Numerical Analysis of Trampoline Effect in Extreme Ground Motion

Very large vertical surface acceleration of nearly four times gravity was measured at a strong motion observation station in Iwate Prefecture during the 2008 Iwate-Miyagi Inland, Japan, earthquake (Mw 6.9). The station is located about 3 km southwest of the epicenter and equipped with three-component accelerometers, installed at both the free surface and the bottom of a 260-m borehole. The wave form of the vertical acceleration shows a clearly asymmetric form with large amplitude in the upward direction. Aoi et al. (2008) reported and qualitatively explained the mechanism of this phenomenon by the analogy of bouncing a piece of matter on a trampoline, and thus they called it the “trampoline effect.” To simulate this recently discovered nonlinear behavior of the surface ground motion, numerical analysis with a finite-element method has been employed with parameters derived from the borehole data at the station. The analysis successfully simulates the asymmetric vertical motion. Results indicate that the asymmetric motion may be characterized by the existence of a lower bound of negative acceleration, which in most cases corresponds to the acceleration of gravity, and high positive pulses caused by the compression stress of the disturbed surface ground material

Photon-counting-based diffraction phase microscopy combined with single-pixel imaging

We propose a photon-counting (PC)-based quantitative-phase imaging (QPI) method for use in diffraction phase microscopy (DPM) that is combined with a single-pixel imaging (SPI) scheme (PC-SPI-DPM). This combination of DPM with the SPI scheme overcomes a low optical throughput problem that has occasionally prevented us from obtaining quantitative-phase images in DPM through use of a high-sensitivity single-channel photodetector such as a photomultiplier tube (PMT). The introduction of a PMT allowed us to perform PC with ease and thus solved a dynamic range problem that was inherent to SPI. As a proof-of-principle experiment, we performed a comparison study of analogue-based SPI-DPM and PC-SPI-DPM for a 125-nm-thick indium tin oxide (ITO) layer coated on a silica glass substrate. We discuss the basic performance of the method and potential future modifications of the proposed system

Stroboscopic oblique-incidence interferometer for motion visualization of stator of ultrasonic motor.

AbstractThis paper describes a motion-visualization technique for an ultrasonic motor (USM) by using a stroboscopic oblique-incidence interferometer. Characteristics of USM depend on a vibration mode of a stator which is one of main component of USM. Though there are some visualization techniques of its vibrated mode, it is difficult to visualization. Because the surface of the stator is rough for a light. For visualization such a surface, we focused on an oblique-incidence interferometer. The interferometer is well suited to analyze the rough surface because a scattering at the rough surface is reduced by using an oblique-incidence light. Furthermore, for detecting a vibrated surface, a pulsed light synchronized with stator was used as light source. We have succeeded to detect a periodically movement of fringe patterns of the vibrated stator

High-speed, FPGA-based photon-counting fluorometer with high data-gathering efficiency

We have developed a low-cost, high-efficiency fluorometer using a field-programmable gate array and simultaneous detection of photoelectron pulse trains. The fluorometer covers a time span of 64 ns with a resolution of 1.0 ns/channel. Depending on the number of channels, the signal-gathering efficiency was improved by a factor of 100 relative to that of conventional time-correlated single-photon-counting. This is assuming that the fluorescence intensity is moderately high but still requires photon counting. The dead time for building a histogram has been reduced to zero, which means that the upper limit of the repetitive excitation frequency could exceed that determined by the time span. We describe instrumental details and demonstrate the basic performance

Hadamard-transform fluorescence-lifetime imaging

We discuss a Hadamard-transform-based fluorescence-lifetime-imaging (HT-FLI) technique for fluorescence-lifetime-imaging microscopy (FLIM). The HT-FLI uses a Fourier-transform phase-modulation fluorometer (FT-PMF) for fluorescence-lifetime measurements, where the modulation frequency of the excitation light is swept linearly in frequency from zero to a specific maximum during a fixed duration of time. Thereafter, fluorescence lifetimes are derived through Fourier transforms for the fluorescence and reference waveforms. The FT-PMF enables the analysis of multi-component samples simultaneously. HT imaging uses electronic exchange of HT illumination mask patterns, and a high-speed, high-sensitivity photomultiplier, to eliminate frame-rate issues that accompany two-dimensional image detectors

Phase-Modulation Fluorometer Using a Phase-Modulated Excitation Light Source

We propose a phase-modulation fluorometer (PMF) with a light-emitting diode (LED) or a laser diode (LD) used as an excitation light source (ELS) that is driven in the phase-modulation (PM) mode. The PM-ELS generates many frequency sidebands that spread in the vicinity of carrier frequency fc with the interval of modulation frequency fm depending on the maximum phase deviation Δφ . The scheme enables us to derive fluorescence lifetime values of a multicomponent sample at one time. We show a typical numerical simulation result for explaining the principle of operation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PMF, we have measured fluorescence lifetimes of three kinds of inorganic fluorescent glasses and that of a mixture solution of 1×10−6M rhodamine 6G and 1×10−6M coumarin 152 in ethanol with a volume ratio of 1 :1