Analysis of the Effect of a Gyrotropic Anisotropy on the Phase Constant and Characteristic Impedance of a Shielded Microstrip Line

In this work, we present an analytical modeling of a highly complex medium-based shielded microstrip line. The study aims at a numerical evaluation of the characteristic impedance and the dispersion characteristics of the dominant hybrid mode in the microstrip line printed on an anisotropic medium. The newly considered complex anisotropy has a full 3×3 tensor form of permittivity and permeability. The study is based on the derivation of the Green's functions of the general complex-medium-based structure in the Fourier domain. The spectral Method of Moments (MoM) and the Galerkin's procedure are combined to solve the resulting homogeneous system of equations. The effect of the gyrotropic anisotropy on the phase constant and the characteristic impedance is particularly investigated. Original and interesting numerical results are obtained and discussed. Our results are found to be in good agreement with available isotropic case data reported in literature

Two-dimensional spatiotemporal monitoring of temperature in photothermal therapy using hybrid photoacoustic-ultrasound transmission tomography

Recently, we presented an add-on to a photoacoustic (PA) computed tomography imager that permits the simultaneous imaging of ultrasound (US) transmission parameters such as the speed of sound (SOS), without additional measurements or instruments. This method uses strong absorbers positioned outside the object in the path of light for producing laser-induced US to interrogate the object in a conventional PA imager. Here, we investigate the feasibility of using this approach, first with PA to pin-point the location of photothermal therapeutic agents and then with serial SOS tomograms to image and monitor the resulting local temperature changes when the agents are excited with continuous wave (CW) light. As the object we used an agar-based tissue-mimicking cylinder carrying beads embedded with different concentrations of gold nanospheres. PA and SOS tomograms were simultaneously acquired as the gold nanospheres were photothermally heated using a 532-nm CW laser. In a first approximation, using the relation between SOS of water and temperature, the SOS tomograms were converted into temperature maps. The experimental results were verified using simulations: Monte Carlo modeling of light propagation through a turbid medium and using the obtained absorbed energy densities in heat diffusion modeling for spatial temperature distributio

Surface reconstruction of wear in carpets by using a wavelet edge detector

Carpet manufacturers have wear labels assigned to their products by human experts who evaluate carpet samples subjected to accelerated wear in a test device. There is considerable industrial and academic interest in going from human to automated evaluation, which should be less cumbersome and more objective. In this paper, we present image analysis research on videos of carpet surfaces scanned with a 3D laser. The purpose is obtaining good depth Images for an automated system that should have a high percentage of correct assessments for a wide variety of carpets. The innovation is the use of a wavelet edge detector to obtain a more continuously defined surface shape. The evaluation is based on how well the algorithms allow a good linear ranking and a good discriminance of consecutive wear labels. The results show an improved linear ranking for most carpet types, for two carpet types the results are quite significant

Vulnérabilité climatique et stratégies productives d’adaptation des agropasteurs de Hadj Mechri

Abstract and keywords provided in EnglishInterannual variability which characterizes climate of northern Algeria is exacerbated with climate change. In the steppe, where agropastoral activities are totally dependent on rainfall, the increase of pluviometry variability aggravate agro-pastoralists vulnerability, particularly those weakly endowed and compromises their farming systems. Faced with this situation, these agropastoralists develop coping strategies. Those who remain on rangelands after droughts resort in rainy years to livestock guarding or to association in livestock /cereal crop that allow them to rebuild their capital by taking advantage of the occasional natural offer of rangelands.La variabilité interannuelle qui caractérise le climat de l’Algérie du Nord est exacerbée avec le changement climatique. Dans la steppe, où les activités agropastorales dépendent totalement de la pluviométrie, l’augmentation de la variabilité de cette dernière aggrave la vulnérabilité des agropasteurs, notamment ceux faiblement dotés et compromet leurs systèmes de production. Face à cette situation, ces agropasteurs développent diverses stratégies d’adaptation. Ceux qui se maintiennent sur les parcours après les périodes de sécheresse, recourent en bonnes années au gardiennage d’animaux ou à l’association d’élevage/céréaliculture qui leur permettent de reconstituer leur capital en tirant profit de l’offre naturelle occasionnelle des parcours

Gyro-Chirality Effect of Bianisotropic Substrate On the operational of Rectangular Microstrip Patch Antenna

yesIn this paper, the gyrotropic bi-anisotropy of the chiral medium in substrate constitutive parameters (ξc and ηc) of a rectangular microstrip patch antenna is introduced in order to observe its effects on the complex resonant frequency, half-power bandwidth and input impedance. Numerical calculations and analysis based on the dominant mode are carried out to show that the latter is directly related to the former. This paper is based on the Moment Method as full-wave spectral domain approach using sinusoidal basis functions. Two new results, namely the appearance of the difference (ξc-ηc) and sum (ξc+ηc) of the two magneto-electric elements are obtained in the electric transverse components and Green tensor expressions, respectively. These new results can be considered as a generalisation form of the previously published work

Diagnostic et traitement de la Maladie du charbon à localisation palpébrale: à propos d’un cas et revue de littérature

L´anthrax est une zoonose causée par le Bacillus anthracis. les humains contractent généralement cette maladie dans des régions endémiques, par contact direct avec des animaux infectés ou avec leurs produits contaminés. Les localisations palpébrales sont rares dans la pratique clinique et posent des problèmes de diagnostic différentiel. Les auteurs rapportent l'observation d'un patient admis dans un tableau de cellulite préseptale, avec escarre noirâtre étendue de la paupière supérieure et oedème extensif de l´hémiface, faisant suspecter une localisation palpébrale de la maladie du charbon. L'examen bactériologique a permis de confirmer le diagnostic. Le patient a bénéficié d´une antibiothérapie à base de pénicilline G avec une bonne évolution.Key words: Maladie du charbon, oeil, oedème, blépharoplasti

Discriminative speaker recognition using Large Margin GMM

International audienceMost state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems are based on discriminative learning approaches. On the other hand, generative Gaussian mixture models (GMM) have been widely used in speaker recognition during the last decades. In an earlier work, we proposed an algorithm for discriminative training of GMM with diagonal covariances under a large margin criterion. In this paper, we propose an improvement of this algorithm which has the major advantage of being computationally highly efficient, thus well suited to handle large scale databases. We also develop a new strategy to detect and handle the outliers that occur in the training data. To evaluate the performances of our new algorithm, we carry out full NIST speaker identification and verification tasks using NIST-SRE'2006 data, in a Symmetrical Factor Analysis compensation scheme. The results show that our system significantly outperforms the traditional discriminative Support Vector Machines (SVM) based system of SVM-GMM supervectors, in the two speaker recognition tasks

Self-similar chain conformations in polymer gels

We use molecular dynamics simulations to study the swelling of randomly end-cross-linked polymer networks in good solvent conditions. We find that the equilibrium degree of swelling saturates at Q_eq = N_e**(3/5) for mean strand lengths N_s exceeding the melt entanglement length N_e. The internal structure of the network strands in the swollen state is characterized by a new exponent nu=0.72. Our findings are in contradiction to de Gennes' c*-theorem, which predicts Q_eq proportional N_s**(4/5) and nu=0.588. We present a simple Flory argument for a self-similar structure of mutually interpenetrating network strands, which yields nu=7/10 and otherwise recovers the classical Flory-Rehner theory. In particular, Q_eq = N_e**(3/5), if N_e is used as effective strand length.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 3 Figure