Fabrication of high current and low profile micromachined inductorwith laminated Ni/Fe core

A new process for the fabrication of high current and very low profile micromachined inductors has been developed. This process involves the combination of mechanical lamination and electrodeposition of copper windings by means of LIGA-like lithography through thick epoxy photoresists. The dimension of the fabricated inductor is 16 mm×19 mm×1 mm. The fabricated inductor has an inductance value of 1.2 μH with DC saturation current of 3 A and an electrical resistance of less than 30 mΩ at 10 kHz     

A novel phase noise reduction technique in oscillators usingdefected ground structure

A new technique to reduce the phase noise in microwave oscillators is developed using the resonant characteristic of the defected ground structure (DGS). Two kinds of oscillators have been designed and measured for the examination of the reduction of phase noise by the DGS. The first adopts the DGS section under the microstrip line at the gate circuit, while the second has only the conventional microstrip line. Measurement shows reduced phase noise by 10-15 dB in the oscillator with the DGS compared to the conventional one     

A study on the degree of deliberation and meditation of cyber poll respondents for nuclear-related decision making

Public participation is essential in each step of the nuclear-related decision-making process. Recently, the electronic systems using the Internet have become quite popular, and have emerged as a good medium for communicating with the public. In this study, a comprehensive utilization of electronic public participation was used to analyze public opinion on a given nuclear-related decision-making process. The degree of deliberation and meditation of the public participating in an electronic poll survey was evaluated, and the decision-making factors representing the personal characteristics of the poll respondents such as age, income, education, residence, degree of knowledge and concern were carefully incorporated when preparing the poll-survey questionnaire for its evaluation. Fuzzy analysis was used to assess and aggregate the responses to each decision-making factor. As a case study, this procedure was used to analyzing public opinion on the location of a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility on the campus of Seoul National University. The results show that there is a tendency of respondents who are on the negative side of the argument to be more deliberate and meditative in their decision-making process than those on the positive side. Knowledge and residence were found to be important decision-making factors.     

BioFET sensor for detection of albumin in urine

Characterisation of a BioFET for detection of albumin in a mixture of human urine is presented. To avoid electrolyte effect of the urine, it was measured in PBS (phosphate buffer saline) at a fixed pH after albumin binding. The drain current was modulated by the albumin bound to the anti-albumin immobilised on the gate surface of the BioFET. The current variation ratio was likely to be proportional to the concentration of the albumin in the range 50-250 mg/1. The results show the feasibility of the BioFET as a urinary albumin sensor.     

Polygonal extrusion

A sweeping operation called polygonal extrusion is defined to improve the modeling power of CSG-based modeling. It is assumed that a 2D cross-sectional polygon (sweeping polygon) moves in space while its containing plane is kept orthogonal to the tangent direction of the trajectory curve, a planar polygonal chain having no self-intersections. The objective of the paper is to compute the boundary of the swept volume of the sweeping polygon as a set of polygons (or triangles). The most significant challenge to accomplishing this objective is the problem of trimming the swept volume. To solve the trimming problem, 2D-curve offsetting methods are employed. Two algorithms are presented for polygonal extrusion that are based on different offsetting methods, the Voronoi diagram and PWID offset. The proposed algorithms have been implemented and tested with various examples. Published online: 28 January 2003     

A tolerant approach to reconstruct topology from unorganized trimmed surfaces

Presented in this paper is a topology reconstruction algorithm from a set of unorganized trimmed surfaces. Error-prone small geometric elements are handled to give proper topological information. It gives complete topology to topologically complete models, and it is also tolerant to incomplete models. The proposed algorithm is vertex-based in that clues for topological information are searched from the set of vertices first, not from that of edges.     

Austenitizing treatment influence on the electrochemical corrosion behavior of 0.3C-14Cr-3Mo martensitic stainless steel

Effects of austenitizing treatment temperatures on aqueous corrosion properties of martensitic stainless steels were investigated by electrochemical tests (potentiodynamic test, potentiostatic test and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy), and surface analyses (optical microscopy and XRD). The results of potentiodynamic test revealed that the breakdown potential increased with the increased austenitizing temperature, indicating increased relative resistance to initiation of localized corrosion. EIS measurements showed that MSS3 (1030 °C) exhibits larger polarization resistance value than MSS1 (970 °C) and MSS2 (1000 °C) at passive and breakdown states. This was caused by decreasing the amount of Cr-rich M₂₃C₆ carbide which acts as preferential sites for pitting corrosion.     

Category Norms as a Function of Culture and Age: Comparisons of Item Responses to 105 Categories by American and Chinese Adults.

Understanding how aging influences cognition across different cultures has been hindered by a lack of standardized, cross-referenced verbal stimuli. This study introduces a database of such item-level stimuli for both younger and older adults, in China and the United States, and makes 3 distinct contributions. First, the authors specify which item categories generalize across age and/or cultural groups, rigorously quantifying differences among them. Second, they introduce novel, powerful methods to measure between-group differences in freely generated ranked data, the rank-ordered logit model and Hellinger Affinity. Finally, a broad archive of tested, cross-linguistic stimuli is now freely available to researchers: data, similarity measures, and all stimulus materials for 105 categories and 4 culture-by-age groups, comprising over 10,000 fully translated unique item responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)