Composite Performance and Reliability Analysis for Hypercube Systems

In this paper we propose a novel technique to model and ana¿ lyze the performability of parallel and distributed architectures using GSPN-reward models.

Influence of Starch Polysaccharide on the Remolded Properties of 2 Indian clay Samples

The reported presence in marine clays and the recognized role of polysaccharide as a bonding agent provided the motivation to examine the role of starch polysaccharide in the remoulded properties of nonswelling (kaolinite) and swelling (bentonite) groups of clays. The starch polysaccharide belongs to a group of naturally occurring, large-sized organic molecules (termed polymers) and is built up by extensive repetition of simple chemical units called repeat units. The results of the study indicate that the impact of the starch polysaccharide on the remoulded properties of clays is dependent on the mineralogy of the clays. On addition to bentonite clay, the immensely large number of segments (repeat units) of the starch polysaccharide create several polymer segment - clay surface bonds that cause extensive aggregation of the bentonite units layers. The aggregation of the bentonite unit layers greatly curtails the available surface area of the clay mineral for diffuse ion layer formation. The reduction in diffuse ion layer thickness markedly lowers the consistency limits and vane shear strength of the bentonite clay. On addition to kaolinite, the numerous polymer segment - clay surface bonds enhance the tendency of the kaolinite particles to flocculate. The enhanced particle flocculation is responsible apparently for a small to moderate increase in the liquid limit and remoulded undrained strength of the nonswelling clay.

Decentralized Parallel Operation of Inverters Sharing Unbalanced and Nonlinear Loads

In this paper, a wireless control strategy for parallel operation of three-phase four-wire inverters is proposed. A generalized situation is considered where the inverters are of unequal power ratings and the loads are nonlinear and unbalanced in nature. The proposed control algorithm exploits the potential of sinusoidal domain proportional+multiresonant controller ( in the inner voltage regulation loop) to make the system suitable for nonlinear and unbalanced loads with a simple and generalized structure of virtual output-impedance loop. The decentralized operation is achieved by using three-phase P/Q droop characteristics. The overall control algorithm helps to limit the harmonic contents and the degree of unbalance in the output-voltage waveform and to achieve excellent power-sharing accuracy in spite of mismatch in the inverter output impedances. Moreover, a synchronized turn on with consequent change over to the droop mode is applied for the new incoming unit in order to limit the circulating current completely. The simulation and experimental results from-1 kVA and -0.5 kVA paralleled units validate the effectiveness of the scheme.

Electrical Contact Resistance in Thin (<= 0.5 mu m) Gold Plated Contacts: Effect of Gold Plating Thickness

This paper describes the electrical contact resistance (ECR) measurements made on thin gold plated (gold plating of <= 0.5 mu m with a Ni underlayer of similar to 2 mu m) oxygen free high conductivity (OFHC) Cu contacts in vacuum environment. ECR in gold plated OFHC Cu contacts is found to be slightly higher than that in bare OFHC Cu contacts. Even though gold is a softer material than copper, the relatively high ECR values observed in gold plated contacts are mainly due to the higher hardness and electrical resistivity of the underlying Ni layer. It is well known that ECR is directly related to plating factor, which increases with increasing coating thickness when the electrical resistivity of coating material is more than that of substrate. Surprisingly, in the present case it is found that the ECR decreases with increasing gold layer thickness on OFHC Cu substrate (gold has higher electrical resistivity than OFHC Cu). It is analytically demonstrated from the topography and microhardness measurements results that this peculiar behavior is associated with thin gold platings, where the changes in surface roughness and microhardness with increasing layer thickness overshadow the effect of plating factor on ECR.

Adaptive Keeper Design for Dynamic Logic Circuits Using Rate Sensing Technique

The increasing variability in device leakage has made the design of keepers for wide OR structures a challenging task. The conventional feedback keepers (CONV) can no longer improve the performance of wide dynamic gates for the future technologies. In this paper, we propose an adaptive keeper technique called rate sensing keeper (RSK) that enables faster switching and tracks the variation across different process corners. It can switch upto 1.9x faster (for 20 legs) than CONV and can scale upto 32 legs as against 20 legs for CONV in a 130-nm 1.2-V process. The delay tracking is within 8% across the different process corners. We demonstrate the circuit operation of RSK using a 32 x 8 register file implemented in an industrial 130-nm 1.2-V CMOS process. The performance of individual dynamic logic gates are also evaluated on chip for various keeper techniques. We show that the RSK technique gives superior performance compared to the other alternatives such as Conditional Keeper (CKP) and current mirror-based keeper (LCR).

V-CE Sensing for IGBT Protection in NPC Three Level Converters-Causes For Spurious Trippings and Their Elimination

Neutral point clamped (NPC), three level converters with insulated gate bipolar transistor devices are very popular in medium voltage, high power applications. DC bus short circuit protection is usually done, using the sensed voltage across collector and emitter (i.e., V-CE sensing), of all the devices in a leg. This feature is accommodated with the conventional gate drive circuits used in the two level converters. The similar gate drive circuit, when adopted for NPC three level converter protection, leads to false V-CE fault signals for inner devices of the leg. The paper explains the detailed circuit behavior and reasons, which result in the occurrence of such false V-CE fault signals. This paper also illustrates that such a phenomenon shows dependence on the power factor of the supplied three-phase load. Finally, experimental results are presented to support the analysis. It is shown that the problem can be avoided by blocking out the V-CE sense fault signals of the inner devices of the leg.

A Feature-Based Solution to Forward Problem in Electrical Capacitance Tomography of Conductive Materials

A new feature-based technique is introduced to solve the nonlinear forward problem (FP) of the electrical capacitance tomography with the target application of monitoring the metal fill profile in the lost foam casting process. The new technique is based on combining a linear solution to the FP and a correction factor (CF). The CF is estimated using an artificial neural network (ANN) trained using key features extracted from the metal distribution. The CF adjusts the linear solution of the FP to account for the nonlinear effects caused by the shielding effects of the metal. This approach shows promising results and avoids the curse of dimensionality through the use of features and not the actual metal distribution to train the ANN. The ANN is trained using nine features extracted from the metal distributions as input. The expected sensors readings are generated using ANSYS software. The performance of the ANN for the training and testing data was satisfactory, with an average root-mean-square error equal to 2.2%.

A Shapley Value-Based Approach to Discover Influential Nodes in Social Networks

Our study concerns an important current problem, that of diffusion of information in social networks. This problem has received significant attention from the Internet research community in the recent times, driven by many potential applications such as viral marketing and sales promotions. In this paper, we focus on the target set selection problem, which involves discovering a small subset of influential players in a given social network, to perform a certain task of information diffusion. The target set selection problem manifests in two forms: 1) top-k nodes problem and 2) lambda-coverage problem. In the top-k nodes problem, we are required to find a set of k key nodes that would maximize the number of nodes being influenced in the network. The lambda-coverage problem is concerned with finding a set of k key nodes having minimal size that can influence a given percentage lambda of the nodes in the entire network. We propose a new way of solving these problems using the concept of Shapley value which is a well known solution concept in cooperative game theory. Our approach leads to algorithms which we call the ShaPley value-based Influential Nodes (SPINs) algorithms for solving the top-k nodes problem and the lambda-coverage problem. We compare the performance of the proposed SPIN algorithms with well known algorithms in the literature. Through extensive experimentation on four synthetically generated random graphs and six real-world data sets (Celegans, Jazz, NIPS coauthorship data set, Netscience data set, High-Energy Physics data set, and Political Books data set), we show that the proposed SPIN approach is more powerful and computationally efficient. Note to Practitioners-In recent times, social networks have received a high level of attention due to their proven ability in improving the performance of web search, recommendations in collaborative filtering systems, spreading a technology in the market using viral marketing techniques, etc. It is well known that the interpersonal relationships (or ties or links) between individuals cause change or improvement in the social system because the decisions made by individuals are influenced heavily by the behavior of their neighbors. An interesting and key problem in social networks is to discover the most influential nodes in the social network which can influence other nodes in the social network in a strong and deep way. This problem is called the target set selection problem and has two variants: 1) the top-k nodes problem, where we are required to identify a set of k influential nodes that maximize the number of nodes being influenced in the network and 2) the lambda-coverage problem which involves finding a set of influential nodes having minimum size that can influence a given percentage lambda of the nodes in the entire network. There are many existing algorithms in the literature for solving these problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm which is based on a novel interpretation of information diffusion in a social network as a cooperative game. Using this analogy, we develop an algorithm based on the Shapley value of the underlying cooperative game. The proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of generality or computational complexity or both. Our results are validated through extensive experimentation on both synthetically generated and real-world data sets.

Modeling and Field Oriented Control of Salient Pole Wound Field Synchronous Machine in Stator Flux Coordinates

This paper describes the field oriented control of a salient pole wound field synchronous machine in stator flux coordinates. The procedure for derivation of flux linkage equations along any general rotating axes including stator flux axes is given. The stator flux equations are used to identify the cross-coupling occurring between the axes due to saliency in the machine. The coupling terms are canceled as feedforward terms in the generation of references for current controllers to achieve good decoupling during transients. The design of current controller for stator-flux-oriented control is presented. This paper proposes the method of extending rotor flux closed loop observer for sensorless control of wound field synchronous machine. This paper also proposes a new sensorless control by using stator flux closed loop observer and estimation of torque angle using stator current components in stator flux coordinates. Detailed experimental results from a sensorless 15.8 hp salient pole wound field synchronous machine drive are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed control strategy from a low speed of 0.8 Hz to 50 Hz.

Area Optimized H.264 Intra Prediction Architecture for 1080p HD Resolution

High performance video standards use prediction techniques to achieve high picture quality at low bit rates. The type of prediction decides the bit rates and the image quality. Intra Prediction achieves high video quality with significant reduction in bit rate. This paper present an area optimized architecture for Intra prediction, for H.264 decoding at HDTV resolution with a target of achieving 60 fps. The architecture was validated on Virtex-5 FPGA based platform. The architecture achieves a frame rate of 64 fps. The architecture is based on multi-level memory hierarchy to reduce latency and ensure optimum resources utilization. It removes redundancy by reusing same functional blocks across different modes. The proposed architecture uses only 13% of the total LUTs available on the Xilinx FPGA XC5VLX50T.