Nonresonant edge slot antenna for phased array applications: Theory and experiment

The design and development of nonresonant edge slot antenna for phased array applications has been presented. The radiating element is a slot cut on the narrow wall of rectangular waveguide (edge slot). The admittance characteristics of the edge slot have been rigorously studied using a novel hybrid method. Nonresonant arrays have been fabricated using the present slot characterization data and the earlier published data. The experimentally measured electrical characteristics of the antenna are presented which clearly brings out the accuracy of the present method.

Fast-Group-Decodable STBCs via Codes over GF(4)

In this paper we construct low decoding complexity STBCs by using the Pauli matrices as linear dispersion matrices. In this case the Hurwitz-Radon orthogonality condition is shown to be easily checked by transferring the problem to $\mathbb{F}_4$ domain. The problem of constructing low decoding complexity STBCs is shown to be equivalent to finding certain codes over $\mathbb{F}_4$. It is shown that almost all known low complexity STBCs can be obtained by this approach. New codes are given that have the least known decoding complexity in particular ranges of rate.

Precoding with X-codes to increase capacity with discrete input alphabets

We consider Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels with discrete input alphabets. We propose a non-diagonal precoder based on X-Codes in to increase the mutual information. The MIMO channel is transformed into a set of parallel subchannels using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and X-codes are then used to pair the subchannels. X-Codes are fully characterized by the pairings and the 2 × 2 real rotation matrices for each pair (parameterized with a single angle). This precoding structure enables to express the total mutual information as a sum of the mutual information of all the pairs. The problem of finding the optimal precoder with the above structure, which maximizes the total mutual information, is equivalent to i) optimizing the rotation angle and the power allocation within each pair and ii) finding the optimal pairing and power allocation among the pairs. It is shown that the mutual information achieved with the proposed pairing scheme is very close to that achieved with the optimal precoder by Cruz et al., and significantly better than mercury/waterfilling strategy by Lozano et al.. Our approach greatly simplifies both the precoder optimization and the detection complexity, making it suitable for practical applications.

Automatic decomposition of unstructured meshes employing genetic algorithms for parallel FEM computations

Parallel execution of computational mechanics codes requires efficient mesh-partitioning techniques. These mesh-partitioning techniques divide the mesh into specified number of submeshes of approximately the same size and at the same time, minimise the interface nodes of the submeshes. This paper describes a new mesh partitioning technique, employing Genetic Algorithms. The proposed algorithm operates on the deduced graph (dual or nodal graph) of the given finite element mesh rather than directly on the mesh itself. The algorithm works by first constructing a coarse graph approximation using an automatic graph coarsening method. The coarse graph is partitioned and the results are interpolated onto the original graph to initialise an optimisation of the graph partition problem. In practice, hierarchy of (usually more than two) graphs are used to obtain the final graph partition. The proposed partitioning algorithm is applied to graphs derived from unstructured finite element meshes describing practical engineering problems and also several example graphs related to finite element meshes given in the literature. The test results indicate that the proposed GA based graph partitioning algorithm generates high quality partitions and are superior to spectral and multilevel graph partitioning algorithms.

Effect of contact at the interface on the compressive properties of fly ash-epoxy composites

Particulate composites based on polymer matrices generally contain fillers, especially those that are abundantly available and are cheaper. The inclusion of these, besides improving the properties, makes the system costwise viable, In the present study, fly ash was tried as a filler in epoxy. The filler particle surfaces were modified using three chemical surface treatment techniques in order to elicit the effect of adhesion at the interface on the mechanical properties of these composites. The compatibilizing of the filler with the use of a silane coupling agent yielded the best compression strength values. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) has been used to characterize and supplement the mechanical test data.

iPBA: a tool for protein structure comparison using sequence alignment strategies

With the immense growth in the number of available protein structures, fast and accurate structure comparison has been essential. We propose an efficient method for structure comparison, based on a structural alphabet. Protein Blocks (PBs) is a widely used structural alphabet with 16 pentapeptide conformations that can fairly approximate a complete protein chain. Thus a 3D structure can be translated into a 1D sequence of PBs. With a simple Needleman-Wunsch approach and a raw PB substitution matrix, PB-based structural alignments were better than many popular methods. iPBA web server presents an improved alignment approach using (i) specialized PB Substitution Matrices (SM) and (ii) anchor-based alignment methodology. With these developments, the quality of similar to 88% of alignments was improved. iPBA alignments were also better than DALI, MUSTANG and GANGSTA(+) in > 80% of the cases. The webserver is designed to for both pairwise comparisons and database searches. Outputs are given as sequence alignment and superposed 3D structures displayed using PyMol and Jmol. A local alignment option for detecting subs-structural similarity is also embedded. As a fast and efficient `sequence-based' structure comparison tool, we believe that it will be quite useful to the scientific community. iPBA can be accessed at http://www.dsimb.inserm.fr/dsimb_tools/ipba/.

On the explicit determination of the polar decomposition in n-dimensional vector spaces

A method for the explicit determination of the polar decomposition (and the related problem of finding tensor square roots) when the underlying vector space dimension n is arbitrary (but finite), is proposed. The method uses the spectral resolution, and avoids the determination of eigenvectors when the tensor is invertible. For any given dimension n, an appropriately constructed van der Monde matrix is shown to play a key role in the construction of each of the component matrices (and their inverses) in the polar decomposition.

The production of AlN-rich matrix composites by the reactive infiltration of Al alloys in nitrogen

Aluminium nitride (AlN)-Al matrices reinforced with Al2O3 particulate have been fabricated by reactive infiltration of Al-2% Mg alloy into Al2O3 preforms in N-2 in the temperature range of 900-1075 degreesC. The growth of composites of useful thickness was facilitated by the presence of a Mg-rich external getter, in the absence of which composite growth is self-limiting and terminates prematurely. Successful growth of composites has been attributed to the reduction in residual oxygen partial pressure brought about by the reaction with oxygen of highly volatile Mg in the getter alloy. The microstructure of the matrix consists of AlN-rich regions contiguous with the particulate with metal-rich channels in-between, thereby suggesting that nitridation initiates by preferential wicking of alloy along the particle surfaces. The increase in nitride content of the matrix with temperature is consistent with hardness values that vary between similar to3 and 10 GPa. (C) 2002 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

A new parallel overlapped domain decomposition method for nonlinear dynamic finite element analysis

In this paper a new parallel algorithm for nonlinear transient dynamic analysis of large structures has been presented. An unconditionally stable Newmark-beta method (constant average acceleration technique) has been employed for time integration. The proposed parallel algorithm has been devised within the broad framework of domain decomposition techniques. However, unlike most of the existing parallel algorithms (devised for structural dynamic applications) which are basically derived using nonoverlapped domains, the proposed algorithm uses overlapped domains. The parallel overlapped domain decomposition algorithm proposed in this paper has been formulated by splitting the mass, damping and stiffness matrices arises out of finite element discretisation of a given structure. A predictor-corrector scheme has been formulated for iteratively improving the solution in each step. A computer program based on the proposed algorithm has been developed and implemented with message passing interface as software development environment. PARAM-10000 MIMD parallel computer has been used to evaluate the performances. Numerical experiments have been conducted to validate as well as to evaluate the performance of the proposed parallel algorithm. Comparisons have been made with the conventional nonoverlapped domain decomposition algorithms. Numerical studies indicate that the proposed algorithm is superior in performance to the conventional domain decomposition algorithms. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Model of resistances in systems of Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid wires

In a recent paper, we combined the technique of bosonization with the concept of a Rayleigh dissipation function to develop a model for resistances in one-dimensional systems of interacting spinless electrons Europhys. Lett. 93, 57007 (2011)]. We also studied the conductance of a system of three wires by using a current splitting matrix M at the junction. In this paper, we extend our earlier work in several ways. The power dissipated in a three-wire system is calculated as a function of M and the voltages applied in the leads. By combining two junctions of three wires, we examine a system consisting of two parallel resistances. We study the conductance of this system as a function of the M matrices and the two resistances; we find that the total resistance is generally quite different from what one expects for a classical system of parallel resistances. We do a sum over paths to compute the conductance of this system when one of the two resistances is taken to be infinitely large. We study the conductance of a three-wire system of interacting spin-1/2 electrons, and show that the charge and spin conductances can generally be different from each other. Finally, we consider a system of two wires that are coupled by a dissipation function, and we show that this leads to a current in one wire when a voltage bias is applied across the other wire.

Believe it or Not! Multicore CPUs can Match GPUs for FLOP-intensive Applications

In this work, we evaluate performance of a real-world image processing application that uses a cross-correlation algorithm to compare a given image with a reference one. The algorithm processes individual images represented as 2-dimensional matrices of single-precision floating-point values using O(n4) operations involving dot-products and additions. We implement this algorithm on a nVidia GTX 285 GPU using CUDA, and also parallelize it for the Intel Xeon (Nehalem) and IBM Power7 processors, using both manual and automatic techniques. Pthreads and OpenMP with SSE and VSX vector intrinsics are used for the manually parallelized version, while a state-of-the-art optimization framework based on the polyhedral model is used for automatic compiler parallelization and optimization. The performance of this algorithm on the nVidia GPU suffers from: (1) a smaller shared memory, (2) unaligned device memory access patterns, (3) expensive atomic operations, and (4) weaker single-thread performance. On commodity multi-core processors, the application dataset is small enough to fit in caches, and when parallelized using a combination of task and short-vector data parallelism (via SSE/VSX) or through fully automatic optimization from the compiler, the application matches or beats the performance of the GPU version. The primary reasons for better multi-core performance include larger and faster caches, higher clock frequency, higher on-chip memory bandwidth, and better compiler optimization and support for parallelization. The best performing versions on the Power7, Nehalem, and GTX 285 run in 1.02s, 1.82s, and 1.75s, respectively. These results conclusively demonstrate that, under certain conditions, it is possible for a FLOP-intensive structured application running on a multi-core processor to match or even beat the performance of an equivalent GPU version.

Multi-hop Cooperative Wireless Networks: Diversity Multiplexing Tradeoff and Optimal Code Design

We consider single-source single-sink (ss-ss) multi-hop relay networks, with slow-fading links and single-antenna half-duplex relay nodes. While two-hop cooperative relay networks have been studied in great detail in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), few results are available for more general networks. In this paper, we identify two families of networks that are multi-hop generalizations of the two-hop network: K-Parallel-Path (KPP)networks and layered networks.KPP networks, can be viewed as the union of K node-disjoint parallel relaying paths, each of length greater than one. KPP networks are then generalized to KPP(I) networks, which permit interference between paths and to KPP(D) networks, which possess a direct link from source to sink. We characterize the DMT of these families of networks completely for K > 3. Layered networks are networks comprising of layers of relays with edges existing only between adjacent layers, with more than one relay in each layer. We prove that a linear DMT between the maximum diversity dmax and the maximum multiplexing gain of 1 is achievable for single-antenna fully-connected layered networks. This is shown to be equal to the optimal DMT if the number of relaying layers is less than 4.For multiple-antenna KPP and layered networks, we provide an achievable DMT, which is significantly better than known lower bounds for half duplex networks.For arbitrary multi-terminal wireless networks with multiple source-sink pairs, the maximum achievable diversity is shown to be equal to the min-cut between the corresponding source and the sink, irrespective of whether the network has half-duplex or full-duplex relays. For arbitrary ss-ss single-antenna directed acyclic networks with full-duplex relays, we prove that a linear tradeoff between maximum diversity and maximum multiplexing gain is achievable.Along the way, we derive the optimal DMT of a generalized parallel channel and derive lower bounds for the DMT of triangular channel matrices, which are useful in DMT computation of various protocols. We also give alternative and often simpler proofs of several existing results and show that codes achieving full diversity on a MIMO Rayleigh fading channel achieve full diversity on arbitrary fading channels. All protocols in this paper are explicit and use only amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. We also construct codes with short block-lengths based on cyclic division algebras that achieve the optimal DMT for all the proposed schemes.Two key implications of the results in the paper are that the half-duplex constraint does not entail any rate loss for a large class of cooperative networks and that simple AF protocols are often sufficient to attain the optimal DMT

Size-dependent and strain rate effects in quantum dot nanostructures with molecular dynamic simulations

Size and strain rate effects are among several factors which play an important role in determining the response of nanostructures, such as their deformations, to the mechanical loadings. The mechanical deformations in nanostructure systems at finite temperatures are intrinsically dynamic processes. Most of the recent works in this context have been focused on nanowires [1, 2], but very little attention has been paid to such low dimensional nanostructures as quantum dots (QDs). In this contribution, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with an embedded atom potential method(EAM) are carried out to analyse the size and strain rate effects in the silicon (Si) QDs, as an example. We consider various geometries of QDs such as spherical, cylindrical and cubic. We choose Si QDs as an example due to their major applications in solar cells and biosensing. The analysis has also been focused on the variation in the deformation mechanisms with the size and strain rate for Si QD embedded in a matrix of SiO2 [3] (other cases include SiN and SiC matrices).It is observed that the mechanical properties are the functions of the QD size, shape and strain rate as it is in the case for nanowires [2]. We also present the comparative study resulted from the application of different EAM potentials in particular, the Stillinger-Weber (SW) potential, the Tersoff potentials and the environment-dependent interatomic potential (EDIP) [1]. Finally, based on the stabilized structural properties we compute electronic bandstructures of our nanostructures using an envelope function approach and its finite element implementation.

Doubly spectral stochastic finite element method (DSSFEM) for random field problems

Uncertainties in complex dynamic systems play an important role in the prediction of a dynamic response in the mid- and high-frequency ranges. For distributed parameter systems, parametric uncertainties can be represented by random fields leading to stochastic partial differential equations. Over the past two decades, the spectral stochastic finite-element method has been developed to discretize the random fields and solve such problems. On the other hand, for deterministic distributed parameter linear dynamic systems, the spectral finite-element method has been developed to efficiently solve the problem in the frequency domain. In spite of the fact that both approaches use spectral decomposition (one for the random fields and the other for the dynamic displacement fields), very little overlap between them has been reported in literature. In this paper, these two spectral techniques are unified with the aim that the unified approach would outperform any of the spectral methods considered on their own. An exponential autocorrelation function for the random fields, a frequency-dependent stochastic element stiffness, and mass matrices are derived for the axial and bending vibration of rods. Closed-form exact expressions are derived by using the Karhunen-Loève expansion. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the unified spectral approach.

Viscoelastic phenomenology based structure assignment for closed-loop vibration control of a beam with sensors and actuators

In this paper we incorporate a novel approach to synthesize a class of closed-loop feedback control, based on the variational structure assignment. Properties of a viscoelastic system are used to design an active feedback controller for an undamped structural system with distributed sensor, actuator and controller. Wave dispersion properties of onedimensional beam system have been studied. Efficiency of the chosen viscoelastic model in enhancing damping and stability properties of one-dimensional viscoelastic bar have been analyzed. The variational structure is projected on a solution space of a closed-loop system involving a weakly damped structure with distributed sensor and actuator with controller. These assign the phenomenology based internal strain rate damping parameter of a viscoelastic system to the usual elastic structure but with active control. In the formulation a model of cantilever beam with non-collocated actuator and sensor has been considered. The formulation leads to the matrix identification problem of two dynamic stiffness matrices. The method has been simplified to obtain control system gains for the free vibration control of a cantilever beam system with collocated actuator-sensor, using quadratic optimal control and pole-placement methods.