Effect of water vapor in a y-cut lithium niobate waveguide

In z-cut lithium niobate (LiNbO3) samples, surface damage has been observed after diffusion in a wet atmosphere, but recent reports show that with controlled flow of water vapor waveguides with good surface morphology and low loss can be obtained. Y-cut waveguides do not show any surface damage. Fabrication of y-cut waveguides diffused with controlled variation of water vapor in the ambient has not been reported to the best of our knowledge. We show that a minimum loss in y-cut waveguides is obtained at a particular water vapor content in the ambient, which is lower than the loss obtained for waveguides diffused in dry ambient. We have found a decrease in the waveguide loss to 0.3 dB/cm from 0.6 dB/ cm for 1 mL of water vapor passed per hour as compared with a dry atmosphere.     

A comparative dielectric relaxation study of PMN–PT and PMN–PZ ceramics using impedance spectroscopy

AC-impedance spectroscopic studies in the temperature range of 30–400 °C are carried out on solid solutions of lead magnesium niobate (PMN) with lead titanate (PT) and lead zirconate (PZ), both of them in the 65/35 atomic ratio. For PMN–PT this corresponds to the morphotropic phase boundary composition (with normal ferroelectric behaviour), and for PMN–PZ it is near the phase boundary between normal ferroelectric and relaxor ferroelectric compositions. The variation of dielectric permittivity with temperature at different frequencies shows normal ferroelectric and relaxor-like dependence for PMN–PT and PMN–PZ, respectively. Temperature-dependent spectroscopic modulus plots reveal a much broader peak for PMN–PZ compared to that for PMN–PT, which is consistent with the dielectric behaviour. PMN–PT shows nearly ideal Debye behaviour below T_m (the temperature of the permittivity maximum) and the behaviour departs from ideality above T_m, whereas non-ideal Debye behaviour is seen both below and above T_m for PMN–PZ. Complex modulus plots fit well with two depressed semicircles and three depressed semicircles, respectively, for PMN–PT and PMN–PZ. The relaxation observed in the spectroscopic plots around 1 MHz for PMN–PT has been assigned to polarisation relaxation expected for normal-sized domains. No such relaxation could be observed for PMN–PZ around 1 MHz because of the mesoscopic domain sizes.     

Synthesis of Sr0.5Ba0.5Nb2O6 by Coprecipitation Method—Dielectric and Microstructural Characteristics

Sr_0.5Ba_0.5Nb₂O₆ (SBN50) has been synthesized by coprecipitation method using Sr(NO₃)₂, Ba(NO₃)₂ and Nb-oxalate as precursors and ammonium hydroxide as precipitant. Calcination at 1150C resulted in pure SBN50 phase (XRD) and nano powder with size varying between 100–250 nm (TEM). The average grain size (SEM) in the sintered pellets ranged from 2.5 to 5 m as the sintering temperature varied from 1250 to 1350C. The maximum sintered density was observed to be 93% of _th. The plot of dielectric constant vs. temperature clearly showed a shift of dielectric maxima (_max) with frequency, indicating the relaxor nature of SBN50. The room temperature dielectric constant (_RT > 2300) observed for all these samples is higher compared to the earlier reported values (_RT 1500). The T_c (for 1 KHz) varied from 47–60C depending on the sintering conditions. The hystersis loops were recorded at various temperatures. The maximum saturation polarization for the unpoled pellets was found to be 2.3 C/cm² when sintered at 1350C. The improvement in dielectric and ferroelectric behavior is attributed to the enhanced homogeneity attained by the coprecipitation synthesis route used in the present study. Correlations between microstructure (sintering conditions) and dielectric behavior is explored.     

Distributed fault-tolerant topology control in wireless multi-hop networks

In wireless multi-hop and ad-hoc networks, minimizing power consumption and at the same time maintaining desired properties of the network topology is of prime importance. In this work, we present a distributed algorithm for assigning minimum possible power to all the nodes in a static wireless network such that the resultant network topology is k-connected. In this algorithm, a node collects the location and maximum power information from all nodes in its vicinity, and then adjusts the power of these nodes in such a way that it can reach all of them through k optimal vertex-disjoint paths. The algorithm ensures k-connectivity in the final topology provided the topology induced when all nodes transmit with their maximum power is k-connected. We extend our topology control algorithm from static networks to networks having mobile nodes. We present proof of correctness for our algorithm for both static and mobile scenarios, and through extensive simulation we present its behavior.     

