Evaluation of Desulphurization Flux in CaO‐Al2O3‐BaO‐CeO2‐MgO System

The flux of the CaO‐Al₂0₃‐BaO‐CeO₂‐MgO system as a desulphurization flux containing no fluorine for the secondary metallurgy process was evaluated in this study. The flux composition was designed using the eutectic compositions of the binary systems. The melting and desulphurization abilities of the fluxes were evaluated by measuring their liquidus temperatures and the distribution ratios of sulphur between the fluxes and the carbon‐saturated iron or stainless steel. The lowest liquidus temperature of 1325°C was obtained by adding 5.7 mass% MgO to the 80mass%A‐20mass%B flux. (A: 12CaO‐7Al₂O₃, B: BaCeO₃+12mass%Al₂O₃). The distribution ratios of sulphur and sulphide capacities of the fluxes in this study were higher than those of the commercial product of calcium aluminate flux. This means that the CaO‐Al₂O₃‐BaO‐CeO₂‐MgO fluxes developed in this study have higher desulphurization and melting abilities compared with the commercial product of calcium aluminate flux.     

Route guidance by a car navigation system based on augmented reality

Car navigation systems play a prominent role in road traffic safety and traffic regulation. However, it is necessary to improve the route guidance of car navigation systems so that they accurately and quickly recognize small differences in location. Thus, to increase the ease of understanding and safety of car navigation systems, navigation systems based on augmented reality have been proposed for providing guidance at road intersections. We are currently developing a car navigation system based on augmented reality, called AR‐Navi. We investigated designs for the display of road intersection guidance that can be easily understood even when limited information is available and proposed a “best shot” display method that does not use moving images. In addition, we implemented a prototype system that includes these methods and conducted driving experiments on public roads to evaluate the ease of understanding and safety of AR‐Navi. Using the evaluation results, we confirmed that the ease of understanding and safety is similar in the case of AR‐Navi and CG‐Navi. We also clarified the characteristics of AR‐Navi. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 180(2): 43–54, 2012; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.22278     

Improving corrosion resistance of Al‐11mass%Si alloy through a large number of ECAP passes

Ultrafine‐grained (UFG) Al‐11mass%Si alloy, processed by multi‐pass equal‐channel angular pressing (ECAP) at 573 K, was investigated on corrosion behavior in 0.6 M NaCl solution. Potentiodynamic polarization tests and scanning electron microscopy observation showed that a large number of ECAP passes resulted in lower corrosion current density, more positive corrosion potential, and rather smooth corroded surface with shallow corrosion pits. The uniform distribution of fine secondary‐phase particles on UFG Al matrix weakened the susceptibility to pitting corrosion while inhibited general microgalvanic reactions. The present results indicate that grain refinement of aluminum matrix to the UFG state and uniform redistribution of broken particles (including eutectic silicon and secondary phases), via severe plastic deformation at elevated temperature undergoing dynamic recrystallization, can significantly improve the corrosion resistance of Al alloys, besides the known exceptional mechanical advantages. The simple and effective ECAP procedure makes UFG Al alloys more attractive for high strength structural application in corrosive environment.     

Cathode properties of metal trifluorides in Li and Na secondary batteries

Fluorine compounds have high discharge voltage due to its highly ionic metal-ligand bonds. In them, perovskite-type metal trifluorides with corner sharing matrix have large bottlenecks of diffusion pathways for intercalants. Iron trifluoride composites (FeF₃-C) prepared by planetary ball milling with carbon showed reversible charge/discharge behavior not only for Li, but also for Na anodes. X-ray diffraction and ⁵⁷Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy were applied to characterize the electrochemical properties of FeF₃ vs. Li and Na anodes. The cathode performances of the other commercially available transition metal trifluorides such as MF₃ (M = Ti, V, Mn, Co) have been also investigated.     

The flow rate of test odor spouting into the mask in the dynamic odor test

The adoption of the sensory odor test will prevail widely in many local self governments in Japan in order to evaluate and regulate the complex odor in fields. This is also done by the tri‐angle choice bag test. However, this procedure has several problems in the reliability and reproducibility of the results obtained. It is desired to solve these problems by the mechanization of the method. From this point of view, an experimental study on the flow rate of test odor has been carried out and the results obtained are described in this paper. It is confirmed that the optimum flow rate of test odor is about 41/min at the inlet of the mask in the dynamic sniffing method.     

A 65 nm Single-Chip Application and Dual-Mode Baseband Processor With Partial Clock Activation and IP-MMU

Supporting both WCDMA with HSDPA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE, the 9.3 times 9.3 mm² SoC fabricated in triple-Vth 65 nm CMOS, has three CPU cores and 20 separate power domains. Unused power domains can be powered down to reduce the leakage power. Partial clock activation scheme especially focused on music playback scene dynamically stops a PLL and clock trees when not necessary and reduces power consumption from 33.6 mW to 19.6 mW. IP-MMU translates virtual address to physical address for 18 hardware-IPs and virtual address space can be allocated when necessary and can be freed after its operation, reducing external memory by 43 MB. Video performance of D1 (720 times 520) size with 30 frames per second for MPEG/AVC decoding and encoding can be achieved under mixed virtual and physical address usage.     

Toward a multi-culture adaptive virtual tour guide agent with a modular approach

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are computer-generated, human-like characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. ECA is a powerful tool for representing cultural differences and is suitable for interactive training or edutainment systems. This article presents preliminary results from the development of a culture-adaptive virtual tour guide agent for serving Japanese, Croatian, and general Western users by displaying appropriate verbal and non-verbal behaviors. It is being implemented in Generic ECA Framework, a modular framework for developing ECAs. Dividing the ECA functions into reusable and loosely coupled modules minimizes the effort required to implement additional behavior and facilitates incremental scale up of the system.     

Uniaxial-process-induced strained-Si: extending the CMOS roadmap

This paper reviews the history of strained-silicon and the adoption of uniaxial-process-induced strain in nearly all high-performance 90-, 65-, and 45-nm logic technologies to date. A more complete data set of n- and p-channel MOSFET piezoresistance and strain-altered gate tunneling is presented along with new insight into the physical mechanisms responsible for hole mobility enhancement. Strained-Si hole mobility data are analyzed using six band k/spl middot/p calculations for stresses of technological importance: uniaxial longitudinal compressive and biaxial stress on [001] and [110] wafers. The calculations and experimental data show that low in-plane and large out-of-plane conductivity effective masses and a high density of states in the top band are all important for large hole mobility enhancement. This work suggests longitudinal compressive stress on [001] or [110] wafers and <110> channel direction offers the most favorable band structure for holes. The maximum Si inversion-layer hole mobility enhancement is estimated to be /spl sim/ 4 times higher for uniaxial stress on (100) wafer and /spl sim/ 2 times higher for biaxial stress on (100) wafer and for uniaxial stress on a [110] wafer.     

Derivation of equivalents for dynamic security assessment

A method is described by which the order of interconnected power systems is reduced. When the system under study is composed of a main system and several subsystems connected to the main system, the method gives an equivalent model to each subsystem with far fewer generators, even when each subsystem is connected to the main system at more than one point. The paper also discusses the data that needs to be sent from each subsystem when it is expressed by a reduced-order equivalent model. A numerical example of a 250-bus and 61-machine system shows that the method is effective and causes no loss of accuracy. Although the proposed method provides an accurate reduced-order model, it is rather time-consuming, because it is based on the linearized dynamic equations of the system, and their eigenvectors are needed. This problem must be solved before practical use of the method can proceed.