Development of a mechatronic sorting system for removing contaminants from wool

Automated visual inspection (AVI) systems have been extended to many fields, such as agriculture and the food, plastic and textile industries. Generally, most visual systems only inspect product defects, and then analyze and grade them due to the lack of any sorting function. This main reason rests with the difficulty of using the image data in real time. However, it is increasingly important to either sort good products from bad or grade products into separate groups usingAVI systems. This article describes the development of a mechatronic sorting system and its integration with a vision system for automatically removing contaminants from wool in real time. The integration is implemented by a personal computer, which continuously processes live images under the Windows 2000 operating system. The developed real-time sorting approach is also applicable to many other AVI systems

Time Evolution of Entropy in Gravitational Collapse

We study the time evolution of the entropy of a collapsing spherical domain wall, from the point of view of an asymptotic observer, by investigating the entropy of the entire system (i.e. domain wall and radiation) and induced radiation alone during the collapse. By taking the difference, we find the entropy of the collapsing domain wall, since this is the object which will form a black hole. We find that for large values of time (times larger than $t/R_s\approx8$), the entropy of the collapsing domain wall is a constant, which is of the same order as the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

The effects of dust evolution on disks in the mid-IR

In this paper, we couple together the dust evolution code two-pop-py with the thermochemical disk modelling code ProDiMo. We create a series of thermochemical disk models that simulate the evolution of dust over time from 0.018 Myr to 10 Myr, including the radial drift, growth, and settling of dust grains. We examine the effects of this dust evolution on the mid-infrared gas emission, focussing on the mid-infrared spectral lines of C2H2, CO2, HCN, NH3, OH, and H2O that are readily observable with Spitzer and the upcoming E-ELT and JWST. The addition of dust evolution acts to increase line fluxes by reducing the population of small dust grains. We find that the spectral lines of all species except C2H2 respond strongly to dust evolution, with line fluxes increasing by more than an order of magnitude across the model series as the density of small dust grains decreases over time. The C2H2 line fluxes are extremely low due to a lack of abundance in the infrared line-emitting regions, despite C2H2 being commonly detected with Spitzer, suggesting that warm chemistry in the inner disk may need further investigation. Finally, we find that the CO2 flux densities increase more rapidly than the other species as the dust disk evolves. This suggests that the flux ratios of CO2 to other species may be lower in disks with less-evolved dust populations.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, accepted in A&

Thermal dependence of the zero-bias conductance through a nanostructure

We show that the conductance of a quantum wire side-coupled to a quantum dot, with a gate potential favoring the formation of a dot magnetic moment, is a universal function of the temperature. Universality prevails even if the currents through the dot and the wire interfere. We apply this result to the experimental data of Sato et al.[Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 066801 (2005)].Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. More detailed presentation, and updated references. Final version

Adhesive Contact to a Coated Elastic Substrate

We show how the quasi-analytic method developed to solve linear elastic contacts to coated substrates (Perriot A. and Barthel E. {\em J. Mat. Res.}, {\bf 2004}, {\em 19}, 600) may be extended to adhesive contacts. Substrate inhomogeneity lifts accidental degeneracies and highlights the general structure of the adhesive contact theory. We explicit the variation of the contact variables due to substrate inhomogeneity. The relation to other approaches based on Finite Element analysis is discussed

The measurement of the winds near the ocean surface with a radiometer-scatterometer on Skylab

The author has identified the following significant results. There were a total of twenty-six passes in the ZLV mode that yielded useful data. Six were in the in-track noncontiguous mode; all others were in the cross-track noncontiguous mode. The wind speed and direction, as effectively determined in a neutral atmosphere at 19.5 m above the sea surface, were found for each cell scanned by S193. It is shown how the passive microwave measurements were used both to compute the attenuation of the radar beam and to determine those cells where the backscatter measurement was suspect. Given the direction of the wind from some independent source, with the typical accuracy of measurement by available meteorological methods, a backscatter measurement at a nadir angle of 50, 43, or 32 deg can be used to compute the speed of the wind averaged over the illuminated area