Effect of Annealing on Aluminum Oxide Passivation Layer for Crystalline Silicon Wafer

The surface of silicon was passivated by A1203 and acidify using nitric acid with SiOx as the bi-layer, it was expected that hydrogen bonding reduce interface states and negative field effect which yields maximum passivation. By optimizing the thickness of passivation layer and annealing condition, the minority carrier lifetime of p-type single crystalline Czochralski wafer could be improved from 10 μs to 190 μs. The formation and variation of hillock defect on passivation layer was founded to be affected by the thermal annealing temperature. For the purpose of obtaining high minority carrier lifetime and low hillock defect density simultaneously, using a lower heating and cooling speed in thermal annealing process is suggested.     

Experimental simulation on the integration of solid oxide fuel cell and micro-turbine generation system

Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is characterized in high performance and high temperature exhaust, and it has potential to reach 70% efficiency if combined with gas turbine engine (GT). Because the SOFC is in developing stage, it is too expensive to obtain. This paper proposes a feasibility study by using a burner (Comb A) to simulate the high temperature exhaust gas of SOFC. The second burner (Comb B) is connected downstream of Comb A, and preheated hydrogen is injected to simulate the condition of sequential burner (SeqB). A turbocharger and a water injection system are also integrated in order to simulate the situation of a real SOFC/GT hybrid system. The water injection system is used to simulate the water mist addition at external reformer.     

Power-operated relief valve stuck-open accident and recovery scenarios in the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research integral system test facility

Four scaled small break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) tests simulating the pressurizer power-operated relief valves (PORVs) stuck-open accidents and the recovery actions in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) were performed at the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) integral system test (IIST) facility. The objectives of this study are to verify the effectiveness of emergency operating procedure (EOP) and emergency core cooling system (ECCS) on reactor safety. The break sizes were volumetrically scaled down based on one and all three fully-opened PORVs which is equivalent to 0.23% and 0.69% hot leg flow area of the reference plant. The experimental results indicate that in case of high pressure injection (HPI) system failure, the rapid depressurization of the steam generators is proved to be an effective way in the depressurization of the reactor coolant system and the core cooling. In contrast, if only one HPI charging pump operates normally, which injected half (or minimum) flow rate of normal cooling water, the core cooling can be adequately provided without operating the secondary bleeding during PORV stuck-open transient. This paper also presents the scaling methods for the reduced-height, reduced-pressure (RHRP) IIST facility and the test conditions. The validity of the present scaling methodology is confirmed by the results from previous IIST counterpart tests and comparison of the present results with those of the tests performed at the full-height, full-pressure(FHFP) stuck-open tests.     

Linear-time prediction mode reduction method for intracoding in H.264/AVC

We present a linear-time elimination method to adaptively reduce the nine intraprediction modes in H.264/AVC to two, three, five, or nine modes while preserving a satisfactory reconstructed video quality. Resemblance between prediction modes and appearing frequency for each prediction mode are first determined in an off-line way from the training video sequences. Prediction modes are modeled as vertices and resemblance between two prediction modes as the weight of the connecting edge in a complete graph. Then, find the Hamilton cycle with the minimum sum of weights. When encoding each intrablock, prediction modes corresponding to the adjacent vertices along the Hamilton cycle are examined for similarity. The prediction mode which appears less frequently in a pair of similar prediction modes is declared as redundant and eliminated. When compared with Laroche et al.’s method which aims to reduce the bitrate, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed elimination method can substantially reduce the execution time while preserving the peak signal-to-noise ratio and bitrate performance.     

Thermal stress and thermo-electrochemical analysis of a planar anode-supported solid oxide fuel cell: Effects of anode porosity

A 3D integrated numerical model is constructed to evaluate the thermal-fluid behavior and thermal stress characteristics of a planar anode-supported solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). Effects of anode porosity on performance, temperature gradient and thermal stress are investigated. Using commercial Star-CD software with the es-sofc module, simulations are performed to obtain the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of a fuel cell as a function of the anode porosity and the temperature distribution within the fuel cell under various operating conditions. The temperature field is then imported into the MARC finite element analysis (FEA) program to analyze thermal stresses induced within the cell. The numerical results are found to be in good agreement with the experimental data. It is shown that the maximum principal stress within the positive electrode-electrolyte-negative electrode (PEN) increases at a higher current and a higher temperature gradient. It is recommended that the temperature gradient should be limited to less than 10.6 °C mm⁻¹ to maintain the structural integrity of the PEN.     

