Combined High Power and High Frequency Operation of InGaAsP/InP Lasers at 1.3μm

A simultaneous operation of a semiconductor laser at high power and high speed was demonstrated in a buried crescent laser on a P-InP substrate. In a cavity length of 300μm, a maximum CW power of 130mW at room temperature was obtained in a junction-up mounting configuration. A 3dB bandwidth in excess of 12GHz at an output power of 52mW was observed

Sound propagation over mixed impedances

Outdoor propagation of surface transportation noise is strongly influenced by reflections from the ground surface due to the creation of an intereference pattern. The result is an attenuation with distance over and above that expected from simple spherical divergence and atmospheric absorption. A review of literature shows that ground effects can be characterised by a spherical wave reflection coefficient and a normal surface impedance. Theoretical solutions of point to point propagation over three different ground surface models (local reaction, extended reaction and a rigid backed layer) are described and the first two are shown to give good estimates of the excess attenuation as a function of distance. Methods for measuring the normal surface impedance are discussed and experimental measurements reported. It is concluded that an indirect method employing the local reaction theoretical solution gives reasonable estimates over the frequency range 1-70 kHz. For practical applications the homogeneous ground surface is modified to include the effects of impedance discontinuities. The theoretical solutions are compared with the results obtained from experiments on laboratory models built to a notional scale of 1:100. In the case of the source over a rigid surface and receiver over an acoustically soft ground surface, it is shown that (a) for a low noise source (e.g. cars) the impedance discontinuity has negligible effect and (b) that for elevated sources (e.g. lorries) the excess attenuation is increased relative to that of a homogeneous surface. The double discontinuity introduced by a rigid strip in an acoustically soft ground surface is also examined. Experimental results indicate the effect of the strip is insignificant for strip widths less than 10% of the source receiver separation distance. For wider strips it is found that prediction can be improved by postulating an increased average surface impedance

Acoustic features of piano sounds

To date efforts of music transcription indicate the need for modelling the data signal in a more comprehensive manner in order to improve the transcription process of music performances. This research work is concerned with the investigation of two features associated with the reproduced sound of a piano; the inharmonicity factor of the piano strings and the double decay rate of the resulting sound. Firstly, a simple model of the inharmonicity is proposed and the factors that affect the modelled signal are identified, such as the magnitude of the inharmonicity, the number of harmonics, the time parameter, the phase characteristics and the harmonic amplitudes. A formation of a socalled “one-sided” effect appears in simulated signals, although this effect is obscured in real recordings potentially due to the non-uniformly varying amplitudes of the harmonic terms. This effect is also discussed through the use of the cepstrum by analysing real piano note recordings and synthesized signals. The cepstrum is further used to describe the effect of the coupled behaviour of two strings through digital waveguides. Secondly, the double decay rate effect is modelled through coupled oscillators and digital waveguides. A physical model of multiple strings is also presented as an extension to the simple model of coupled oscillators and various measurements on a real grand piano are carried out in order to investigate the coupling mechanism between the strings, the soundboard and the bridge. Finally, a model, with reduced dimensionality, is proposed to represent the signal model for single and multiple notes formulated around a Bayesian framework. The potential of such a model is illustrated with the transcription of simple examples of real monophonic and polyphonic piano recordings by implementing the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and Gibbs sampler for multivariate parameter estimation

A simple spectrum estimation technique based on the analytic cepstrum

Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The Teager-Kaiser Energy Cepstral Coefficients as an Effective Structural Health Monitoring Tool

Recently, features and techniques from speech processing have started to gain increasing attention in the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) community, in the context of vibration analysis. In particular, the Cepstral Coefficients (CCs) proved to be apt in discerning the response of a damaged structure with respect to a given undamaged baseline. Previous works relied on the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). This approach, while efficient and still very common in applications, such as speech and speaker recognition, has been followed by other more advanced and competitive techniques for the same aims. The Teager-Kaiser Energy Cepstral Coefficients (TECCs) is one of these alternatives. These features are very closely related to MFCCs, but provide interesting and useful additional values, such as e.g., improved robustness with respect to noise. The goal of this paper is to introduce the use of TECCs for damage detection purposes, by highlighting their competitiveness with closely related features. Promising results from both numerical and experimental data were obtained

Support vector machine based classification in condition monitoring of induction motors

Continuous and trouble-free operation of induction motors is an essential part of modern power and production plants. Faults and failures of electrical machinery may cause remarkable economical losses but also highly dangerous situations. In addition to analytical and knowledge-based models, application of data-based models has established a firm position in the induction motor fault diagnostics during the last decade. For example, pattern recognition with Neural Networks (NN) is widely studied. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a novel machine learning method introduced in early 90's. It is based on the statistical learning theory presented by V.N. Vapnik, and it has been successfully applied to numerous classification and pattern recognition problems such as text categorization, image recognition and bioinformatics. SVM based classifier is built to minimize the structural misclassification risk, whereas conventional classification techniques often apply minimization of the empirical risk. Therefore, SVM is claimed to lead enhanced generalisation properties. Further, application of SVM results in the global solution for a classification problem. Thirdly, SVM based classification is attractive, because its efficiency does not directly depend on the dimension of classified entities. This property is very useful in fault diagnostics, because the number of fault classification features does not have to be drastically limited. However, SVM has not yet been widely studied in the area of fault diagnostics. Specifically, in the condition monitoring of induction motor, it does not seem to have been considered before this research. In this thesis, a SVM based classification scheme is designed for different tasks in induction motor fault diagnostics and for partial discharge analysis of insulation condition monitoring. Several variables are compared as fault indicators, and forces on rotor are found to be important in fault detection instead of motor current that is currently widely studied. The measurement of forces is difficult, but easily measurable vibrations are directly related to the forces. Hence, vibration monitoring is considered in more detail as the medium for the motor fault diagnostics. SVM classifiers are essentially 2-class classifiers. In addition to the induction motor fault diagnostics, the results of this thesis cover various methods for coupling SVMs for carrying out a multi-class classification problem.reviewe