Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Polymer-Based Microfluidic Device with Electrolyte-Enabled Distributed Transducers (EEDT) for Distributed Load Detection

A POLYMER-BASED MICROFLUIDIC DEVICE WITH ELECTROLYTE-ENABLED DISTRIBUTED TRANSDUCERS (EEDT) FOR DISTRIBUTED LOAD DETECTION Peng Cheng Old Dominion University, 2013 Advisor: Dr. Zhili Julie Hao The capability of detecting distributed static and dynamic loads is indispensable in a wide variety of applications, such as examining anatomical structures of biological tissues in tissue health analysis and minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and determining the texture of an object in robotics. This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of a polymer-based microfluidic device with electrolyte-enabled distributed transducers and demonstrates a new concept on using a single microfluidic device for distributed-load detection, which takes advantage of the low-cost microfluidic fabrication technology and the low modulus and biocompatibility of polymer. The core of the device is a single deformable polymer microstructure integrated with electrolyte-enabled transducers. While distributed loads are converted to different levels of deflections by the polymer microstructure, the deflections of the microstructure are translated to resistance changes by the five pairs of distributed transducers underneath the microstructure. Firstly, the design and working principle of the device is described. Then, due to its simple but efficient configuration, a standard fabrication process well developed for polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS)-based microfluidic devices is detailed and employed to fabricate this device. After that, the experimental setups for characterizing the device performance in static, step and sinusoidal inputs are illustrated. The experimental data then are collected and processed by using custom-built electronic circuits and custom LabVEEW/Matlab program to characterize the device performance. Lastly, the performance analysis of the device is conducted to obtain the performance parameters such as device sensitivity and load resolution. In summary, this polymer-based microflidic device not only demonstrates the new concept and the capability of detecting distributed static and dynamic loads with a single device, with a thorough experimental study on the performance and characterization of this PDMS-based microfluidic device to correlate the device performance to its design parameters, but also the potential application of directly adopting this experimental method to measure the elasticity/viscoelasticity of a soft tissue.
IMPROVEMENT OF RESIDUAL STRESSES IN THICK WALL CYLINDERS USING MULTIPLE AUTOFRETTAGE

Autofrettage and Re-autofrettage processes have been used to generate compressive residual stress at the near bore area of the cylinder to enhance the load carrying capacity of the cylindrical pressure vessels. These processes’ main drawback appears in the detrimental high tensile residual stress at the outer part of the cylinder. On the basis of these findings, internal surface autofrettage combined with external surface autofrettage processes have been used to improve not only by increasing of compressive residual stress at the near bore area but also by decreasing of tensile residual stress at the outer surface area. For these cyclic plasticity processes, an accurate finite element model governed by non-linear kinematic hardening model (Chaboche model) has been used. This model simulates the measured stress-strain actual behavior for NiCrMoV125 steel alloy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* Egyptian Armed Forces. 17 SM Proceedings of the 16 Int. AMME Conference, 27-29 May, 2014
Reactions between Si melt and various ceramics

Reactions between different kinds of ceramics and silicon were studied to evaluate ceramics as candidates for their use in the process of silicon-crystal growth. Three types of ceramic plates, Al2O3, ZrO2 and quartz (SiO2), were put into contact with a silicon wafer via annealing at 1450 ? C for 30min under an Ar atmosphere. Defects appeared at the Si-ceramics interface. Among these, a crack and a dislocation pile up were found at the Si-SiO2 dissolution couple. In addition, two intermetallic compounds, Y2Si2O7 and Zr-Si, produced by the diffusion of Y, O and Zr from the ZrO2 into the Si, were found at the Si-ZrO2 dissolution couple. At the interface of the Si-Al2O3 dissolution couple, no intermetallic compounds and few defects were found. The oxygen concentration and electrical resistivity near the interface were high and gradually decreased away from the interface for all Si-ceramics dissolution couples.
ENHANCEMENT OF SLICED LAYER CONTOUR FOR RECONSTRUCTING A 3D MODEL USING SOLID FREEFORM FABRICATION

