Measurement of internal stresses in coatings using time resolved fluorescence

This paper describes a new nondestructive technique for detecting internal stresses in coatings using time resolved fluorescence. The measurement principle is based upon an experimental result that the decay time of fluorescence from poly(3-octylthiophene), P3OT, dispersed in uniaxially-stretched polymer films decreases with increasing tensile stress acting on the films. Internal stresses in the clear coat and in the base coat of a multilayer structure, which was composed of electrodeposited coat, surface coat, base coat, and clear coat, were estimated from the decay time of fluorescence from P3OT in both coats. The order of internal stresses in the clear coat and base coat of the multilayer system was 1 MPa. When the coatings were piled up, the internal stress decreased as the distance from a metal substrate was increased. It was found that moisture and temperature influenced internal stresses in the clear coat rather than in the base coat. Internal stress in the clear coat, which was one layer coated on a metal substrate, was measured by the traditional bimetallic method or by the time resolved fluorescence technique. Comparing both methods, it was concluded that the time resolved fluorescence technique gave reliable values for internal stresses in coatings.     

Measurement of residual stresses in injection‐molded polymer parts by time‐resolved fluorescence

Time‐resolved fluorescence properties of 9‐methylanthracene (9MAn) dispersed in film of polyvinylchloride (PVC) containing carbon black were studied under tensile loadings. The fluorescence lifetime of 9MAn decreased from 5.70 to 5.55 ns, whereas the stresses acting on the films increased from 0 to 3 MPa. The change in fluorescence lifetimes of 9MAn during the stress relaxation process showed that the fluorescence lifetimes were correlated with the stresses, not with the strains. The results suggest that 9MAn is a useful probe for monitoring stresses acting on the matrix. With the use of the fluorescence properties of 9MAn, the residual tensile stresses on the skin‐layer of PVC injection‐molded test pieces were estimated. The estimated residual stresses were about ～ 1 MPa. The residual stresses were relaxed to 0 MPa with annealing at 100°C. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 83: 2600–2603, 2002     

Bending of ionic polymer gel caused by swelling under sinusoidally varying electric fields

Deformation of poly(vinyl alcohol)–poly(sodium acrylate) composite hydrogel (PVA–PAA gel) under sinusoidally varying electric fields was studied in electrolyte solutions. The PVA–PAA gel was prepared by repeatedly freezing and thawing a mixed solution of PVA and polyacrylic acid. A cyclic bending–straightening motion of the PVA–PAA gel rods of about 1 mm in diameter have been observed in Na₂CO₃ aqueous solutions under the fields. The PVA–PAA gel had a response time of less than several hundreds milliseconds. The bending has also been observed in organic solvents containing an electrolyte when the organic solvent is electrolyzed. It was found that the motion of the gel under electric fields of less than 1 Hz occurred mainly through swelling due to the change of the osmotic pressure based upon the difference of the ion concentration. However, it has not been determined whether the motion at higher frequencies is caused by the osmotic effect. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Catalyst Design of Pt-Modified Ni/Al2O3 Catalyst with Flat Temperature Profile in Methane Reforming with CO2 and O2

Pt(0.3)/Ni(10)/Al₂O₃, prepared by a sequential impregnation method, exhibited a more excellent performance in methane reforming with CO₂ and O₂ in terms of the catalytic activity and the temperature profile of the catalyst bed than Pt(0.3) + Ni(10)/Al₂O₃ prepared by a coimpregnation method, Ni(10)/Al₂O₃, Pt(0.3)/Al₂O₃, and Pt(10)/Al₂O₃. It is thought that this is because the surface Pt atoms on Ni catalyst can contribute to the enhancement of the catalyst reducibility.     

Development of fault cause estimation method for distribution line

We are planning to develop the new Advanced Distribution Automation System (ADAS) equipped with optical communication network and sectionalizer with sensor for more grid reliability and efficiency on maintenance operation. The new system is featured with the function of fault cause or damaged part estimation. The new sectionalizer captures the waveform of electrical line surge originated by fault and the system analyzes the waveform for this function. This paper mainly introduces the system configuration of ADAS and an early stage examination of fault cause estimation technology.     

