm for 3.7-THz frequency. Temperature-induced VO₂ phase transition leads to the change in dielectric susceptibility of the material, which allows one to switch on and off the focusing properties of the device. The devices were tested with radiation of 3.1 and 3.7 THz emitted by quantum cascade lasers. Experimental results were compared with numerical simulations. In this article, we compare the FZP based on VO₂ films with different properties and show that a thicker VO₂ film reveals higher focusing efficiency, while a thinner one reveals a higher modulation ratio for the peak intensity at the focal point of FZP. We demonstrate experimentally the near-diffraction-limited size of the beam in the focal point of the device. Switching between two phase states of the VO₂ films results in up to the 38-fold change of intensity in the focal point.     

碳热还原/氮化合成氮化硅工艺中碳化硅生成的分析

碳热还原/氮化合成氮化硅在Si O2∶C=1∶4.5(摩尔比)、1 425~1 475℃、氮气中添加10 vol%氢气气氛、气体流量1 L/min条件下进行。生成物各相通过XRD定性分析。实验结果及热力学分析表明二氧化硅-碳-氮气反应体系中,氮化硅和碳化硅在常用温度区间内的生成趋势差别小;碳化硅成核在较高温度趋势较强,但在整个温度区间与氮化硅成核趋势均较强且差别细微;氮化硅晶体生长反应为控制步骤。在碳热还原/氮化工艺中控制Si3N4和Si C生成的边界温度并不明显,碳化硅的生成不可避免。     

DC‐sputtered ZnO:Al as transparent conductive oxide for silicon heterojunction solar cells with µc‐Si:H emitter

Silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells are highly interesting, because of their high efficiency and low cost fabrication. So far, the most applied transparent conductive oxide (TCO) is indium tin oxide (ITO). The replacement of ITO with cheaper, more abundant and environmental friendly material with texturing capability is a promising way to reduce the production cost of the future SHJ solar cells. Here, we report on the fabrication of the SHJ solar cells with direct current‐sputtered aluminum‐doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) as an alternative TCO. Furthermore, we address several important differences between ITO and the ZnO:Al layers including a high Schottky barrier at the emitter/ZnO:Al interface and a high intrinsic resistivity of the ZnO:Al layers. To overcome the high Schottky barrier, we suggest employing micro‐crystalline silicon (µc‐Si:H) emitter, which also improves temperature threshold and passivation of the solar cell precursor. In addition, we report on the extensive studies of the effect of the ZnO:Al deposition parameters including layer thickness, oxygen flow, power density and temperature on the electrical properties of the fabricated SHJ solar cells. Finally, the results of our study indicate that the ZnO:Al deposition parameters significantly affect the electrical properties of the obtained solar cell. By understanding and fine‐tuning all these parameters, a high conversion efficiency of 19.2% on flat wafer (small area (5 × 5 mm²) and without any front metal grid) is achieved. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Image segmentation using active contours driven by the Bhattacharyya gradient flow.

This paper addresses the problem of image segmentation by means of active contours, whose evolution is driven by the gradient flow derived from an energy functional that is based on the Bhattacharyya distance. In particular, given the values of a photometric variable (or of a set thereof), which is to be used for classifying the image pixels, the active contours are designed to converge to the shape that results in maximal discrepancy between the empirical distributions of the photometric variable inside and outside of the contours. The above discrepancy is measured by means of the Bhattacharyya distance that proves to be an extremely useful tool for solving the problem at hand. The proposed methodology can be viewed as a generalization of the segmentation methods, in which active contours maximize the difference between a finite number of empirical moments of the "inside" and "outside" distributions. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed methodology is very versatile and flexible in the sense that it allows one to easily accommodate a diversity of the image features based on which the segmentation should be performed. As an additional contribution, a method for automatically adjusting the smoothness properties of the empirical distributions is proposed. Such a procedure is crucial in situations when the number of data samples (supporting a certain segmentation class) varies considerably in the course of the evolution of the active contour. In this case, the smoothness properties of the empirical distributions have to be properly adjusted to avoid either over- or underestimation artifacts. Finally, a number of relevant segmentation results are demonstrated and some further research directions are discussed.     

Blind deconvolution of medical ultrasound images: a parametric inverse filtering approach.

The problem of reconstruction of ultrasound images by means of blind deconvolution has long been recognized as one of the central problems in medical ultrasound imaging. In this paper, this problem is addressed via proposing a blind deconvolution method which is innovative in several ways. In particular, the method is based on parametric inverse filtering, whose parameters are optimized using two-stage processing. At the first stage, some partial information on the point spread function is recovered. Subsequently, this information is used to explicitly constrain the spectral shape of the inverse filter. From this perspective, the proposed methodology can be viewed as a "hybridization" of two standard strategies in blind deconvolution, which are based on either concurrent or successive estimation of the point spread function and the image of interest. Moreover, evidence is provided that the "hybrid" approach can outperform the standard ones in a number of important practical cases. Additionally, the present study introduces a different approach to parameterizing the inverse filter. Specifically, we propose to model the inverse transfer function as a member of a principal shift-invariant subspace. It is shown that such a parameterization results in considerably more stable reconstructions as compared to standard parameterization methods. Finally, it is shown how the inverse filters designed in this way can be used to deconvolve the images in a nonblind manner so as to further improve their quality. The usefulness and practicability of all the introduced innovations are proven in a series of both in silico and in vivo experiments. Finally, it is shown that the proposed deconvolutioh algorithms are capable of improving the resolution of ultrasound images by factors of 2.24 or 6.52 (as judged by the autocorrelation criterion) depending on the type of regularization method used.     

Internal structure visualization and lithographic use of periodic toroidal holes in liquid crystals

The formation of a large-area ordered structure by organic molecular soft building blocks is one of the most exciting interdisciplinary research areas in current materials science and nanotechnology. So far, several distinct organic building blocks--including colloids, block copolymers and surfactants--have been examined as potential materials for the creation of lithographic templates. Here, we report that perfect ordered arrays of toric focal conic domains (TFCDs) covering large areas can be formed by semi-fluorinated smectic liquid crystals. Combined with controlled geometry, that is, a microchannel, our smectic liquid-crystal system exhibits a high density of TFCDs that are arranged with remarkably high regularity. Direct visualization of the internal structure of the TFCDs clearly verified that the smectic layers were aligned normal to the side walls and parallel to the top surface, and merge with the circular profile on the bottom wall surface. Moreover, we demonstrate a new concept: smectic liquid-crystal lithography. Grown in microchannels from a mixture of liquid-crystal molecules and fluorescent particles, TFCDs of the smectic liquid crystals acted as a template, trapping particles in an ordered array. Our findings pose new theoretical challenges and potentially enable lithographic applications based on smectic liquid-crystalline materials.     

Piezoelectric gate for a two-dimensional electron system transport in LiNbO3-GaAs/AlGaAs sandwich structures

Standing-wave piezoelectric fields in the LiNbO(3) driving plate are used to form depleted and accumulated electron densities in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells (QWs). The photoluminescence spectrum of the two-dimensional electron system varies both spatially and temporally, exhibiting an electron-hole plasma recombination and exciton and trion emissions at large and small electron densities, respectively. Controlling the piezoelectric field component perpendicular to the QW layers offers a versatile tool to achieve the spatially indirect exciton luminescence in double QW structures.