Picosecond photodiffraction in semiconductor multiquantum wells and microcavities

We study the transient gratings photogenerated in the picosecond regime in three families of structures, namely : - structures of thickness in the order of one micron, including quantum wells (GaAs/GaAlAs, CdTe/ CdZnTe). A transmission modulation due to the electric field has been observed. We show that, in accordance with our calculations, this modulation is screened faster than 10 ps at a fluence of a few µJ/cm2. - A structure including GalnAs/GalnAsP MQWS in a cavity. This structure shows a top diffraction efficiency of 2.5 × 10-² at 1.55 µm for an energy of excitation in the order of 100 µJ/cm2. The diffraction efficiency exhibits several oscillations due to Fabry-Pårot effects. By introducing cavity effects in our model, we show that the diffraction efficiency is amplified by more than a factor 2 with respect to the no-cavity case. Calculations show that the diffraction efficiency may reach 6 × 10-² around 1.625 µm, for a front mirror reflectivity of 90 %. - Structures including bulk GaAs microcavities. The risetime is lower or in the order of 1 ps while the diffraction efficiency attains 1 %, with an average power of 4 mW (i.e. an energy of 2 µJ/cm²/pulse), compatible with a commutation of packets at 80 MHz.     

Analysis of Interconnected Oscillators by Dissipativity Theory

This paper employs dissipativity theory for the global analysis of limit cycles in particular dynamical systems of possibly high dimension. Oscillators are regarded as open systems that satisfy a particular dissipation inequality. It is shown that this characterization has implications for the global stability analysis of limit cycle oscillations: i) in isolated oscillators, ii) in interconnections of oscillators, and iii) for the global synchrony analysis in interconnections of identical oscillators     

Catalytic hydrogenation of nitrile rubber using palladium and ruthenium complexes

The catalytic hydrogenation of acrylonitrile‐butadiene copolymer (nitrile rubber, NBR) using Pd(OAc)₂ or RuCl₂(PPh₃)₃ catalysts has been investigated in order to produce a totally saturated nitrile rubber. The hydrogenation of NBR is effective with both catalysts and achieved total conversion under the appropriate reaction conditions. In the case of palladium the effects of reaction parameters such as reaction temperature, pressure, time, catalyst concentration, and NBR concentration have been investigated. Even though both ruthenium‐ and palladium‐based catalysts are effective in the production of HNBR, the former requires harsh reaction conditions and has the drawback of gel formation under high conversion, motivating the migration to RuCl₂ (PPh₃)₃ as an alternative catalyst. The degree of hydrogenation was determined by IR and NMR spectroscopy. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2007     

Stabilization of symmetric formations to motion around convex loops

We provide a cooperative control algorithm to stabilize symmetric formations to motion around closed curves suitable for mobile sensor networks. This work extends previous results for stabilization of symmetric circular formations. We study a planar particle model with decentralized steering control subject to limited communication. Because of their unique spectral properties, the Laplacian matrices of circulant graphs play a key role. We illustrate the result for a skewed superellipse, which is a type of curve that includes circles, ellipses, and rounded parallelograms.     

Building common ground in global teamwork through re-representation

We explore in this paper the relation between activities, communication channels and media, and common ground building in global teams. We define re-representation as a sequence of representations of the same concept using different communication channels and media. We identified the re-representation technique to build common ground that is used by team members during multimodal and multimedia communicative events in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed settings. Our hypotheses are as follows: (1) Significant sources of information behind decisions and request for actions are embedded within the fabric of communicative events in which participants use both informal and formal media to express their ideas. Capturing these information sources can facilitate common ground building and accelerate the execution of action requests. (2) Re-representations of concepts, i.e., sequences of representations using diverse media and communication channels, mediate and accelerate common ground building. (3) The use of intra- or interdisciplinary re-representations correlates with high team performance, i.e., effective team process and high product quality. We used AEC Global Teamwork course offered in 2008–2009 as the testbed for our study to validate our hypothesis.     

Retrieval of microphysical and optical properties in aerosol plumes with hyperspectral imagery: L-APOM method

This paper presents the retrieval method L-APOM which aims at characterizing the microphysical and optical properties of aerosol plumes from hyperspectral images with high spatial resolution. The inversion process is divided into three steps: estimation of the ground reflectance below the plume, characterization of the standard atmosphere (gases and background aerosols) and estimation of the plume aerosols properties. As using spectral information only is not sufficient to insure uniqueness of solutions, original constraints are added by assuming slow spatial variations of particles properties within the plume. The whole inversion process is validated on a large set of simulated images and reveals to remain accurate even in the worst cases of noise: relative estimation errors of aerosol properties remain between 10% and 20% in most cases. L-APOM is applied on a real AVIRIS hyperspectral image of a biomass burning plume for which in situ measurements are available. Retrieved properties appear globally consistent with measurements.     

Performance-friendly rule extraction in large water data-sets with AOC posets and relational concept analysis

In this paper, we consider data analysis methods for knowledge extraction from large water data-sets. More specifically, we try to connect physico-chemical parameters and the characteristics of taxons living in sample sites. Among these data analysis methods, we consider formal concept analysis (FCA), which is a recognized tool for classification and rule discovery on object–attribute data. Relational concept analysis (RCA) relies on FCA and deals with sets of object–attribute data provided with relations. RCA produces more informative results but at the expense of an increase in complexity. Besides, in numerous applications of FCA, the partially ordered set of concepts introducing attributes or objects (AOC poset, for Attribute–Object–Concept poset) is used rather than the concept lattice in order to reduce combinatorial problems. AOC posets are much smaller and easier to compute than concept lattices and still contain the information needed to rebuild the initial data. This paper introduces a variant of the RCA process based on AOC posets rather than concept lattices. This approach is compared with RCA based on iceberg lattices. Experiments are performed with various scaling operators, and a specific operator is introduced to deal with noisy data. We show that using AOC poset on water data-sets provides a reasonable concept number and allows us to extract meaningful implication rules (association rules whose confidence is 1), whose semantics depends on the chosen scaling operator.     

An internal model principle is necessary and sufficient for linear output synchronization

Output synchronization of a network of heterogeneous linear state–space models under time-varying and directed interconnection structures is investigated. It is shown that, assuming stabilizability and detectability of the individual systems and imposing very mild connectedness assumptions on the interconnection structure, an internal model requirement is necessary and sufficient for synchronizability of the network to polynomially bounded trajectories. The resulting dynamic feedback couplings can be interpreted as a generalization of existing methods for identical linear systems.     

A Coupled Model Between Robot Trajectories and Thermal History of the Workpiece During Thermal Spray Operation

Offline robot trajectory generation is now often used for thermal spray applications, especially for complex design parts, requiring enhanced trajectories. This technique allows decreasing the downtime of the thermal spray cell and insures the generation of optimized trajectories. Heat transfers caused by thermal spray increase the workpiece temperature during the coating application. This temperature acts directly on the resulting thermal stresses after cooling of the part down to the ambient temperature. In this study, a coupling was developed between the robot trajectory and computation of the thermal history of the workpiece during the spray operation. The method is based on the storage of the real robot trajectory (i.e., accurate in time) in a text file, and reading of this file with a C programming performed with ANSYS/FLUENT commercial code which allows computing the displacement of the thermal sources according to the trajectory and solving the transient heat conservation equation during the torch displacement. The contributions of the impinging plasma jet and the molten particle jet are taken into account in the model.