Nowadays, Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) takes a great attention by creating complex solid objects directly from geometric models without specific tooling information. SFF also referred to layered manufacturing (LM) which builds up 3D objects by successive 2D layer deposition after exporting it as an STL file format from its CAD environment. This paper aims at overcoming the approximation problem of 2D layer contour from sliced STL model. The author used a Lagrange interpolation method to increase the point’s coordinates of the sliced layer contour in order to reconstruct an accurate and near net contour of the original sliced CAD model. This method reduced the error between the original sliced CAD model and the actual reconstructed layer contours to 0.006%.
Third-order nonlinear optical response of enzothiazole derivative doped Polymethyl methacrylate C18H15N3SFe

In this paper one novel conjugated enzothiazole derivative doped Polymethyl methacrylate C18H15N3SFe with D-π-A structures were synthesized to realize reverse saturable absorption (RSA) under femtosecond laser excitation resulting from two-photon absorption (TPA) and TPA-induced excited-state absorption (TPA−ESA). we describe the linear and nonlinear optical (NLO) properties of enzothiazole derivative doped Polymethyl methacrylate C18H15N3SFe. The nonlinear absorption of Polymethyl methacrylate can be enhanced by enzothiazole derivative doped. The Z-scan results revealed that C18H15N3SFe/PMMA showed RSA on the femtosecond time regions (532 nm). All the results indicate show that C18H15N3SFe /PMMA are promising candidates for future optoelectronic and RSA applications.
International migration, open borders debates, and happiness

Arguments for “open borders” typically assume that migration from poorer countries to wealthy countries generally makes the migrants themselves better off; indeed, many discussions of ethics concerning immigration policy depend heavily on this assumption. But there are several grounds for wondering whether it is at least partly unfounded for economic migrants (if not for refugees), particularly if “better off” is specified in terms of happiness. Research on happiness casts doubt on the notion that increases in income contribute significantly to happiness; this article extends those doubts to the notion that one can increase happiness by gaining more income via labor migration. Certain processes (for example, adaptation, social comparisons) might work in counterintuitive ways for immigrants, perhaps inhibiting happiness despite ostensible economic gains. Arguments against immigration restrictions might therefore need to focus more on the dysfunctions of restrictions themselves and less on putative benefits to migrants from migration.
Design, modelling, and fabrication of a ferrite magnet axial flux in-wheel motor

The uncertainty in the availability and the price of rare-earth (RE) metals required to produce high-energy density magnets prompted the search for RE free high-efficiency machines. This work investigates the suitability of ferrite magnet machine as a substitute to RE magnet machine in an electric twowheeler application. The two-wheeler selected for this work is an electric scooter used for the city commute, which belongs to a group of vehicles known as light electric vehicles (LEV). The objective of the work is to develop a ferrite magnet direct drive in-wheel motor for an electric two-wheeler and compare its performance with RE magnet in-wheel motors. Currently, an electric scooter costs twice the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle of similar class. The existing LEV mostly use a powertrain with a lithium-ion battery as the power source and a motor using RE magnets like NdFeB as the energy converter to meet the range and the performance of ICE counterparts, and these two parts accounts the major share of the cost of the vehicle. When comparing a ferrite magnet and an NdFeB magnet of same dimensions, the ferrite magnet produces around one-fourth of the flux, and it can be demagnetized by a much lower demagnetizing field. Motor designers workaround the inherent deficiencies of ferrite magnets by selecting a motor topology that allows placing more magnets and ensuring that the motor field poles are not exposed to an armature field of magnitude that can cause demagnetization. After reviewing many motor types and topologies, a permanent magnet brushless DC (PMBLDC) motor with a segmented armature torus (SAT) topology is selected for developing the ferrite magnet in-wheel motor. The SAT motor topology is a variation of axial flux motor and offers advantages such as high torque per unit mass, high-efficiency, and a dual rotor structure to accommodate more magnets. A finite element (FE) based design-synthesis program
Heat transfer and pressure drop of R1123/R32 (40/60 mass%) flow in horizontal microfin tubes during condensation and evaporation

