Dielectric,ferroelectric, and energy storage properties in dysprosium doped sodium bismuth titanate ceramics

In this work, Na_0.5(Bi_1-xDy_x)_0.5TiO₃ (0?≤?x?≤?15%) ceramics were prepared via solid state reaction method and were characterized. A stable and pure perovskite phase was revealed by X-ray diffraction analysis for all compositions and a symmetry change from rhombohedral to orthorhombic phase was detected beyond 10% of Dy substitution. The incorporation of Dy³⁺ into Sodium Bismuth Titanate (Na_0.5Bi_0.5TiO₃) matrix allows a substantial decrease of the coercive field, an increase in the resistivity, and leads to a high stability of the dielectric permittivity (??/?_(150?°C) ≤?±?15%) over a wide temperature range. Furthermore, this system was found to exhibit improved energy storage properties at high temperatures with a maximum energy density of 1.2?J/cm³ obtained for 2%Dy composition at 200?°C. The obtained results are very promising for energy storage capacitors operating at high temperatures.     

Outcome of cardiac valve ring abscesses after medical treatment: attempt to identify criteria of favorable prognosis

OBJECTIVES: Identify factors predicting favorable outcome after medical management of valve ring abscesses in order to propose a surveillance schedule for conservative treatment. METHODS: A multicentric study conducted from July 1989 to February 1996 included 28 patients (mean age 64 +/- 16 years, range 26-83) hospitalized for active endocarditis and valve ring abscesses diagnosed at transthoracic or transesophageal echography. Conservative medical therapy was given because of a decision of the medico-surgical team (n = 9), high surgical risk (n = 12), or patient refusal of surgery (n = 7). Outcome was favourable in 18 patients (Group I) and unfavorable in 10 (Group II) due to death (n = 9) or subsequent surgery (n = 1). Univariate and multivariate analysis were used to determine differences between the groups in terms of clinical and laboratory data. RESULTS: Mean follow-up in Group I was 33 +/- 18 months and 15 +/- 10 months in Group II. Univariate analysis showed significant differences between Group I and II respectively for age (59 +/- 18 yr vs 72 +/- 10, p = 0.04), delay to apyrexia after antibiotics (4.3 +/- 2.8 vs 8.3 +/- 2.4 days, p < 0.0008), heart failure (5% vs 70%, p = 0.003), grade III or IV valvular regurgitation (5% vs 60%, p < 0.04), and mean surface area of the abscess (1.5 +/- 1.2 vs 5.4 +/- 6.4 cm2, p < 0.03). Independent factors at multivariate analysis were by decreasing order: lack of heart failure at admission, delay to apyrexia, abscess surface area, and age. Outcome was favorable (mean follow-up 33 +/- 10 months) in all patients with an abscess surface area < 1.5 cm2, no signs of heart failure, no grade III or IV valvular regurgitation, apyrexia after less than 8 days on antibiotics and no staphylococcus positive blood culture. CONCLUSION: Medical management of valve ring abscesses may be indicated in selected patients in care units with rigorous surveillance facilities. Further studies are needed to precisely identify surveillance and treatment criteria.     

Distributed Coordination and Workflow on the World Wide Web

This paper describes WebFlow, an environment thatsupports distributed coordination services on theWorld Wide Web. WebFlow leverages the HTTP Webtransport protocol and consists of a number of toolsfor the development of applications that require thecoordination of multiple, distributed servers.Typical applications of WebFlow include distributeddocument workspaces, inter/intra-enterprise workflow,and electronic commerce. In this paper we describe thegeneral WebFlow architecture for distributedcoordination, and then focus on the environment fordistributed workflow.     

Design of High Speed AWGN Communication Channel Emulator

This paper presents a method for designing a high accuracy white gaussian noise generator suitable for communication channel emulation. The proposed solution is based on the combined use of the Box-Muller method and the central limit theorem. The resulting architecture provides a high accuracy AWGN with a low complexity architecture for a digital implementation in FPGA. The performance is studied by means of MATLAB simulations and various complexity figures are given.     

2-Methylthiazolidine and 4-ethylguaiacol,male sex pheromone components of the cockroachNauphoeta cinerea (dictyoptera,blaberidae): A reinvestigation

InNauphoeta cinerea, male calling behavior is associated with sex pheromone release by the sternal glands. The male pheromone that attracts females from a distance is a mixture of 2-methylthiazolidine and 4-ethylguaiacol. It is active at very low concentrations, 0.05 and 0.01 ng, respectively. Two other compounds, 3-hydroxy-2-butanone and 2-methyl-2thiazoline, act at close range, keeping the female in the vicinity of the male. The function of the volatile pheromone and those of previously described contact pheromones are discussed in regard to their possible involvement in the establishment of male dominant-subordinate relationships.     