Simulations of reversible protein aggregate and crystal structure

We simulated the structure of reversible protein aggregates as a function of protein surface characteristics, protein-protein interaction energies, and the entropic penalty accompanying the immobilization of protein in a solid phase. These simulations represent an extension of our previous work on kinetically irreversible protein aggregate structure and are based on an explicit accounting of the specific protein-protein interactions that occur within reversible aggregates and crystals. We considered protein monomers with a mixture of hydrophobic and hydrophilic surface regions suspended in a polar solvent; the energetic driving force for aggregation is provided by the burial of solvent-exposed hydrophobic surface area. We analyzed the physical properties of the generated aggregates, including density, protein-protein contact distributions, solvent accessible surface area, porosity, and order, and compared our results with the protein crystallization literature as well as with the kinetically irreversible case. The physical properties of reversible aggregates were consonant with those observed for the irreversible aggregates, although in general, reversible aggregates were more stable energetically and were more crystal-like in their order content than their irreversible counterparts. The reversible aggregates were less dense than the irreversible aggregates, indicating that the increased energetic stability is derived primarily from the optimality rather than the density of the packing in the solid phase. The extent of hydrophobic protein-protein contacts and solvent-exposed surface area within the aggregate phase depended on the aggregation pathway: reversible aggregates tended to have a greater proportion of hydrophobic-hydrophobic contacts and a smaller fraction of hydrophobic solvent-exposed surface area. Furthermore, the arrangement of hydrophobic patches on the protein surface played a major role in the distribution of protein contacts and solvent content. This was readily reflected in the order of the aggregates: the greater the contiguity of the hydrophobic patches on the monomer surface, the less ordered the aggregates became, despite the opportunities for rearrangement offered by a reversible pathway. These simulations have enhanced our understanding of the impact of protein structural motifs on aggregate properties and on the demarcation between aggregation and crystallization.     

Corrosion behaviour of an indigenous Ag-Sn-Cu cast dental alloy in artificial saliva

Tyrosine kinases are involved in various intracellular signalling cascades of different cells: Genistein has been shown to inhibit tyrosine kinase in INS-1 cells, an insulin-secreting cell line (Verspohl et al., 1995). It is, however, not established how specific and selective the tyrosine kinase inhibitors and their controls are. The tyrosine kinase inhibitors genistein and tyrphostin 25 increased insulin release, but not their negative controls with isoflavonoid structure (daidzein and genistin). In addition to this short-term effect a long-term effect was investigated. Genistein (100 microM) time-dependently increased insulin mRNA levels in INS-1 cells. On the other hand the tyrosine kinase inhibitors tyrphostin 25 and lavendustin A (both at 100 microM), which are structurally different from genistein, failed to increase the insulin mRNA whereas daidzein and genistin, normally used as negative controls, increased insulin mRNA as potently as genistein did. However, an examination of the incubation medium revealed that genistin was degraded to genistein by about 50% probably by nonspecific glucosidases first seen after 2 hours of incubation; genistin, therefore, does not appear to be a proper control though often used in this way. In conclusion, the suitability of the compounds used in recent studies is doubtful since other effects than the inhibition of tyrosine kinases are possible. Whereas the involvement of tyrosine kinase in a short-term effect (insulin release) is obvious and clearly substantiated by using the established pharmacological tools (negative controls), the involvement of tyrosine kinases in long-term effects is not that clear; only compounds with isoflavonoid structure are effective independent whether they normally are thought to be inhibitors or negative controls. One has to be cautious in using the above-mentioned compounds in an uncritical way.     

Dictionary-based classifiers for exploiting feature sequence information and their application to hyperspectral remotely sensed data

The problem of classification is shared across various disciplines. Designing even less computationally demanding and more effective classifiers has been a key challenge for researchers for many years. No single classifier can be highly effective for all types of datasets and thus, depending on the data distribution, various classifiers have been proposed in the literature. To our knowledge, feature values have been vastly exploited as the base for discriminating classes, while feature sequence information has been somehow under-exploited so far. In the proposed approach normalised features are sorted and ranked, creating a sequence of finite numbers. The associated rank of the created sequence is used as an additional feature, which in a way defines the sample-specific intra-feature relationship. Three novel dictionary-based approaches such as Sequence Classifier (SC), Sequence-dictionary-based k-Nearest Neighbours Classifier (SDk-NN) and Combined-dictionary-based k-Nearest Neighbours Classifier (CDk-NN) are proposed in this paper.

In the case of remotely sensed data, and specifically in Hyper-Spectral Images (HSI), the spectral features (Spectral signatures) represent a strong, object-specific spectral relationship, which is a key point in our proposed approach. In this case, indeed, the proposed classifiers were tested over various (five) HS datasets and found to be effective. Based on the classifiers features, two derived distance measures are proposed and validated for the HS dataset, namely: the Normalised Sequence Distance (NSD) measure and Combined Distance (CD) measure. These measures appear to overperform the conventional Normalised Euclidean Distance (NED) in this context. Also, validation for both binary and multi-class datasets are experimented and their performances are evaluated in terms of accuracy and other standard measures. Experimental results over 21 datasets revealed that the proposed approaches perform comparably, and in some cases even better than other classifiers. Stack-operated, class-specific sparse dictionaries are also introduced in order to reduce the computational complexity, which can be used as an active learning-based approach for optimal training sample selection. Additional tests were performed with variable levels of dictionary sparsity for assessing its impact on accuracy.     

Formation and characterization of polyurethane—vermiculite clay nanocomposite foams

Nanocomposites of rigid polyurethane foam with unmodified vermiculite clay are synthesized. The clay is dispersed either in polyol or isocyanate before blending. The viscosity of the polyol is found to increase slightly on the addition of clay up to 5 pphp (parts per hundred parts of polyol by weight). The gel time and rise time are significantly reduced by the addition of clay, indicating that the clay acts as a heterogeneous catalyst for the foaming and polymerization reactions. X‐ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy of the polyurethane composite foams indicate that the clay is partially exfoliated in the polymer matrix. The clay is found to induce gas bubble nucleation resulting in smaller cells with a narrower size distribution in the cured foam. The closed cell content of the clay nanocomposite foams increases slightly with clay concentration. The mechanical properties are found to be the best at 2.3 wt% of clay when the clay is dispersed in the isocyanate; the compressive strength and modulus normalized to a density of 40 kg/m³ are 40% and 34% higher than the foam without clay, respectively. The thermal conductivity is found to be 10% lower than the foam without clay. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2008. © 2008 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Performance of Smart Antenna Under Different Fading Conditions

Optimizing the current distribution of an evenly spaced antenna array has shown to be an efficient approach for reducing side lobe levels. In this article, the Tchebyscheff distribution-based antenna array synthesis approach is combined with an adaptive signal processing algorithm for beamforming and side lobe level reduction in smart antennas in various fading situations. The performance of smart antennas in uniformly spaced linear, planar, circular, and semi-circular arrays are evaluated. The presence of Rayleigh and Rician channels is examined in the network. The least mean square (LMS) and normalised least mean square (NLMS) algorithms are applied as adaptive algorithms. In fading environments, the NLMS algorithm with Tchebyscheff distribution outperforms than the LMS algorithm with Tchebyscheff distribution, with a side lobe level decrease of 11.23 dB. The lowest side lobe achieved with the NLMS algorithm with Tchebyscheff distribution is???45.59 dB for uniform planar array.

     

Various dimensional colour image encryption based on non-overlapping block-level diffusion operation

This paper proposes a colour image encryption scheme to encrypt colour images of arbitrary sizes. In this scheme, a fixed block size (3 × 8) based block-level diffusion operation is performed to encrypt arbitrary sized images. The proposed technique overcomes the limitation of performing block-level diffusion operations in arbitrary sized images. This method first performs bit-plane decomposition and concatenation operation on the three components (blue, green, and red) of the colour image. Second it performs row and column shuffling operation using the Logistic-Sine System. Then the proposed scheme executes block division and fixed block-level diffusion (exclusive-OR) operation using the key image generated by the Piece-wise Linear Chaotic Map. At last, the cipher image is generated by combining the diffused blocks. In addition, the SHA-256 hashing on plain image is used to make chaotic sequences unique in each encryption process and to protect the ciphertext against the known-plaintext attack and the chosen-plaintext attack. Simulation results and various parameter analysis demonstrate the algorithm’s best performance in image encryption and various common attacks.