In this study, the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) and pressure drop of the new low global warming potential refrigerant mixture R1123/R32 (40/60 mass%) in a 6.0 mm OD horizontal microfin tube during condensation at 40 °C and evaporation at 10 °C are experimentally quantified. The data are then compared to the component R32. Both the condensation HTC and pressure drop of R1123/R32 (40/60 mass%) are somewhat lower than those of R32. Similarly, the pressure drop of R1123/R32 during the evaporation process at 10 °C is somewhat lower than that of R32. However, the evaporation HTC is comparable to that of R32. The lower surface tension of R1123/R32 can enhance the nucleate boiling and compensate the heat transfer degradation due to the volatility difference.
REGULATED TRANSFORMER RECTIFIER UNIT FOR MORE ELECTRIC AIRCRAFTS

Title of Dissertation: REGULATED TRANSFORMER RECTIFIER UNIT FOR MORE ELECTRIC AIRCRAFTS Ayan Mallik, Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 Dissertation directed by: Prof. Alireza Khaligh, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The impending trends in the global demand of more-electric-aircrafts with higher efficiency, high power density, and high degree of compactness has opened up numerous opportunities in front of avionic industries to develop innovative power electronic interfaces. Traditionally, passive diode-bridge based transformer rectifier units (TRU) have been used to generate a DC voltage supply from variable frequency and variable voltage AC power out of the turbo generators. These topologies suffer from bulky and heavy low-frequency transformer size, lack of DC-link voltage regulation flexibility, high degree of harmonic contents in the input currents, and additional cooling arrangement requirements. This PhD research proposes an alternative approach to replace TRUs by actively controlled Regulated Transformer Rectifier Units (RTRUs) employing the advantages of emerging wide band gap (WBG) semiconductor technology. The proposed RTRU utilizing Silicon Carbide (SiC) power devices is composed of a three-phase active boost power factor correction (PFC) rectifier followed by an isolated phase-shifted full bridge (PSFB) DC-DC converter. Various innovative control algorithms for wide-range input frequency operation, ultracompact EMI filter design methodology, DC link capacitor reduction approach and novel start-up schemes are proposed in order to improve power quality and transient dynamics and to enhance power density of the integrated converter system. Furthermore, a variable switching frequency control algorithm of PSFB DC-DC converter has been proposed for tracking maximum conversion efficiency at all feasible operating conditions. In addition, an innovative methodology engaging multi-objective optimization for designing electromagnetic interference (EMI) filter stage with minimized volume subjected to the reactive power constraints is analyzed and validated experimentally. For proof-of-concept verifications, three different conversion stages i.e. EMI filter, three-phase boost PFC and PSFB converter are individually developed and tested with upto 6kW (continuous) / 10kW (peak) power rating, which can interface a variable input voltage (190V-240V AC RMS) variable frequency (360Hz – 800Hz) three-phase AC excitation source, emulating the airplane turbo generator and provide an AC RMS voltage of 190V to 260V. According to the experimental measurements, total harmonic distortion (THD) as low as 4.3% and an output voltage ripple of ±1% are achieved at rated output power. The proposed SiC based RTRU prototype is ~8% more efficient and ~50% lighter than state-of-the art TRU technologies. REGULATED TRANSFORMER RECTIFIER UNIT FOR MORE ELECTRIC AIRCRAFTS
A Hierarchical Impact Force Reconstruction Method for Aerospace Composites