Characterization and modeling of diffusion process for mass transport through the Tournemire argillites (Aveyron, France)

Argillites are one of the geological formations studied by IRSN for their confining properties for isolation of radioactive wastes. One of the main objectives is the study of water transport through rocks with very low water content and very low hydraulic conductivity by modeling of natural tracer profiles. This paper presents the protocol developed for and applied to the acquisition of data for chloride content in interstitial water of the Toarcian argillites at the Tournemire site (Southern France). This protocol is based on laboratory diffusion experiments and on modeling. Experimental data obtained during the transient and steady-state parts of diffusion experiments enable, respectively, the assessment of the diffusion coefficient and the determination of Cl concentration in pore water. Using this protocol, profiles with depth for both of these data sets have been acquired along the geological sequence. Taking into account the present knowledge of the geological and hydrogeological history of the Tournemire massif, a conceptual model granting the main role for mass transport to diffusion has been proposed. According to this conceptual model, a one-dimensional numerical model was built for simulating the mass transport of chloride through the sedimentary column, over 53 Ma. The good agreement between experimental data and calculated values for both diffusion coefficients and concentrations of chloride confirms that diffusion is likely the main process for mass transport in the massif. This model was also tested with the deuterium content of interstitial water, applying variable concentrations at the aquifer system boundaries for reflecting the thermal dependency of isotopic composition in precipitation. These simulations also reveal the likely important role of heterogeneities, such as fractures, in the variability of tracer concentrations with regards to a simple diffusion profile.     

Design and Implementation of an Agent Home Scheme Strategy for Prefetch-Based DSM Systems

In recent years, cluster computing has been widely investigated and there is no doubt that it can provide a cost-effective computing infrastructure by aggregating computational power, communication, and storage resources. Moreover, it is also considered to be a very attractive platform for low-cost supercomputing. Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems utilize the physical memory of each computing node interconnected in a private network to form a global virtual shared memory. Since this global shared memory is distributed among the computing nodes, accessing the data located in remote computing nodes is an absolute necessity. However, this action will result in significant remote memory access latencies which are major sources of overhead in DSM systems. For these reasons, in order to increase overall system performance and decrease this overhead, a number of strategies have been devised. Prefetching is one such approach which can reduce latencies, although it always increases the workload in the home nodes. In this paper, we propose a scheme named Agent Home Scheme. Its most noticeable feature, when compared to other schemes, is that the agent home distributes the workloads of each computing nodes when sending data. By doing this, we can reduce not only the workload of the home nodes by balancing the workload for each node, but also the waiting time. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain about 20% higher performance than the original JIAJIA, about 18% more than History Prefetching Strategy (HPS), and about 10% higher than Effective Prefetch Strategy (EPS).     

The Impact of Speculative Execution on SMT Processors

By executing two or more threads concurrently, Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT) architectures are able to exploit both Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) and Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) from the increased number of in-flight instructions that are fetched from multiple threads. However, due to incorrect control speculations, a significant number of these in-flight instructions are discarded from the pipelines of SMT processors (which is a direct consequence of these pipelines getting wider and deeper). Although increasing the accuracy of branch predictors may reduce the number of instructions so discarded from the pipelines, the prediction accuracy cannot be easily scaled up since aggressive branch prediction schemes strongly depend on the particular predictability inherently to the application programs. In this paper, we present an efficient thread scheduling mechanism for SMT processors, called SAFE-T (Speculation-Aware Front-End Throttling): it is easy to implement and allows an SMT processor to selectively perform speculative execution of threads according to the confidence level on branch predictions, hence preventing wrong-path instructions from being fetched. SAFE-T provides an average reduction of 57.9% in the number of discarded instructions and improves the instructions per cycle (IPC) performance by 14.7% on average over the ICOUNT policy across the multi-programmed workloads we simulate. This paper is an extended version of the paper, “Speculation Control for Simultaneous Multithreading,” which appeared in the Proceedings of the 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2004.     

Chemical sensor based on a novel capacitive microwave flexible transducer with polymer nanocomposite-carbon nanotube sensitive film

Microsystem Technologies - This study presents the results on the feasibility of a resonant planar chemical capacitive sensor in the microwave frequency range suitable for gas detection and...