Improved universal chroma 4:2:2 subsampling for color filter array video coding in HEVC

Considering one color filter array (CFA) video whose CFA pattern can be any sort of ten well-known CFA patterns, prior to compression in High Efficient Video Coding, this paper presents an improved universal chroma 4:2:2 subsampling method for the CFA video. The proposed subsampling method has clear quality improvement merit because for any \(2\,\times \, 2\) YUV block, we take the influence of the U component and V component when converting them to B/G pixels and R/G pixels, respectively, into account when determining the two subsampled U and V chroma values. To further improve the quality, a luma modification strategy is performed after chroma subsampling. Based on four typical test CFA videos, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed subsampling method outperforms the four related state-of-the-art methods in terms of the objective and subjective quality metrics and the trade-off between the quality and bitrate.     

Joint AGC-Equalization Algorithm and VLSI Architecture for Wirelined Transceiver Designs

Traditional approaches of automatic gain control (AGC) involve estimating the average power or the peak amplitude over an extended time period, which results in high hardware complexity and a long processing time. Moreover, the accuracy of traditional approaches is seriously degraded by noise and intersymbol interference. In this paper, we propose a joint AGC and equalization (Joint AGC-EQ) scheme, in which the AGC circuitry comprises only one-tenth of the area of a traditional AGC. In addition, the total convergence time of the proposed Joint AGC-EQ is only half that of traditional blind equalization. The scheme is already silicon proven for the application of a Fast Ethernet transceiver using Faraday/UMC 0.18-mum cell libraries     

An investigation into the sheltering performance of porous windbreaks under various wind directions

This study performs a series of simulations utilizing the Navier–Stokes equations and the RNG k–ε turbulence model to investigate the efficacy of porous windbreaks in preventing the wind erosion of stockpiles in an open storage yard. The simulations focus specifically on the effects of the fence porosity, the geometric configuration of the wind fence, and the direction of the incident wind. The basic validity of the simulation model is confirmed by performing scale-model wind-tunnel experiments. In general, the results show that the dust control efficiency of the windbreak is fundamentally dependent on the direction of the incident wind. It addition, it is shown that a rectangular wind fence provides a poor sheltering effect for wind incident with an angle of 45°, but is relatively more effective for winds incident in a normal direction. By contrast, an octagonal wind fence yields higher dust control efficiency for oblique incident angles, but is less effective for normally incident winds. Finally, it is shown that the shelter effect can be improved, via the deployment of additional wind fences within the storage yard or at either end of the yard.     

Elastic–plastic modeling of heat-treated bimorph micro-cantilevers

This paper models the residual stress distributions within micro-fabricated bimorph cantilevers of varying thickness. A contact model is introduced to calculate the influence of contact on the residual stress following a heat treatment process. An analytical modeling approach is adopted to characterize bimorph cantilevers composed of thin Au films deposited on thick poly-silicon or silicon-dioxide beams. A thermal elastic–plastic finite element model (FEM) is utilized to calculate the residual stress distribution across the cantilever cross-section and to determine the beam tip deflection following heat treatment. The influences of the beam material and thickness on the residual stress distribution and tip deflections are thoroughly investigated. The numerical results indicate that a larger beam thickness leads to a greater residual stress difference at the interface between the beam and the film. The residual stress established in the poly-silicon cantilever is greater than that induced in the silicon-dioxide cantilever. The results confirm the ability of the developed thermal elastic–plastic finite element contact model to predict the residual stress distributions within micro-fabricated cantilever structures with high accuracy. As such, the proposed model makes a valuable contribution to the development of micro-cantilevers for sensor and actuator applications.