Third post-Newtonian gravitational waveforms for compact binary systems in general orbits: Instantaneous terms

We compute the instantaneous contributions to the spherical harmonic modes of gravitational waveforms from compact binary systems in general orbits up to the third post-Newtonian (PN) order. We further extend these results for compact binaries in quasielliptical orbits using the 3PN quasi-Keplerian representation of the conserved dynamics of compact binaries in eccentric orbits. Using the multipolar post-Minkowskian formalism, starting from the different mass and current-type multipole moments, we compute the spin-weighted spherical harmonic decomposition of the instantaneous part of the gravitational waveform. These are terms which are functions of the retarded time and do not depend on the history of the binary evolution. Together with the hereditary part, which depends on the binary's dynamical history, these waveforms form the basis for construction of accurate templates for the detection of gravitational wave signals from binaries moving in quasielliptical orbits.

Biodiesel Exhaust Treatment with Dielectric Barrier Discharges Coupled with Industrial Waste Byproducts

Biodiesel run engines are gaining popularity since the last few years as a viable alternative to conventional petro-diesel based engines. In biodiesel exhaust the content of volatile organic compounds, oil mist, and mass of particulate matter is considerably lower. However, the concentration of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) is relatively higher. In this paper the biodiesel exhaust from a stationary engine is treated under controlled laboratory conditions for removal of NOx using dielectric barrier discharge plasma in cascade with adsorbents prepared from abundantly available industrial waste byproducts like red mud and copper slag. Results were compared with gamma-alumina, a commercial adsorbent. Two different dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactors were tested for their effectiveness under Repetitive pulses /AC energization. NOx removal as high as 80% was achieved with pulse energized reactors when cascaded with red mud as adsorbent.

Dictionary-Learning-Based Post-Filter for HMM-Based Speech Synthesis

Oversmoothing of speech parameter trajectories is one of the causes for quality degradation of HMM-based speech synthesis. Various methods have been proposed to overcome this effect, the most recent ones being global variance (GV) and modulation-spectrum-based post-filter (MSPF). However, there is still a significant quality gap between natural and synthesized speech. In this paper, we propose a two-fold post-filtering technique to alleviate to a certain extent the oversmoothing of spectral and excitation parameter trajectories of HMM-based speech synthesis. For the spectral parameters, we propose a sparse coding-based post-filter to match the trajectories of synthetic speech to that of natural speech, and for the excitation trajectory, we introduce a perceptually motivated post-filter. Experimental evaluations show quality improvement compared with existing methods.