THE TECHNOLOGY FORECASTING OF NEW MATERIALS: THE EXAMPLE OF NANOSIZED CERAMIC POWDERS

New materials have been recognized as significant drivers for corporate growth and profitability in today’s fast changing environments. The nanosized ceramic powders played important parts in new materials field nowadays. However, little has been done in discussing the technology forecasting for the new materials development. Accordingly, this study applied the growth curve method to investigate the technology performances of nanosized ceramic powders. We adopted the bibliometric analysis through EI database and trademark office (USPTO) database to gain the useful data for this work. The effort resulted in nanosized ceramic powders were all in the initial growth periods of technological life cycles. The technology performances of nanosized ceramic powders through the EI and USPTO databases were similar and verified by each other. And there were parts of substitutions between traditional and nanosized ceramic powders. The bibliometric analysis was proposed as the simple and efficient tools to link the science and technology activities, and to obtain quantitative and historical data for helping researchers in technology forecasting, especially in rare historical data available fields, such as the new materials fields.new materials, bibliometric analysis, technology forecasting.

Image quality as a function of unsharp masking band center

Unsharp masking is an image enhancement technique used to obtain a Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) greater than unity within a given spatial frequency band. In unsharp masking, the mask forms a slightly blurred version of the original image. The result is more severe in the high frequency region than at low frequencies. The final image is made by combining the original positive and the blurred negative images. The subjective quality of images resulting from unsharp masking is a function of the frequency response of the human eye. This study evaluates the unsharp masking technique by implementing the Subjective Quality Factor (SQF) criterion

Dynamics simulation of microelectromechanical electrostatic actuator incorporating the squeeze-film damping effect

In this study, the influences of the squeeze-film damping effect on the dynamic behavior of the microelectromechanical electrostatic actuators are investigated by the hybrid numerical scheme comprising the differential transformation method and the finite difference method. There are two types of actuators which including the circular micro-plate and the clamped-clamped micro-beam, relatively. The analyses take account of the axial stress effect, the residual stress and the fringing field effect within the micro actuators and explore the dynamic response of the plate/beam as a function of the magnitude of the AC driving voltage. The effectiveness of a combined DC/AC loading scheme in driving the micro actuators are examined. It is shown that the use of an AC actuating voltage in addition to the DC driving voltage provides an effective means of tuning the dynamic response of the micro actuators. Therefore, the results show that the hybrid method provides an accurate and computationally-efficient means of analyzing the nonlinear behavior of the micro-beam structures used in many of today’s MEMS-based actuator systems

Numerical simulation and analysis of the micro electrostatic device

In general, analysis of the electrostatic device is quite difficult and complicated due to the electrostatic coupling effect and the nonlinear electrostatic force. In this study, a hybrid method (H. M.) for the micro-structure system, which combines the differential transformation method (D. T. M.) and finite difference approximation techniques, is used to overcome the nonlinear electrostatic coupling phenomenon. The differential transformation employed is a transformed function based on the Taylor series that is effective in solving nonlinear problems with fast convergence. First, the natural frequencies of a micro fixed-fixed beam are derived as the solutions to a boundary value problem with prescribed boundary conditions by the differential transformation method. And then the nonlinear governing equation of a micro cantilever beam is solved by the hybrid method. The numerical results of the calculated pull-in voltage and natural frequencies are compared with other literatures using various computational methods and are found to be in good agreement. Overall, the results presented in this study show that the proposed hybrid method, provides an accurate and versatile means of analyzing the complex nonlinear behavior of a micro electrostatic devices

Cost minimization for fading channels with energy harvesting and conventional energy

In this paper, we investigate resource allocation strategies for a point-to-point wireless communications system with hybrid energy sources consisting of an energy harvester and a conventional energy source. In particular, as an incentive to promote the use of renewable energy, we assume that the renewable energy has a lower cost than the conventional energy. Then, by assuming that the non-causal information of the energy arrivals and the channel power gains are available, we minimize the total energy cost of such a system over $N$ fading slots under a proposed outage constraint together with the energy harvesting constraints. The outage constraint requires a minimum fixed number of slots to be reliably decoded, and thus leads to a mixed-integer programming formulation for the optimization problem. This constraint is useful, for example, if an outer code is used to recover all the data bits. Optimal linear time algorithms are obtained for two extreme cases, i.e., the number of outage slot is $1$ or $N-1$. For the general case, a lower bound based on the linear programming relaxation, and two suboptimal algorithms are proposed. It is shown that the proposed suboptimal algorithms exhibit only a small gap from the lower bound. We then extend the proposed algorithms to the multi-cycle scenario in which the outage constraint is imposed for each cycle separately. Finally, we investigate the resource allocation strategies when only causal information on the energy arrivals and only channel statistics is available. It is shown that the greedy energy allocation is optimal for this scenario.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Nonlinear Mean Reversion and Arbitrage in the Gold Futures Market

Previous literatures take transaction costs as being negligible when analyzing the futures basis behavior in linear dynamic framework. However, we argue that the relationship between the futures and spot prices with the conventional linear cointegration approach may not be appropriate after taking transaction costs into account. In this paper, an incorporation of transaction costs presented by Dumas (1992) and Michael (1997) into the exponential smooth transition autoregressive (ESTAR) model developed by Granger and Terasvita (1993) is motivated to examine the dynamic relationship between daily gold futures and spot prices and the nonlinear behavior of the gold futures basis. Transaction costs may lead to the existence of neutral band for futures market speculation within which profitable trading opportunities are impossible. Further, our results indicate that the ESTAR model provides higher forecasting power than the linear AR(1) model.