A correlation for the estimation of critical micellization concentrations and temperatures of polyols in aqueous solutions

An empirical correlation is presented for the estimation of critical micellization concentrations (CMC) and critical micellization temperatures (CMT) for poly(ethylene oxide)-block-poly(propylene oxide)-block-poly(ethylene oxide) copolymers in aqueous solutions. The CMC and CMT are expressed as a function of the polyol molecular weight, composition, and temperature (for CMC determination) or concentration (in the case of CMT). The correlation was developed from experimental CMT data for a set of 12 polyols that covered a wide range of molecular weights (2900–14600) and poly(ethylene oxide) contents (30–80 wt%) and is based on a simple expression for the standard free energy of micellization. Such a correlation should be useful to practitioners of the field as it allows easy prediction of CMC and CMT for a wide range of polyols with a minimal number of input parameters.     

C-Testable modified-Booth multipliers

In this paper the testability of modified-Booth array multipliers for standard cells based design environments is examined for first time. In such cases the structure of the cells may be unknown, thus Cell Fault Model (CFM) is adopted. Two C-testable designs are proposed. A design for an N _x × N_y bits modified-Booth multiplier, which uses ripple carry addition at the last stage of the multiplication, is first proposed. The design requires the addition of only one extra primary input and 38 test vectors with respect to CFM. A second C-testable design is given using carry lookahead addition at the last stage which is the case of practical implementations of modified-Booth multipliers. Such a C-testable design using carry lookahead addition is for first time proposed in the open literature. This second design requires the addition of 4 extra primary inputs. One-level and two-levels carry lookahead adders, are considered. The C-testable design requires 61 test vectors for the former and 73 test vectors for the latter, respectively. The hardware and delay overheads imposed by both C-testable designs are very small and decrease when the size of the multiplier increases.     

Multi-channel energy detection under phase noise: analysis and mitigation

For the development of highly integrated, flexible and low-cost cognitive radio (CR) devices, simple transceiver architectures, like direct-conversion receiver, are expected to be deployed and provide viable radio frequency (RF) spectrum sensing solutions for practical implementation. Yet, this can be very challenging task especially if spectrum sensing and down-conversion are conducted over multiple RF channels simultaneously for improved efficiency in channel scans. Then, the so-called dirty RF problem that degrades link performance of traditional transmission systems starts to be influential from spectrum sensing perspective as well. The unavoidable RF impairments, e.g., oscillator phase noise in direct-conversion receiver, could generate crosstalk between multiple channels that are down-converted simultaneously, and thus considerably limit the spectrum sensing capabilities. Most of the existing spectrum sensing studies in literature assume an ideal RF receiver and have not considered such practical RF hardware problem. In this article, we study the impact of oscillator phase noise on energy detection (ED) based spectrum sensing in multi-channel direct-conversion receiver scenario. With complex Gaussian primary user (PU) signal models, we first derive the detection and false alarm probabilities in closed-form expression. The analytical results, verified through extensive simulations, show that the wideband multi-channel sensing receiver is very sensitive to the neighboring channel crosstalk induced by oscillator phase noise. More specifically, it is shown that the false alarm probability of multi-channel energy detection increases significantly, compared to the ideal RF receiver case. The exact performance degradation depends on the power of neighboring channels as well as statistical characteristics of the phase noise in the deployed receiver. In order to prevent such performance degradation in spectrum identification, an enhanced energy detection technique is proposed. The proposed technique calculates the leakage power from neighboring channels for each channel and improves the sample energy statistics by subtracting this leakage power from the raw values. An analytical expression is derived for the leakage power which is shown to be a function of power spectral levels of neighboring channels and 3-dB bandwidth of phase noise process. Practical schemes for estimating these two quantities are discussed. Extensive computer simulations show that the proposed enhanced detection yields false alarm rates that are very close to those of an ideal RF receiver and hence clearly outperforms classical energy detection.     

The effect of acetylation on the Janka hardness of pine wood

This paper addressed the effect of chemical modification with acetic anhydride on Janka hardness of pine wood, a less studied mechanical property. It was found that acetylation did not significantly affect the hardness of wood.     

System level performance evaluation of MIMO and SISO OFDM-based WLANs

In this paper we investigate the system level performance of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) Wireless LAN network enhanced through Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques and compare it to the performance of the conventional Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) network. The MIMO scheme we apply is closed loop power allocation based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The above investigations are carried out by means of a software based simulation platform. In order to characterize the system level performance accurately, a suitable link-to-system interface based on channel capacity has been developed. The performance evaluation is achieved by monitoring the average system throughput and the percentage of satisfied users. Extensive system level simulations have been carried out that prove the superiority of MIMO techniques especially for heavy traffic load conditions.     

