Gas permeation property of polyaniline films

We examined the influence of polyaniline (PAn)'s unit sequence and doping with low molecular weight dopants or polymer dopants on permeation property. It was found that CO₂ permeability was increased by the formation of a quinonediimine unit in PAn with the oxidation. CO₂ sorption amount of PAn was decreased by oxidation. The increase of CO₂ permeability with oxidation, therefore, resulted from the increase of diffusivity, which was attributable to morphological variation by the increase of a quinonediimine unit. The permselectivity of PAn films was found to be remarkably improved by doping. In particular, the selectivity value of the PAn film doped with polyvinyl sulphonic acid as a polymer dopant went up to over 2,000. This remarkable increase of selectivity was found to result in the increase of selectivity, depending on diffusivity. It was also found that the permselectivity of the PAn film doped by polymer dopants was surpassed, as compared with that doped by low molecular dopants. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Texture,sensory and swallowing characteristics of high-pressure-heat-treated pork meat gel as a dysphagia diet

To develop a soft meat product for a dysphagia diet, high-pressure technology was applied. Pressure-heat-treated ground pork meat (PH) was prepared from ground pork mixed with water (ground meat: water, 1:0.5 or 1:1) and salt (1.5%). PH-gels were made from these meat homogenates by treatment at 400 MPa for 20 min, followed by heat treatment. Heat-treated pork meat homogenates (H) were also prepared. The hardness and adhesiveness of the 1:1PH-gel was lower than those of the 1:1H-gel. The PH-gel scored higher in sensory evaluations of elasticity, smoothness and ease of swallowing. Scanning electron micrographs indicated that the superior textural property of the 1:1PH-gel was caused by a network of myosin filaments. Videofluoroscopic examination of swallowing revealed that the 1:1PH-gel was easy to swallow and left little residue in the oropharynx. These results proved the utility of pressurization in creating a dysphagia meat diet.     

Intra-body data transmission for the personal area network

Intra-body communication is a wireless means of exchanging information within a personal area network (PAN) between wearable electronic sensors and devices. The feasibility of intra-body communication is confirmed through several experiments on signal propagation within the human body, and a human phantom is designed and used to obtain reproducible results over repeated experiments. Based on the results of these experiments, a prototype transmission system is constructed using aluminum electrodes powered by 3 V DC and operating in the 10.7 MHz frequency modulation (FM) band. This prototype is demonstrated to be capable of transmitting analog signals through the human subjects in the presence of external noise. Digital data transmission at 9600 bps is also achieved using newly fabricated 10.7 MHz frequency shift keying (FSK) transmitter and receiver devices. The carrier frequency of 10.7 MHz is the intermediate frequency of FM radio receivers, meaning that the proposed system can make use of a wide selection of inexpensive, commercial radio frequency devices.     

Source-to-drain nonuniformly doped channel (NUDC) MOSFET structuresfor high current drivability and threshold voltage controllability

The source-to-drain nonuniformly doped channel (NUDC) MOSFET has been investigated to improve the aggravation of the V_th lowering characteristics and to prevent the degradation of the current drivability. The basic concept is to change the impurity ions to control the threshold voltage, which are doped uniformly along the channel in the conventional channel MOSFET, to a nonuniform profile of concentration. The MOSFET was fabricated by using the oblique rotating ion implantation technique. As a result, the V_th lowering at 0.4-μm gate length of the NUDC MOSFET is drastically suppressed both in the linear region and in the saturation region as compared with that of the conventional channel MOSFET. Also, the maximum carrier mobility at 0.4-μm gate length is improved by about 20.0%. Furthermore, the drain current is increased by about 20.0% at 0.4-μm gate length     

Quantum Coin Method for Numerical Integration

Light transport simulation in rendering is formulated as a numerical integration problem in each pixel, which is commonly estimated by Monte Carlo integration. Monte Carlo integration approximates an integral of a black-box function by taking the average of many evaluations (i.e. samples) of the function (integrand). For N queries of the integrand, Monte Carlo integration achieves the estimation error of . Recently, Johnston [Joh16] introduced quantum super-sampling (QSS) into rendering as a numerical integration method that can run on quantum computers. QSS breaks the fundamental limitation of the convergence rate of Monte Carlo integration and achieves the faster convergence rate of approximately which is the best possible bound of any quantum algorithms we know today [NW99]. We introduce yet another quantum numerical integration algorithm, quantum coin (QCoin) [AW99], and provide numerical experiments that are unprecedented in the fields of both quantum computing and rendering. We show that QCoin's convergence rate is equivalent to QSS's. We additionally show that QCoin is fundamentally more robust under the presence of noise in actual quantum computers due to its simpler quantum circuit and the use of fewer qubits. Considering various aspects of quantum computers, we discuss how QCoin can be a more practical alternative to QSS if we were to run light transport simulation in quantum computers in the future.     