This research work presents a hierarchical method able to reconstruct the time history of the impact force on a composite wing stringer-skin panel by using the structural responses measured by a set of surface bonded ultrasonic transducers. Time reversal method was used to identify the impact location by the knowledge of structural responses recorded from a set of excitation points arbitrarily chosen on the plane of the structure. Radial basis function interpolation approach was then used to calculate the transfer function at the impact point and reconstruct the impact force history. Experimental results showed the high level of accuracy of the proposed impact force reconstruction method for a number of low-velocity impact sources and energies.
Infrared tunable, two colour-band photodetectors on flexible platforms using 0D/2D PbS–MoS2 hybrids

Two-dimensional (2D) MoS2 nanosheets have been integrated with zero-dimensional (0D) PbS quantum dots to achieve a superior optical response extending to the short-wavelength infrared region along with a broadband visible response for multispectral photodetection. The 0D/2D hybrid nanostructures have been synthesized by a one pot, stabilizer-free solvothermal growth process. Microscopic and spectroscopic studies confirmed the formation of PbS QD decorated semiconducting 2H-MoS2 layers. The size tunable absorption features with longer photo-generated carrier lifetime of synthesized hybrid nanostructures indicate that the integration of PbS QDs in MoS2 could be a viable approach for fabricating two-colour band photodetectors, viz. visible broadband and wavelength selective short-wave IR photodetectors. Devices have also been demonstrated on polyethylene terephthalate substrates using a solution-based synthesis technique for flexible and ultrathin optoelectronic device applications. The photodetection performance of fabricated devices suggests that the synergic 0D/2D hybrid nanostructures are significantly superior to solution processed hybrid devices operating in the infrared region. The successful integration of 0D QDs in 2D materials may pave the way for novel, high performance, next-generation CMOS compatible flexible photonic devices.
Implementation of IDWT OFDM system in LabVIEW

-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a kind of multi-carrier modulation, which divides the available spectrum into a number of parallel subcarriers and each subcarrier is then modulated by a low rate data stream at different carrier frequency. The conventional OFDM systems uses IFFT and FFT at the transmitter and receiver respectively but DWT-OFDM is an alternative approach to this conventional FFT based OFDM system. In this paper, we have designed an IDWT OFDM system in LabVIEW for use in various wireless techniques.
Hand Gesture Recognition Using SIFT Features on Depth Image

In this paper, we present a hand gesture recognition system using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) on depth images. Due to SIFT features and depth information, our approach is robust against rotations, scaling, illumination conditions, cluttered background, and occlusions. Previously, SIFT features were applied on binary images which do not provide enough discriminating key points to classify close gestures. We have extracted SIFT keypoints from each depth silhouette and applied k-means clustering to reduce feature dimensions. Bag-of-word features were generated using vector quantization technique, which maps keypoints from each training image into a unified dimensional histogram. These bag-of-word features were fed into multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for training. We have tested our results for five close symbolic gestures, compared the results for both binary and depth images and found higher accuracy for depth images. The proposed recognition scheme can be used to develop human gesture based interactive HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) applications. Keywords-Hand gesture recognition, SIFT features, depth image, HCI, SVM
Incorporating pronoun function into statistical machine translation

Pronouns are used frequently in language, and perform a range of functions. Some pronouns are used to express coreference, and others are not. Languages and genres differ in how and when they use pronouns and this poses a problem for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems (Le Nagard and Koehn, 2010; Hardmeier and Federico, 2010; Novák, 2011; Guillou, 2012; Weiner, 2014; Hardmeier, 2014). Attention to date has focussed on coreferential (anaphoric) pronouns with NP antecedents, which when translated from English into a language with grammatical gender, must agree with the translation of the head of the antecedent. Despite growing attention to this problem, little progress has been made, and little attention has been given to other pronouns. The central claim of this thesis is that pronouns performing different functions in text should be handled differently by SMT systems and when evaluating pronoun translation. This motivates the introduction of a new framework to categorise pronouns according to their function: Anaphoric/cataphoric reference, event reference, extra-textual reference, pleonastic, addressee reference, speaker reference, generic reference, or other function. Labelling pronouns according to their function also helps to resolve instances of functional ambiguity arising from the same pronoun in the source language having multiple functions, each with different translation requirements in the target language. The categorisation framework is used in corpus annotation, corpus analysis, SMT system development and evaluation. I have directed the annotation and conducted analyses of a parallel corpus of English-German texts called ParCor (Guillou et al., 2014), in which pronouns are manually annotated according to their function. This provides a first step toward understanding the problems that SMT systems face when translating pronouns. In the thesis, I show how analysis of manual translation can prove useful in identifying and understanding systematic differences in pronoun use between two languages and can help inform the design of SMT systems. In particular, the analysis revealed that the German translations in ParCor contain more anaphoric and pleonastic pronouns than their English originals, reflecting differences in pronoun use. This raises a particular problem for the evaluation of pronoun translation. Automatic evaluation methods that rely on reference translations to assess pronoun translation, will not be able to provide an adequate evaluation when the
Muti-Scale Feature Extraction for Vehicle Detection Using PHis-LBP

Multi-resolution object detection faces several drawbacks including its high dimensionality produced by a richer image representation in different channels or scales. In this paper, we propose a robust and lightweight multi-resolution method for vehicle detection using local binary patterns (LBP) as channel feature. Algorithm acceleration is done using LBP histograms instead of multi-scale feature maps and by extrapolating nearby scales to avoid computing each scale. We produce a feature descriptor capable of reaching a similar precision to other computationally more complex algorithms but reducing its size from 10 to 800 times. Finally, experiments show that our method can obtain accurate and considerably faster performance than state-of-the-art methods on vehicles datasets.
Intelligent Traffic Control Based on Multi-armed Bandit and Wireless Scheduling Techniques

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) researches, including vehicular communications, have been making grea t advancements to improve road safety and traffic flow efficienc y. In this paper, we propose two new traffic control systems. In the first method, we assume a system with fully autonomous cars and infrastructure to avoid collision completely. Vehicles communicate with the access point in both random access mode and polling mode, and the movement of the automobiles will be coordinated by the infrastructure using IEEE 802.11 DCF/PCF mechanisms. In the second method, there is a given set of lane s with unknown reward statistics and we consider the lanes as a multi-armed bandit. We use multi-armed bandit algorithm to choose the best lane to drive in and to maximize the total expected reward while minimizing the regret. Traffic congestion is very difficult to predict and deal with because it is a function of many unknown factors such as number of cars, weather, road constructions, and accidents. The proposed algorithms are designed for urban road networks to ease the congestion, and make it more predictable at the same time. We find that the first algorithm makes the traffic system able to balance efficiencyand fairness and the second algorithm helps vehicles choose the b st lane with minimizied regret. Keywords-ITS; Vehicular Network; IEEE 802.11 DCF/PCF; MAB.
Towards Accessibility Guidelines of Interaction and User Interface Design for Alzheimer’s Disease Patients

The number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease is increasing. In a world which is more and more dependent on computing and Internet, this group of users is be-coming technologically isolated, due to the ill-suited design of user interfaces. Thus, in this paper, we propose a set of accessibility guidelines for designing user interfaces for adults diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. These guidelines are identified after a comprehensive review of the literature. We identify 147 design guidelines that are grouped under 11 categories and 9 criterions. The aim of this work is to ensure that software applications and websites become accessible and easy to use to this demographic. The result of this work is a set of design guidelines, helpful for developers, designers, content producers, researchers and usability specialists. The proposed set of accessibility guidelines were applied for designing the user interfaces of a software application that target Alzheimer’s patients (CAPTAIN MEMO memory prosthesis). Then, we evaluated the accessibility of the developed user interfaces. 24 Alzheimer’s disease patients entered the study. The results confirmed that the developed user interfaces are