Development of an epileptic seizure prediction algorithm using R–R intervals with self-attentive autoencoder

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that may affect the autonomic nervous system (ANS) from 15 to 20 min before seizure onset, and disturbances of ANS affect R–R intervals (RRI) on an electrocardiogram (ECG). This study aims to develop a machine learning algorithm for predicting focal epileptic seizures by monitoring R–R interval (RRI) data in real time. The developed algorithm adopts a self-attentive autoencoder (SA-AE), which is a neural network for time-series data. The results of applying the developed seizure prediction algorithm to clinical data demonstrated that it functioned well in most patients; however, false positives (FPs) occurred in specific participants. In a future work, we will investigate the causes of FPs and optimize the developing seizure prediction algorithm to further improve performance using newly added clinical data.

     

Time‐averaged spatial profile of Xe excitation efficiency in PDPs

Abstract— The Xe excitation efficiency for various Xe content was analyzed by monitoring the panel luminance and IR emission intensity. It was found that dependences of the Xe excitation efficiency and luminous efficacy on the sustain voltage show almost the same tendency. A decrease for increasing sustaining voltage was found in a low‐Xe‐content panel and an increase was found in a high‐Xe‐content panel. A reduction in the effective electron temperature and a reduction in plasma saturation contribute to the efficacy improvement. The time‐averaged spatial profile of the Xe excitation efficiency in PDPs was investigated by measuring the distribution of IR and blue‐phosphor emissions. The results show that the Xe excitation efficiency is similar in the cathode and anode regions even though the spatial and time development of the discharge in these regions is very different. An extended theory that takes into account not only the radiative transition process but also the collisional de‐excitation process from Xe** to Xe* is proposed for investigating the pressure dependence of the Xe excitation efficiency. By using the proposed theory, it was found that Xe excitation efficiency increases, attains a maximum value at 30% Xe, then decreases as the Xe content is increased, when the rate coefficient of the collisional de‐excitation process is less than 1.0 × 10^?10 cm³/sec.     

Power savings and enhancement of gray‐scale capability of LCD TVs with an adaptive dimming technique

Abstract— The luminance of a backlight unit for an LCD TV is adaptively and locally dimmed along with the input video signal in order to reduce the power consumption and also to improve the picture quality. By adopting the zero‐dimensional (0D), 1D, and 2D adaptive dimming techniques, a sample movie having 8.0% post‐gamma average picture levels (APL) could be displayed using 83%, 71%, and 50% of the original backlight power, respectively. For an adoption of the 2D dimming, an LED backlight is preferable. The adaptive‐dimming technique also allows the differential aging characteristics between the LED components and temperature dependence of color and luminance to be overcome. From simulations of a reduction in power consumption, it was found that 40 × 40 pixels is a unit of the local dimming, 30 frames for the sampling period, 24 dimming steps, and an equal‐signal‐step method for determining the dimming factor have been found to be appropriate. The gray‐scale capability of low‐luminance images can also be improved by dimming the backlight luminance and expanding the input signal. By using an LCD TV having an 8‐bit capability, an 11‐bit‐equivalent gray‐scale expression was experimentally proven.     

Efficient semi-supervised learning on locally informative multiple graphs

We address an issue of semi-supervised learning on multiple graphs, over which informative subgraphs are distributed. One application under this setting can be found in molecular biology, where different types of gene networks are generated depending upon experiments. Here an important problem is to annotate unknown genes by using functionally known genes, which connect to unknown genes in gene networks, in which informative parts vary over networks. We present a powerful, time-efficient approach for this problem by combining soft spectral clustering with label propagation for multiple graphs. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach using both synthetic and real biological datasets.     

Static Coarse Grain Task Scheduling with Cache Optimization Using OpenMP

Effective use of cache memory is getting more important with increasing gap between the processor speed and memory access speed. Also, use of multigrain parallelism is getting more important to improve effective performance beyond the limitation of loop iteration level parallelism. Considering these factors, this paper proposes a coarse grain task static scheduling scheme considering cache optimization. The proposed scheme schedules coarse grain tasks to threads so that shared data among coarse grain tasks can be passed via cache after task and data decomposition considering cache size at compile time. It is implemented on OSCAR Fortran multigrain parallelizing compiler and evaluated on Sun Ultra80 four-processor SMP workstation using Swim and Tomcatv from the SPEC fp 95. As the results, the proposed scheme gives us 4.56 times speedup for Swim and 2.37 times on 4 processors for Tomcatv respectively against the Sun Forte HPC Ver. 6 update 1 loop parallelizing compiler.