Scalable Virtual Ray Lights Rendering for Participating Media

Virtual ray lights (VRL) are a powerful representation for multiple‐scattered light transport in volumetric participating media. While efficient Monte Carlo estimators can importance sample the contribution of a VRL along an entire sensor subpath, render time still scales linearly in the number of VRLs. We present a new scalable hierarchial VRL method that preferentially samples VRLs according to their image contribution. Similar to Lightcuts‐based approaches, we derive a tight upper bound on the potential contribution of a VRL that is efficient to compute. Our bound takes into account the sampling probability densities used when estimating VRL contribution. Ours is the first such upper bound formulation, leading to an efficient and scalable rendering technique with only a few intuitive user parameters. We benchmark our approach in scenes with many VRLs, demonstrating improved scalability compared to existing state‐of‐the‐art techniques.     

Stratified Markov Chain Monte Carlo Light Transport

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is a powerful approach to generate samples from an arbitrary distribution. The application to light transport simulation allows us to efficiently handle complex light transport such as highly occluded scenes. Since light transport paths in MCMC methods are sampled according to the path contributions over the sampling domain covering the whole image, bright pixels receive more samples than dark pixels to represent differences in the brightness. This variation in the number of samples per pixel is a fundamental property of MCMC methods. This property often leads to uneven convergence over the image, which is a notorious and fundamental issue of any MCMC method to date. We present a novel stratification method of MCMC light transport methods. Our stratification method, for the first time, breaks the fundamental limitation that the number of samples per pixel is uncontrollable. Our method guarantees that every pixel receives a specified number of samples by running a single Markov chain per pixel. We rely on the fact that different MCMC processes should converge to the same result when the sampling domain and the integrand are the same. We thus subdivide an image into multiple overlapping tiles associated with each pixel, run an independent MCMC process in each of them, and then align all of the tiles such that overlapping regions match. This can be formulated as an optimization problem similar to the reconstruction step for gradient-domain rendering. Further, our method can exploit the coherency of integrands among neighboring pixels via coherent Markov chains and replica exchange. Images rendered with our method exhibit much more predictable convergence compared to existing MCMC methods.     

A Survey on Gradient‐Domain Rendering

Monte Carlo methods for physically‐based light transport simulation are broadly adopted in the feature film production, animation and visual effects industries. These methods, however, often result in noisy images and have slow convergence. As such, improving the convergence of Monte Carlo rendering remains an important open problem. Gradient‐domain light transport is a recent family of techniques that can accelerate Monte Carlo rendering by up to an order of magnitude, leveraging a gradient‐based estimation and a reformulation of the rendering problem as an image reconstruction. This state of the art report comprehensively frames the fundamentals of gradient‐domain rendering, as well as the pragmatic details behind practical gradient‐domain uniand bidirectional path tracing and photon density estimation algorithms. Moreover, we discuss the various image reconstruction schemes that are crucial to accurate and stable gradient‐domain rendering. Finally, we benchmark various gradient‐domain techniques against the state‐of‐the‐art in denoising methods before discussing open problems.     

NOx Storage-Reduction Three-Way Catalyst with Improved Sulfur Tolerance

The NO _x storage-reduction catalyst (NSR catalyst) is poisoned by SO₂ caused by fuel sulfur, thus its activity is reduced. In order to improve the NSR catalyst, the sulfur poisoning phenomenon has been analyzed. Based on this result, we developed TiO₂ and Rh/ZrO₂ to promote the sulfur desorption. The developed catalyst has made remarkable progress in its sulfur tolerance, about 50% improvement in NO _x purification performance compared with the conventional one.     

Enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen production from aqueous methanol solution using ZnO with simultaneous photodeposition of Cu

The enhanced photocatalytic hydrogen production from aqueous methanol solution using ZnO was investigated with aid of simultaneous metal deposition. The simultaneous deposition for such metals as Ag, Au, Cu, Ni, Pd, Pt, and Rh was evaluated for the H₂ production from aqueous methanol solution. As a result, the addition of Cu ion was effective improvement in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. The photocatalytic hydrogen production using ZnO photocatalyst with aid of simultaneous deposition of Cu was approximately 130 times better than those obtained with bare ZnO. The Cu-deposited ZnO had the response to the visible light for the hydrogen formation. After the photocatalytic hydrogen production, the in-situ Cu-photodeposited ZnO sample was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), UV–visible diffuse reflectance spectrometry (UV-DRS), and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy.