Pointing a ground antenna at a spinning spacecraft using Conscan-simulation results

The results are presented for an investigation of ground antenna pointing errors which are caused by fluctuations of the receiver AGC signal due to thermal noise and a spinning spacecraft. Transient responses and steady-state errors and losses are estimated using models of the digital Conscan (conical scan) loop, the FFT, and antenna characteristics. Simulation results are given for the on-going Voyager mission and for the upcoming Galileo mission, which includes a spinning spacecraft. The simulation predicts a 1 sigma pointing error of 0.5 to 2.0 mdeg for Voyager, assuming an AGC loop SNR of 35 to 30 dB with a scan period varying from 128 to 32 sec, respectively. This prediction is in agreement with the DSS 14 antenna Conscan performance of 1.7 mdeg for 32 sec scans as reported in earlier studies. The simulation of Galileo predicts 1 mdeg error with a 128 sec scan and 4 mdeg with a 32 sec scan under similar AGC conditions

Full electrical control of Charge and Spin conductance through Interferometry of Edge States in Topological Insulators

We investigate electron interferometry of edge states in Topological Insulators. We show that, when inter-boundary coupling is induced at two quantum point contacts of a four terminal setup, both Fabry-P\'erot-like and Aharonov-Bohm-like loop processes arise. These underlying interference effects lead to a full electrically controllable system, where the magnitude of charge and spin linear conductances can be tuned by gate voltages, without applying magnetic fields. In particular we find that, under appropriate conditions, inter-boundary coupling can lead to negative values of the conductance. Furthermore, the setup also allows to selectively generate pure charge or pure spin currents, by choosing the voltage bias configuration.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures (expanded discussion section, corrected typos

A discussion of the scaling effect in numerical simulation of the extrusion process

The main objective of the work of this paper is to study the possibility of using a small scale geometrical model in the numerical simulation of aluminium extrusion. The advantages and shortcomings of the application of the geometrically similar model in FEM simulation are discussed. Thermal – mechanical and metallurgical combined simulations are performed within two tests using geometrically similar models and assessment is made in terms of mechanical and material properties. It was found that small scale simulation could not reproduce most of the important forming parameters of the original process, although it could help to bring about significant savings in computation time

Chaos-modified detrended moving average methodology for monitoring the depth of anaesthesia

This paper proposes a new method to monitor the depth of anaesthesia (DoA) based on the EEG signal. This approach firstly uses discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to to remove the spikes and the low frequency noise from raw EEG signals. After de-noising the EEG signals, the modified Hurst parameter is proposed with two new indices (CDoA and CsDoA), to estimate the anaesthesia states of the patients. To reduce the fluctuation of the new DoA index, a combination of Modified Chaos and Modifying Detrended Moving Average is used (MC-DMA). Analyses of variance (ANOVA) for C-MDMA and BIS distributions are presented The results indicate that the C-MDMA distributions at each anaesthesia state level are significantly different and the C-MDMA can distinguish five depths of anaesthesia. Compared with BIS trends, MC-DMA trend is close to BIS trend covering the whole scale from 100 to 0 with a full recording time

Characteristics of homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion and emissions of n-heptane

This paper reports the outcome from a systematic investigation carried out on HCCI (Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition) combustion of a diesel type fuel. The n heptane was chosen in this study to study the premixed diesel HCCI combustion characteristics with port fuel injection. Measurements were carried out in a single-cylinder, 4-stroke and variable compression ratio engine. Premixed n-heptane/air/EGR mixture was introduced into the cylinder by a port fuel injector and an external EGR system. The operating regions with regard to Air/Fuel ratio and EGR rate were established for different compression ratios and intake temperatures. The effects of compression ratios, intake temperatures, Air/Fuel ratios and EGR rates on knock limit, auto-ignition timing, combustion rate, IMEP, and engine-out emissions, such as NOx, CO, and unburned HC, were analysed. The results have shown HCCI combustion of n-heptane could be implemented without intake charge heating with a typical diesel engine compression ratio. The attainable HCCI operating region was mainly limited by the knock limit, misfir, and low IMEP respectively. Higher intake temperature or compression ratio could extend the misfire limit of the HCCI operation at low load but they would reduce the maximum IMEP limit at higher load conditions. Compared with conventional diesel combustion, HCCI combustion lead to extremely low NOx emissions ( less than 5 ppm) and smoke free exhaust. But HCCI diesel combustion was found to produce higher HC and CO emissions. An increase in intake temperature or compression ratio helped to reduce HC and CO emissions.

On the threshold-width of graphs

The GG-width of a class of graphs GG is defined as follows. A graph G has GG-width k if there are k independent sets N1,...,Nk in G such that G can be embedded into a graph H in GG such that for every edge e in H which is not an edge in G, there exists an i such that both endpoints of e are in Ni. For the class TH of threshold graphs we show that TH-width is NP-complete and we present fixed-parameter algorithms. We also show that for each k, graphs of TH-width at most k are characterized by a finite collection of forbidden induced subgraphs