Dynamic optimization of the transmission efficiency between the solid state microwave sources and the microwave applicator

[EN] Microwaves are a fast way to dry moist goods through volumetric heating. During the drying process, materials change their electrical properties. As a result, the impedances at the feed port of the applicator will change and the microwave source is not matched anymore. The amount of reflected power increases and the process efficiency reduces. New semiconductor high power sources can perform a dynamic impedance matching. A lab scaled functional model with two sources was designed and realized. For measuring the scattering parameters during the process run, an embedded two-port vector network analyzer was added. Measurement results confirm the feasibility of the concept.Zuber, S.; Joss, M.; Tresch, S.; Kleingries, M. (2018). Dynamic optimization of the transmission efficiency between the solid state microwave sources and the microwave applicator. En IDS 2018. 21st International Drying Symposium Proceedings. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 291-298. https://doi.org/10.4995/IDS2018.2018.7412OCS29129

Comment on "Evidence for dark matter in the inner Milky Way"

This is a brief rebuttal to arXiv:1502.03821, which claims to provide the first observational proof of dark matter interior to the solar circle. We point out that this result is not new, and can be traced back at least a quarter century.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. In this version we add a figure from a 1998 paper that shows the same result that arXiv:1502.03821 claims to be novel. We also add a short note rebutting arXiv:1503.08784 which was written in response to the first versio

CubETH: low cost GNSS space experiment for precise orbit determination

CubETH is a project to evaluate and demonstrate possibilities of low-cost GNSS receivers on a nano-satellite by following the Cubesat standard. The development of this new Swiss cubesat mission is underway at the Swiss Polytechnical Schools, launch is planned for 2016. Scientific goal are: precise orbit determination and estimate of satellite attitude based on a very short baseline together with a number of other experimental measurements. Programmatic goal is to implement this project in cooperation between federal (ETH/EPF domain) and cantonal (FH/HES domain) engineering schools and industrial partners. The educational objective is to involve engineering students from various schools across Switzerland to promote innovative teaching of engineering of complex systems. In this paper, we will discuss performance requirements for the CubETH spacecraft and its payload. We also show how lessons learned from the Swisscube satellite were used for the design and implementation of this project

Tama Compiler Overhaul

Triamec Motion AG manufactures ultra-precision servo drives that can be programmed using the C# programming language and the Tama framework. These servo drives run a virtual machine that executes a proprietary bytecode format, which is generated by the Tama compiler. The compiler previously relied on Microsoft's deprecated CCI library to read C# assembly files and transpile them to the Tama bytecode format. In this project, our goal was to replace the unmaintained CCI library with a modern, actively maintained alternative. After evaluating several options, we chose to replace the CCI library with ILSpy. ILSpy is a modern, actively maintained and well documented .NET decompiler with an active community. In addition to ensuring the ability to support newer versions of .NET in the future, we also implemented a computed goto performance optimization in the servo's runtime, resulting in an overall performance increase of approximately 16%. There is still potential for further performance gains, for example by implementing a template-based just-in-time (JIT) compiler in the servo's runtime

A GNSS Payload with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Receivers for Cubesat Precise Orbit Determination

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have been used as a key technology for satellite orbit determination since many years ago. In view of the increasing popularity of miniaturized satellites (e.g. CubeSats), we developed a small-sized versatile GNSS payload board for orbit determination using commercial-off-the-shelf single-frequency GNSS receivers with extremely small weight, size and power consumption. The board features two separate antenna connectors and four GNSS receivers — two per antenna. This redundancy lowers the risk of total payload failure in case one receiver malfunctions. Two prototypes of the GNSS positioning board have been successfully launched onboard the Astrocast-01 and -02 3-unit cube satellites with altitudes of 575 and 505 km, respectively. The multi- GNSS receivers are capable of tracking the GNSS satellites from four major systems, i.e., GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo. In addition, both satellites are equipped with an array of three laser retroreflectors enabling orbit validation with satellite laser ranging (SLR). First real-time orbit results using GPS only indicate that the receivers perform very well on both satellites. The RMS of the 1-day orbit fits is at the level of 2-5 meters after removing a few outliers despite errors caused by the ionosphere and the orbit model. In the next few months, we will compare the accuracy of the real-time orbits derived using different GNSS, download raw code and phase measurements for a post-processing using the graphics linear combination (sub-meter accuracy expected) and validate the orbits with SLR. The results achieved in these experiments will be shown

Phase II study of amsacrine in solid tumors: a report of the EORTC early clinical trial-group

A total of 239 patients with advanced solid tumors were treated in this phase II trial. Amsacrine was administered as a single i.v. dose of 120 mg/m2 repeated at 21-day intervals. The initial dose was reduced to 90 mg/m2 in the case of extensive prior therapy. Some antitumor activity was detected in head and neck cancer but the drug appears to lack significant efficacy in epidermoid lung cancer as well as in carcinoma of the breast, melanoma, renal cell cancer, colorectal cancer and non-seminomatous testicular cancer. Leukopenia was the major toxic effect encountered in this trial and was similar at 90 and 120 mg/m2. © 1983.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe