A Flexible, Highly Integrated, Low Power pH Readout

Medical devices are widely employed in everyday life as wearable and implantable technologies make more and more technological breakthroughs. Implantable biosensors can be implanted into the human body for monitoring of relevant physiological parameters, such as pH value, glucose, lactate, CO2 [carbon dioxide], etc. For these applications the implantable unit needs a whole functional set of blocks such as micro- or nano-sensors, sensor signal processing and data generation units, wireless data transmitters etc., which require a well-designed implantable unit.Microelectronics technology with biosensors has caused more and more interest from both academic and industrial areas. With the advancement of microelectronics and microfabrication, it makes possible to fabricate a complete solution on an integrated chip with miniaturized size and low power consumption.This work presents a monolithic pH measurement system with power conditioning system for supply power derived from harvested energy. The proposed system includes a low-power, high linearity pH readout circuits with wide pH values (0-14) and a power conditioning unit based on low drop-out (LDO) voltage regulator. The readout circuit provides square-wave output with frequency being highly linear corresponding to the input pH values. To overcome the process variations, a simple calibration method is employed in the design which makes the output frequency stay constant over process, supply voltage and temperature variations. The prototype circuit is designed and fabricated in a standard 0.13-μm [micro-meter] CMOS process and shows good linearity to cover the entire pH value range from 0-14 while the voltage regulator provides a stable supply voltage for the system

Desıgn of a control and data acquısıtıon system for a multı-mode solar trackıng farm

This paper presents a combination network design for a solar tracking farm consisting of n-solar tracking systems. Serial communication protocol has been adopted for this network with developed strategy to make the farm expandable for possible future extension. The master control unit is responsible for managing all the trackers of the sun location in multi-tracking mode, diagnosis all the trackers for any faults and give complete information about the produced power by each of the solar tracking system. This network protocols is designed to deal with the error control, congestion control and flow control for data transmission in the network

System for monitoring and controlling unit operations that include distillation

Fluid sensor methods and systems adapted for monitoring and/or controlling distillation operations in fluidic systems, such as bath distillation operations or continuous distillation operations, are disclosed. Preferred embodiments are directed to process monitoring and/or process control for unit operations involving endpoint determination of a distillation, for example, as applied to a liquid-component-switching operation (e.g., a solvent switehing operation), a liquid-liquid separation operation, a solute concentration operation, a dispersed- phase concentration operation, among others

An improved artificial dendrite cell algorithm for abnormal signal detection

In dendrite cell algorithm (DCA), the abnormality of a data point is determined by comparing the multi-context antigen value (MCAV) with anomaly threshold. The limitation of the existing threshold is that the value needs to be determined before mining based on previous information and the existing MCAV is inefficient when exposed to extreme values. This causes the DCA fails to detect new data points if the pattern has distinct behavior from previous information and affects detection accuracy. This paper proposed an improved anomaly threshold solution for DCA using the statistical cumulative sum (CUSUM) with the aim to improve its detection capability. In the proposed approach, the MCAV were normalized with upper CUSUM and the new anomaly threshold was calculated during run time by considering the acceptance value and min MCAV. From the experiments towards 12 benchmark and two outbreak datasets, the improved DCA is proven to have a better detection result than its previous version in terms of sensitivity, specificity, false detection rate and accuracy

Systems and methods for monitoring solids using mechanical resonator

Multi-phase system monitoringmethods, systems and apparatus aredisclosed. Preferred embodiments comprise one or more mechanical resonator sensing elements. In preferred embodiments a sensor or a sensor subassembly is ported to a fluidized bed vessel such as a fluidized bed polymerization reactor

