Twentieth New Hampshire Symposium

Report

Long term sustainable product development at the packaging sector

This paper outlines the importance of sustainable product developments and their role in securing a sustainable future through current practices and procedures. It discusses the difficulties faced within organisations through the complexities and swamping of regulations when considering sustainability and the problems in policing such a system to ensure compliance. Focus is centred on the design stage, where large numbers of standards and interests must be factored in to create specifications that are highly compliant. Where there is a limited understanding of the complexities that are presented at this stage, less optimum specifications will be dispatched. This presents the need to think strategically with new systems and approaches which adapt to company behaviour, where decisions that are made at a design stage have impacts up and down the supply chain, changes that are made must be in line with company strategic objectives and provide influential returns on investment

The placement, fate and effectiveness of granular nematicides in potato beds infested with the potato cyst nematode <i>Globodera pallida</i> (stone)

The chemical control of the potato cyst nematode (PCN) by granular nematicides when applied and incorporated into potato seed beds was investigated to assess problems connected with incorporation using bed cultivation machinery. Fluorescent tracer granule work using a range of granular nematicide incorporation methods suggested that differences exist between the incorporation methods in terms of placement of the fluorescent granules in the planted potato bed. Incorporation of tracer initially by a bed tiller followed by a second incorporation by a stone and clod separator produced a distribution of tracer greater than 40cm deep in the planted bed. Incorporation of tracer by a stone and clod separator with application of tracer halfway up the first web produced concentrated bands of tracer in the sides of the planted bed. No visible differences in tracer distribution occurred between other treatments. The differences observed between incorporation techniques during the fluorescent tracer granule work were shown not to be important in terms of PCN control or yield in the first year's field experiments. The second year of field experimentsa ssessedth e incorporation of the granular nematicide Vydate (10G) before, during or after stone and clod separation of potato beds. These field experiments suggested that timing of nematicide incorporation in relation to stone and clod separation had no effect on potato yield or control of PCN. As in the first year's experiments, significant differences occurred between plots treated or not treated with a granular nematicide, but not between incorporation methods. Work describing the field concentration of oxamyl immediately after planting showed similarities to the distribution of tracer granules observed in the soil hall studies. The subsequent distribution of oxamyl 3 weeks after planting showed no redistribution of the nematicide in the potato bed. The depth of potato planting is thought to be responsible for the uniformity of PCN control and crop response to nematicide treatment regardless of incorporation method as seed was planted below the nematicide treated layer. Evaluation of a diagnostic kit used for detecting oxamyl in soil showed that the kit was well suited for this purpose and its use is discussed in the light of the findings of this study

Exploring Functional Acceleration of OpenCL on FPGAs and GPUs Through Platform-Independent Optimizations

OpenCL has been proposed as a means of accelerating functional computation using FPGA and GPU accelerators. Although it provides ease of programmability and code portability, questions remain about the performance portability and underlying vendor's compiler capabilities to generate efficient implementations without user-dened, platform specic optimizations. In this work, we systematically evaluate this by formalizing a design space exploration strategy using platform-independent micro-architectural and application-specic optimizations only. The optimizations are then applied across Altera FPGA, NVIDIA GPU and ARM Mali GPU platforms for three computing examples, namely matrix-matrix multiplication, binomial-tree option pricing and 3-dimensional nite difference time domain. Our strategy enables a fair comparison across platforms in terms of throughput and energy efficiency by using the same design effort. Our results indicate that FPGA provides better performance portability in terms of achieved percentage of device's peak performance (68%) compared to NVIDIA GPU (20%) and also achieves better energy efficiency (up to 1:4X) for some of the considered cases without requiring in-depth hardware design expertise

Defining Spatial Security Outage Probability for Exposure Region Based Beamforming

With increasing number of antennae in base stations, there is considerable interest in using beamfomining to improve physical layer security, by creating an `exposure region' that enhances the received signal quality for a legitimate user and reduces the possibility of leaking information to a randomly located passive eavesdropper. The paper formalises this concept by proposing a novel definition for the security level of such a legitimate transmission, called the `Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability' (SSOP). By performing a theoretical and numerical analysis, it is shown how the antenna array parameters can affect the SSOP and its analytic upper bound. Whilst this approach may be applied to any array type and any fading channel model, it is shown here how the security performance of a uniform linear array varies in a Rician fading channel by examining the analytic SSOP upper bound.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication