High-pressure behavior and tribological properties of wind turbine gear oil

Different types of synthetic polyalphaolefin (PAO) oils and a mineral oil are considered in this study. High-pressure viscosity test was done and pressure-viscosity coefficient was measured for all sample oils. Results showed the better performance of PAO oils than the mineral oil. Authors also tested some other tribological properties such as low-temperature behavior, bulk property, frictional coefficient, and wear behavior, which are important for wind turbine gear oil. Low-temperature behavior and frictional property of PAO oils exhibited the better results. Study also showed that the prediction of low-temperature fluidity is possible using the sound velocity in the oil. Finally, the presence of polymethakrylate (PMA) absorbent in PAO oil exposed comparatively better results among all PAO oils.     

Wavefield characterization of nearly diffraction-limited focused hard x-ray beam with size less than 10 nm

In situ wavefront compensation is a promising method to realize a focus size of only a few nanometers for x-ray beams. However, precise compensation requires evaluation of the wavefront with an accuracy much shorter than the wavelength. Here, we characterized a one-dimensionally focused beam with a width of 7 nm at 20 keV using a multilayer mirror. We demonstrate that the wavefront can be determined precisely from multiple intensity profiles measured around the beamwaist. We compare the phase profiles recovered from intensity profiles measured under the same mirror condition but with three different aperture sizes and find that the accuracy of phase retrieval is as small as λ∕12.     

Compensation for position‐dependent mechanical resonances in head‐positioning control of hard disk drives

We propose a compensation method for position‐dependent mechanical resonances in head‐positioning control system of hard disk drives (HDDs). To realize high‐accuracy head‐positioning control, it is important to compensate for the mechanical resonances in the head‐positioning control system. The some mechanical resonance characteristics depend on the magnetic head's location. In conventional design method, a notch filter must be designed to compensate for the mechanical resonances at any magnetic head location. The disadvantage is that phase lag caused by the notch filter worsens the stability of the head‐positioning control system. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose a magnetic head‐position‐dependent notch filter to compensate for the position‐dependent mechanical resonances in the head‐positioning control system. The simulation results in HDD benchmark model show that the proposed method can decrease the phase lag caused by the notch filter. That is, the proposed method can improve the stability compared to the conventional method. © 2015 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Phototransparency and water vapor sorption properties of ABA‐type triblock copolymers derived from 6FDA‐TeMPD and poly(2‐methyl‐2‐adamantylmethacrylate)

The phototransparency and water vapor sorption properties of ABA‐type triblock copolymer membranes derived from 4,4‐(hexafluoroisopropylidene) diphthalic anhydride‐2,3,5,6‐tetramethyl‐1,4‐phenylenediamine (PI) and poly(2‐methyl‐2‐adamantylmethacrylate) (PMAdMA) were investigated, with focus on the effect of the adamantane component. The phototransparency of PMAdMA‐block‐PI‐block‐PMAdMA [Block(PI/PMAdMA)] was about 10–20% higher than that of poly(methyl methacrylate)‐block‐PI‐block‐Poly(methylmethacrylate) [Block(PI/PMMA)] because the high symmetric structure of adamantane inhibited photoabsorbance. The water vapor solubility of Block(PI/PMAdMA) decreased with increased PMAdMA because the PMAdMA had a hydrophobic property. Interestingly, in all relative‐pressure regions, Block(PI/PMAdMA) with the least PMAdMA content showed a higher solubility coefficient than PI because the high mobility of PMAdMA in Block(PI/PMAdMA) resulted in additional sorption sites in the PI segment. A comparison of Block(PI/PMAdMA) with Block(PI/PMMA) in terms of relative pressure at the beginning of clustering further revealed that cluster formation in Block(PI/PMAdMA) was inhibited compared with Block(PI/PMMA) because bulky structure of adamantane restricted the mobility of the polymer main chain. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2016 , 133, 43795.     

High-Gain Digital Speech Interpolation with Adaptive Differential PCM Encoding

This paper describes a digital speech interpolationadaptive differential PCM bit reduction technique in which digital speech interpolation (DSI) is combined with ADPCM encoding. A highly sensitive speech detector, a voiceband data discriminator, and a variable rate ADPCM encoding are used to achieve a high compression ratio. The speech detector proposed in [1] detects speech signals above -51 dBm with 32 ms hangover time; average talk spurt activity of 36 percent was measured on fully loaded trunks in an international satellite link. Features of the speech power spectrum are used for adaptively controlling the bit length from 2 to 4 in an ADPCM speech encoder. Voiceband data are detected with 10 ms by the voiceband data discriminator. 5 bit ADPCM encoding is applied to voiceband data to maintain transparency through the DSI-ADPCM system. A DSI gain of 3 is expected as a result of the highly sensitive speech detection, the variable rate encoding technique, and the voiceband data discrimination. Speech and voiceband data are efficiently transmitted through an ADPCM encoding with either a 6 or 6.4 kHz sampling rate converted from an 8 kHz sampling rate. To avoid a band limitation as much as possible, a frequency shift manipulation on the voiceband channel is incorporated prior to the sampling conversion. Consequently, a total bit reduction gain of 7 to 4 is expected relative to a 64 kbit/s PCM transmission. Satisfactorily high quality of the processed speech has been obtained through computer simulations.     

Electrification of polymer surface caused by sliding ultrapurewater

It has been thought that the conductivity of pure water is high enough to neglect the streaming electrification. However, with the recent advancement of semiconductor industries, ultrapure water appeared to cause electrification problems at the washing and the rinsing processes of semiconductor wafers. The investigation on the electrification phenomenon of polymer (PTFE) surface with ultrapure water is described in this article. Water droplets are always charged positively after sliding on the PTFE surface, and the surface potential on PTFE is mostly negative and varies along the droplet path becoming positive downstream. As the conductivity of water becomes closer to that of ideal water, the amount of droplet charge increases drastically. This electrification phenomenon is also enhanced by decreasing the thickness of the PTFE plate. It suggests that the Coulombic force between the charge on the PTFE surface and the mirror image charge is an important factor. We have proposed a model which is based on the electric double layer similar to conventional streaming electrification for insulating liquid, assuming that the charged droplet leaves the excess positive charge on the polymer surface     

Optimal energy consuming planning for a home‑based microgrid with mobility constraint of electric vehicles and tractors

This research deals with the energy management problem to minimize the cost of non-renewable energy for a small-scale microgrid with electric vehicles (EV) and electric tractors (ET). The EVs and ETs function as batteries in the power system, while they often have to leave it for their mobility and agricultural work. Each State of Charge (SoC), which is the charge rate of the battery from 0 to 1, and the operating time of ETs are optimized under the assumption that the required electrical energy, the arrival and departure time of EVs, and the working time of ETs are given by users, but they include uncertainties. In this paper, we deal with these uncertainties by constraints for robust energy planning and expected optimization based on scenarios, and show that the scheduling of the SoC assuming the worst case and the optimal home-based power consumption planning that considers the cost of each scenario corresponding to each variation can be obtained. Our proposed method is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP), and numerical simulations show that the optimal cooperative operation among multiple houses can be obtained and its global optimal or sub-optimal solution can be quickly obtained by using CPLEX.     

Active matrix QD‐LED with top emission structure by UV lithography for RGB patterning

We have developed full colour top emitting quantum dot light‐emitting diode (QD‐LED) display driven by a 176‐ppi active matrix of metal oxide thin‐film transistors. Red, green and blue (RGB) QD‐LED subpixel emission layers are patterned by our original UV photolithography process and materials. We also demonstrate the potential to achieve high resolution such as 528 ppi using this process.