Content-based indexing of low resolution documents

In any multimedia presentation, the trend for attendees taking pictures of slides that interest them during the presentation using capturing devices is gaining popularity. To enhance the image usefulness, the images captured could be linked to image or video database. The database can be used for the purpose of file archiving, teaching and learning, research and knowledge management, which concern image search. However, the above-mentioned devices include cameras or mobiles phones have low resolution resulted from poor lighting and noise. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is considered among the most interesting and promising fields as far as image search is concerned. Image search is related with finding images that are similar for the known query image found in a given image database. This thesis concerns with the methods used for the purpose of identifying documents that are captured using image capturing devices. In addition, the thesis also concerns with a technique that can be used to retrieve images from an indexed image database. Both concerns above apply digital image processing technique. To build an indexed structure for fast and high quality content-based retrieval of an image, some existing representative signatures and the key indexes used have been revised. The retrieval performance is very much relying on how the indexing is done. The retrieval approaches that are currently in existence including making use of shape, colour and texture features. Putting into consideration these features relative to individual databases, the majority of retrievals approaches have poor results on low resolution documents, consuming a lot of time and in the some cases, for the given query image, irrelevant images are obtained. The proposed identification and indexing method in the thesis uses a Visual Signature (VS). VS consists of the captures slides textual layout’s graphical information, shape’s moment and spatial distribution of colour. This approach, which is signature-based are considered for fast and efficient matching to fulfil the needs of real-time applications. The approach also has the capability to overcome the problem low resolution document such as noisy image, the environment’s varying lighting conditions and complex backgrounds. We present hierarchy indexing techniques, whose foundation are tree and clustering. K-means clustering are used for visual features like colour since their spatial distribution give a good image’s global information. Tree indexing for extracted layout and shape features are structured hierarchically and Euclidean distance is used to get similarity image for CBIR. The assessment of the proposed indexing scheme is conducted based on recall and precision, a standard CBIR retrieval performance evaluation. We develop CBIR system and conduct various retrieval experiments with the fundamental aim of comparing the accuracy during image retrieval. A new algorithm that can be used with integrated visual signatures, especially in late fusion query was introduced. The algorithm has the capability of reducing any shortcoming associated with normalisation in initial fusion technique. Slides from conferences, lectures and meetings presentation are used for comparing the proposed technique’s performances with that of the existing approaches with the help of real data. This finding of the thesis presents exciting possibilities as the CBIR systems is able to produce high quality result even for a query, which uses low resolution documents. In the future, the utilization of multimodal signatures, relevance feedback and artificial intelligence technique are recommended to be used in CBIR system to further enhance the performance

Bridges Structural Health Monitoring and Deterioration Detection Synthesis of Knowledge and Technology

INE/AUTC 10.0

Exploratory Research on MEMS Technology for Air-Conditioning and Heat-Pumps

This report details the efforts to exploit micro-electrical-mechanical-systems (MEMS) and micro device technologies to improve control of multi-channel evaporators by reducing maldistribution among channels, and increase capacity and efficiency of current vapor-compression refrigeration chillers and heat-pumps. Besides summarizing the market potential of MEMS technology for use in evaporators and micro-heat-pumps, the report describes the accomplishments of an experimental investigation of refrigerant-side maldistribution in multi-channel plate heat exchangers (PHE's). A special test facility designed for the purpose of studying the maldistribution of refrigerant in evaporators is described in the report. The facility allows maldistribution caused by either normal superheat temperature control, or induced by the user in controlled amounts, to be measured and quantified. Four different techniques were used to detect the presence of liquid droplets in the stream of superheated vapor at the evaporator exit, an indication of maldistributed flow. They are: Helium-Neon laser, beaded thermocouple, static mixer and newly designed heated MEMS sensor. Comparison of the four techniques shows that the MEMS sensor designed and fabricated in this project has the highest potential for indicating maldistribution, manifested by entrained liquid droplets, in multi-channel evaporators. A complete set of test results in the time and frequency domain is show in graphical form in the appendices. The design, fabrication, calibration, and testing of the MEMS serpentine resistance sensor is also reported, along with a control scheme and strategy for implementing the MEMS sensor in multi-channel evaporator systems