Search Algorithms for Subdatatype-Based Multimedia Retrieval

Recently, researchers have mainly been interested only in the search for data content that are globally similar to the query and not in the search for inside data items. This paper presents an algorithm, called a generalized virtual node (GVN) algorithm, to search for data items where parts (subdatatype) are similar to the incoming query. We call this subdatatype-based multimedia retrieval. Each multimedia datatype, such as image and audio is represented in this paper as a k-dimensional signal in the spatio-temporal domain. A k-dimensional signal is transformed into characteristic features and these features are stored in a hierarchical multidimensional structure, called the k-tree. Each node on the k-tree contains partial content corresponding to the spatial and/or temporal positions in the data. The k-tree structure allows us to build a unified retrieval model for any types of multimedia data. It also eliminates unnecessary comparisons of cross-media querying. The experimental results of the use of the new GVN algorithm for subaudio and subimage retrievals show that it takes much less retrieval times than other earlier algorithms such as brute-force and the partial-matching algorithm, while the accuracy is acceptable.     

Walsh Orthogonal Functions in Geometrical Feature Extraction

Walsh functions are used in designinq a feature extraction algorithm. The ?axis-symmetry? property of the Walsh functions is used to decompose geometrical patterns. An axissymmetry (a.s.)-histogram is obtained from the Walsh spectrum of a pattern by adding the squares of the spectrm coefficients that correspond to a given a.s.-number ? and plotting these against ?. Since Walsh transformation is not positionally invariant, the sequency spectrum does not specify the pattern uniquely. This disadvantage is overcome by performing a normalization on the input pattern through Fourier transformation. The a.s.-histogram is obtained from the Walsh spectrum coefficients of the Fourier-normalized rather than the original pattern. Such histogram contains implicit information about symmetries, periodicities, and discontinuities present in a figure. It is shown that a.s.-histograms result in great dimensionality reduction in the feature space, which leads to a computationally simpler classification task, and that patterns which differ only in translations or 90° rotation have equal a.s.-histograms.     

A new control design for multiterminal HVDC systems using optimal entire eigenstructure assignment

Contents This paper presents a new method of control design for multiterminal HVDC systems. The proposed design approach applies the optimal entire eignestructure assignment technique developed for optimal state feedback controls of multi-input linear systems in order to achieve predetermined response characteristics. The feedback-gains are computed to assign the closed-loop eigenvalues of the HVDC system at any specified distinct modes and simultaneously minimize an appropriate linear quadratic (LQ) performance index. Therefore, the controller design takes into account the dynamics of the DC transmission system, making possible the regulation of the current at the remote terminals, and at the same time assures both stability with predetermined duration of transient response and minimum system effort. A computer simulation of an integrated ac/dc power system is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design since in all simulated cases the transient response for typical disturbances appears desirable, showing fast damping characteristics without significant overshoots or oscillations.

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Eine neue Regelmethode für HGÜ-Systeme mit mehreren Unterwerken optimaler Eigenstruktur

Übersicht Diese Arbeit befaßt sich mit einer neuen Regelmethode für HGÜ-Systeme mit mehreren Unterwerken. Die vorgeschlagene Regelstrategie basiert auf der Technik der optimalen Eigenstruktur. Die für optimale Zustandsregelung von linearen Systemen mit vielen Eingängen entwickelt worden ist, um eine vorgeschriebene Antwort zu erreichen. Die Verstärkungsfaktoren werden berechnet, um die Eigenwerte des Regelkreises des HGÜ-Systems bei beliebig gewünschten Höhen zu ermitteln und gleichzeitig ein geeignetes lineares quadratisches Kriterium zu minimieren. Somit berücksichtigt die Regelbemessung die Dynamik des Gleichstromübertragungssystems und ermöglicht die Stromregelung in entfernten Unterwerken. Ebenfalls wird Stabilität des Systems unter Vorbestimmung der Dauer der Transienten Antwort und Minimierung der Systembelastung gesichert. Es wird eine Computersimulation eines ac/dc-Systems durchgeführt, um die Effektivität der vorgeschlagenen Methode zu demonstrieren. In sämtlichen Fällen zeight die transiente Antwort typischer Störungen schnelle Dämpfung ohne merkbare Überhöhungen und Schwingungen.