Dynamic analysis using superelements for a large helicopter model

Using superelements (substructures), modal and frequency response analysis was performed for a large model of the Advanced Attack Helicopter developed for the U.S. Army. Whiffletree concept was employed so that the residual structure along with the various superelements could be represented as beam-like structures for economical and accurate dynamic analysis. A very large DMAP alter to the rigid format was developed so that the modal analysis, the frequency response, and the strain energy in each component could be computed in the same run

Internet of Things (IoT) enabled smart navigation aid for visually impaired

Blindness is a disorder in which a person's ocular vision is lost. Mobility and self-reliability have been a primary concern for visually disabled and blind people. Internet of Things (IoT) enabled Smart Navigation Aid, a smart Electronic Traveling Aid (ETA), is proposed in this paper. This smart guiding ETA improves the lives of blind people since it is enabled with IoT based sensing and is designed to help visually disabled/impaired people walk and navigate freely in both close and open areas. The proposed prototype provides highly powerful, accurate, quick responding, lightweight, low power consumption, and cost-effective solution that would enhance the lives of the visually impaired people. Within a 1m radius, ultrasonic sensors were used to locate the barrier and potholes. The location was shared with the cloud using GPS and an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. The stick was also installed with an emergency button, which will call on the mobile when pressed. The stick can also detect wet surfaces with the help of a water sensor. The entire system was built on the Arduino UNO 3 platform. Thus, the proposed prototype is an excellent example of how IoT enabled sensing could aid in the day-to-day lives of the visually impaired people and allowing them the freedom to navigate independentl

Selected papers from the 16th Annual Bio-Ontologies Special Interest Group Meeting

Copyright @ 2014 Soldatova et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Over the 16 years, the Bio-Ontologies SIG at ISMB has provided a forum for vibrant discussions of the latest and most innovative advances in the research area of bio-ontologies, its applications to biomedicine and more generally in the organisation, sharing and re-use of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences. The six papers selected for this supplement span a wide range of topics including: ontology-based data integration, ontology-based annotation of scientific literature, ontology and data model development, representation of scientific results and gene candidate prediction

Gravitons and Dark Matter in Universal Extra Dimensions

Models of Universal Extra Dimensions (UED) at the TeV scale lead to the presence of Kaluza Klein (KK) excitations of the ordinary fermions and bosons of the Standard Model that may be observed at hadron and lepton colliders. A conserved discrete symmetry, KK-parity, ensures the stability of the lightest KK particle (LKP), which, if neutral, becomes a good dark matter particle. It has been recently shown that for a certain range of masses of the LKP a relic density consistent with the experimentally observed one may be obtained. These works, however, ignore the impact of KK graviton production at early times. Whether the G^1 is the LKP or not, the G^n tower thus produced can decay to the LKP, and depending on the reheating temperature, may lead to a modification of the relic density. In this article, we show that this effect may lead to a relevant modification of the range of KK masses consistent with the observed relic density. Additionally, if evidence for UED is observed experimentally, we find a stringent upper limit on the reheating temperature depending on the mass of the LKP observed.Comment: References added. 38 pages, 18 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

New method for generalised PR target design for perpendicular magnetic recording

In recent years, perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) has been the main topic of interest in the industry. Given current estimates, that would suggest an areal density using PMR as great as one terabit per square inch – making possible in two to three years a 3.5-inch disk drive capable of storing an entire terabyte of data [1]. As the areal density is increased, however, the signal processing aspects of magnetic recording becomes more difficult. The present technique for finding the optimised GPR targets is based on the minmimum mean squared error (MMSE) between the equaliser output and the desired output, subject to the monic constraint [2]. In this paper, we present a new method of designing GPR targets for PMR. This method is based on maximising the ratio of minimum squared eucledian distance of the PR target to the noise penalty introduced by the PR filter

Asymmetric MAP decoding for perpendicular magnetic recording

This paper presents the application of a new MAP algorithm to perpendicular recording in the presence of jitter noise

Control of light transmission through opaque scattering media in space and time

We report the first experimental demonstration of combined spatial and temporal control of light trajectories through opaque media. This control is achieved by solely manipulating spatial degrees of freedom of the incident wavefront. As an application, we demonstrate that the present approach is capable to form bandwidth-limited ultrashort pulses from the otherwise randomly transmitted light with a controllable interaction time of the pulses with the medium. Our approach provides a new tool for fundamental studies of light propagation in complex media and has potential for applications for coherent control, sensing and imaging in nano- and biophotonics