The influence of arrangement of St in MBS on the properties of PVC/MBS blends

Three series of MBS core-shell impact modifiers were prepared by grafting styrene and methyl methacrylate onto PB or SBR seed latex in emulsion polymerization. All the MBS modifiers were designed to have the same total chemical composition, and MMA/Bd/St equals 30/42/28, which is a prerequisite for producing transparent blends with PVC. Under this composition, there were three different ways of arrangement for styrene in MBS, which led to the different structure of MBS modifier. The concentration of MBS in PVC/MBS blends was kept at a constant value of 20 wt.%. The effects of arrangement of St in MBS on the mechanical and optical properties of PVC/MBS blends were studied. The notched Izod impact test results showed that the MBS with a PB homopolymer core grafted with St had a lowest brittle-ductile transition (BDT) temperature and BDT temperature increased with the amount of St copolymerized with Bd in the core of MBS. The transparency of blends also increased with the amount of St copolymerized with Bd in the core. TEM results showed that the arrangement of St in MBS influenced the deformation behavior. Two deformation modes were observed in the blends: cavitation and shear yielding.

Olympic Robot Building Manual

The 1989 AI Lab Winter Olympics will take a slightly different twist from previous Olympiads. Although there will still be a dozen or so athletic competitions, the annual talent show finale will now be a display not of human talent, but of robot talent. Spurred on by the question, "Why aren't there more robots running around the AI Lab?", Olympic Robot Building is an attempt to teach everyone how to build a robot and get them started. Robot kits will be given out the last week of classes before the Christmas break and teams have until the Robot Talent Show, January 27th, to build a machine that intelligently connects perception to action. There is no constraint on what can be built; participants are free to pick their own problems and solution implementations. As Olympic Robot Building is purposefully a talent show, there is no particular obstacle course to be traversed or specific feat to be demonstrated. The hope is that this format will promote creativity, freedom and imagination. This manual provides a guide to overcoming all the practical problems in building things. What follows are tutorials on the components supplied in the kits: a microprocessor circuit "brain", a variety of sensors and motors, a mechanical building block system, a complete software development environment, some example robots and a few tips on debugging and prototyping. Parts given out in the kits can be used, ignored or supplemented, as the kits are designed primarily to overcome the intertia of getting started. If all goes well, then come February, there should be all kinds of new members running around the AI Lab!

Image Chunking: Defining Spatial Building Blocks for Scene Analysis

Rapid judgments about the properties and spatial relations of objects are the crux of visually guided interaction with the world. Vision begins, however, with essentially pointwise representations of the scene, such as arrays of pixels or small edge fragments. For adequate time-performance in recognition, manipulation, navigation, and reasoning, the processes that extract meaningful entities from the pointwise representations must exploit parallelism. This report develops a framework for the fast extraction of scene entities, based on a simple, local model of parallel computation.sAn image chunk is a subset of an image that can act as a unit in the course of spatial analysis. A parallel preprocessing stage constructs a variety of simple chunks uniformly over the visual array. On the basis of these chunks, subsequent serial processes locate relevant scene components and assemble detailed descriptions of them rapidly. This thesis defines image chunks that facilitate the most potentially time-consuming operations of spatial analysis---boundary tracing, area coloring, and the selection of locations at which to apply detailed analysis. Fast parallel processes for computing these chunks from images, and chunk-based formulations of indexing, tracing, and coloring, are presented. These processes have been simulated and evaluated on the lisp machine and the connection machine.

Building with Scottish Stone.

Building with Scottish Stone aims to encourage more use of stone sourced from Scotland’s working quarries and to provide a better understanding of those mineralogical properties which give each stone its distinctive quality. The nation’s architectural history is synonymous with the use of natural stone, and the principles of construction developed over generations in response to Scotland’s particular climatic conditions still find relevance today in the design and detailing of new buildings. Equally, an understanding of the ways in which stone is extracted and processed is as fundamental to its contemporary use as having up-to-date knowledge of the continuously changing legislation that affects its specification and procurement. Building with Scottish Stone is a stimulating introduction to these and many other factors to be considered when using this richly-varied and timeless resource in the design of new buildings.

Building knowledge repositories: partnership of sectors

Tedd, L.A. (2008). Building knowledge repositories: partnership of sectors. Presentation given at conference on Building Knowledge Repositories organised by the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Delhi, 7-9 February 2008. Delhi, India, February 2008.

Building Responsive Systems from Physically-correct Specifications

Predictability - the ability to foretell that an implementation will not violate a set of specified reliability and timeliness requirements - is a crucial, highly desirable property of responsive embedded systems. This paper overviews a development methodology for responsive systems, which enhances predictability by eliminating potential hazards resulting from physically-unsound specifications. The backbone of our methodology is the Time-constrained Reactive Automaton (TRA) formalism, which adopts a fundamental notion of space and time that restricts expressiveness in a way that allows the specification of only reactive, spontaneous, and causal computation. Using the TRA model, unrealistic systems - possessing properties such as clairvoyance, caprice, in finite capacity, or perfect timing - cannot even be specified. We argue that this "ounce of prevention" at the specification level is likely to spare a lot of time and energy in the development cycle of responsive systems - not to mention the elimination of potential hazards that would have gone, otherwise, unnoticed. The TRA model is presented to system developers through the CLEOPATRA programming language. CLEOPATRA features a C-like imperative syntax for the description of computation, which makes it easier to incorporate in applications already using C. It is event-driven, and thus appropriate for embedded process control applications. It is object-oriented and compositional, thus advocating modularity and reusability. CLEOPATRA is semantically sound; its objects can be transformed, mechanically and unambiguously, into formal TRA automata for verification purposes, which can be pursued using model-checking or theorem proving techniques. Since 1989, an ancestor of CLEOPATRA has been in use as a specification and simulation language for embedded time-critical robotic processes.

Developing wireless measurement system for building deployed capacitive sensors with optimized RF front end circuit

In this paper, a prototype of miniaturized, low power, bi-directional wireless sensor node for wireless sensor networks (WSN) was designed for doors and windows building monitoring. The capacitive pressure sensors have been developed particularly for such application, where packaging size and minimization of the power requirements of the sensors are the major drivers. The capacitive pressure sensors have been fabricated using a 2.4 mum thick strain compensated heavily boron doped SiGeB diaphragm is presented. In order to integrate the sensors with the wireless module, the sensor dice was wire bonded onto TO package using chip on board (COB) technology. The telemetric link and its capabilities to send information for longer range have been significantly improved using a new design and optimization process. The simulation tool employed for this work was the Designerreg tool from Ansoft Corporation.

Efficient building management with IP-based wireless sensor network

Existing Building/Energy Management Systems (BMS/EMS) fail to convey holistic performance to the building manager. A 20% reduction in energy consumption can be achieved by efficiently operated buildings compared with current practice. However, in the majority of buildings, occupant comfort and energy consumption analysis is primarily restricted by available sensor and meter data. Installation of a continuous monitoring process can significantly improve the building systems’ performance. We present WSN-BMDS, an IP-based wireless sensor network building monitoring and diagnostic system. The main focus of WSN-BMDS is to obtain much higher degree of information about the building operation then current BMSs are able to provide. Our system integrates a heterogeneous set of wireless sensor nodes with IEEE 802.11 backbone routers and the Global Sensor Network (GSN) web server. Sensing data is stored in a database at the back office via UDP protocol and can be access over the Internet using GSN. Through this demonstration, we show that WSN-BMDS provides accurate measurements of air-temperature, air-humidity, light, and energy consumption for particular rooms in our target building. Our interactive graphical user interface provides a user-friendly environment showing live network topology, monitor network statistics, and run-time management actions on the network. We also demonstrate actuation by changing the artificial light level in one of the rooms.

A study of the RF characteristics for wireless sensor deployment in building environment

In this paper, The radio Frequency (RF) Monitoring and Measurement of the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) located in Cork city will be monitored and analyzed in both the Zigbee (2.44 GHz) and the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM 433 MHz). The main objective of this survey is to confirm what the noise and interferences threat signals exist in these bands. It was agreed that the surveys would be carried out in 5 different rooms and areas that are candidates for the Wireless Sensors deployments. Based on the carried on study, A Zigbee standard Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) will be developed employing a number of motes for sensing number of signals like temperature, light and humidity beside the RSSI and battery voltage monitoring. Such system will be used later on to control and improve indoor building climate at reduced costs, remove the need for cabling and both installation and operational costs are significantly reduced.

Energy harvesting embedded wireless sensor system for building environment applications

For many wireless sensor networks applications, indoor light energy is the only ambient energy source commonly available. Many advantages and constraints co-exist in this technology. However, relatively few indoor light powered harvesters have been presented and much research remains to be carried out on a variety of related design considerations and trade-offs. This work presents a solution using the Tyndall mote and an indoor light powered wireless sensor node. It analyses design considerations on several issues such as indoor light characteristics, solar panel component choice, maximum power point tracking, energy storage elements and the trade-offs and choices between them.

Design of miniaturized wireless sensor mote and actuator for building monitoring and control

In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation are introduced for building deployment application. The core of the mote design is based on the 8 bit AVR microcontroller, Atmega1281 and 2.4 GHz wireless communication chip, CC2420. The module PCB fabrication is using the stackable technology providing powerful configuration capability. Three main layers of size 25 mm2 are structured to form the mote; these are RF, sensor and power layers. The sensors were selected carefully to meet both the building monitoring and design requirements. Beside the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks. Experiments show that the developed mote works effectively in giving stable data acquisition and owns good communication and power performance.