Polymer Hot Embossing with Soft Stamps

Microfluidic channels are fabricated in thick polycarbonate (PC) substrates by hot embossing using soft poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) stamps. The embossing force is in the range of 2.5-3 kN for a 4-inch diameter substrate, and the embossed microchannel is 70 μm deep. We investigate the influence of soft stamp precursor and curing agent mix ratio, and post thermal treatment on embossing conditions. Experimental results show that a soft stamp fabricated with 5:1 mix ratio and post-annealed at 150c results in better embossing properties than conventional un-annealed stamps

Blockchain Technology for Enhancing Traceability and Efficiency in Automobile Supply Chain—A Case Study

A robust traceability system would help organizations in inventory optimization reduce lead time and improve customer service and quality which further enables the organizations to be a leader in their industry sector. This research study analyzes the challenges faced by the automotive industry in its supply chain operations. Further, the traceability issues and waiting time at different nodes of the supply chain are considered to be priority issues that affect the overall supply chain efficiency in the automotive supply chain. After studying the existing blockchain architectures and their implementation methodology, this study proposes a new blockchain-based architecture to improve traceability and reduce waiting time for the automotive supply chain. A hyper ledger fabric-based blockchain architecture is developed to track the ownership transfers in inbound and outbound logistics. The simulation results of the proposed hyper ledger fabric-based blockchain architecture show that there is an improvement in the traceability of items at different nodes of the supply chain that enhances the Inventory Quality Ratio (IQR) and the mean waiting time is reduced at the factory, wholesaler, and retailer, which thereby improves the overall supply chain efficiency. The blockchain embedded supply chain is more capable to eliminate the risks and uncertainties associated with the automotive supply chain. The benefits of adopting blockchain technology in the automotive supply chain are also described. The developed blockchain-based framework is capable to get more visibility into goods movement and inventory status in automotive supply chains

Hazardous Processes and Their Risk Mitigation Techniques in Iron and Steel Industry Emission in CFB Boiler- A Review

Steel manufacturing industries are one of the major industries in the world where number of hazards are being involved in Daily work practices. While working in such steel industries safe operating/work procedures are too much significant as employees are exposed to various threats due to nature of job and work operations. For any industry labour is considered as a great asset which follows the work as trades. As per the New Occupational Safety and Health CODE – Hazardous Process is mentioned in two ways (i) consequence in toxic waste of universal atmosphere or (ii) reason material injury to health of a worker occupied [1]. The working environment in steel industry is too much noisy with excessive heat. In today’s world most of the steel industries are using new technologies where control systems are used in various steel manufacturing industries to control number of incidents and accidents and have precise control over steel composition addition which reflects the quality. As the safety is being considered paramount in today’s working environment, so regardless the hazardous process of various steel manufacturing industries achieving an accident free environment is achievable. Several Risk Assessment Techniques like Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (HIRA) Techniques/Job Safety Analysis are used to reduce the work place injuries i.e. Frequency rate, severity rate and incident rate statistically and statistics of several years has been studied on the various mentioned process and injuries resulting in ill-health is mitigated [2]

Cross-talk compensation of hyperfine control in donor qubit architectures

We theoretically investigate cross-talk in hyperfine gate control of donor-qubit quantum computer architectures, in particular the Kane proposal. By numerically solving the Poisson and Schr\"{o}dinger equations for the gated donor system, we calculate the change in hyperfine coupling and thus the error in spin-rotation for the donor nuclear-electron spin system, as the gate-donor distance is varied. We thus determine the effect of cross-talk - the inadvertent effect on non-target neighbouring qubits - which occurs due to closeness of the control gates (20-30nm). The use of compensation protocols is investigated, whereby the extent of crosstalk is limited by the application of compensation bias to a series of gates. In light of these factors the architectural implications are then considered.Comment: 15 pages, 22 figures, submitted to Nanotechnolog

Database Search Strategies for Proteomic Data Sets Generated by Electron Capture Dissociation Mass Spectrometry

Large data sets of electron capture dissociation (ECD) mass spectra from proteomic experiments are rich in information; however, extracting that information in an optimal manner is not straightforward. Protein database search engines currently available are designed for low resolution CID data, from which Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) ECD data differs significantly. ECD mass spectra contain both z-prime and z-dot fragment ions (and c-prime and c-dot); ECD mass spectra contain abundant peaks derived from neutral losses from charge-reduced precursor ions; FT-ICR ECD spectra are acquired with a larger precursor m/z isolation window than their low-resolution CID counterparts. Here, we consider three distinct stages of postacquisition analysis: (1) processing of ECD mass spectra prior to the database search; (2) the database search step itself and (3) postsearch processing of results. We demonstrate that each of these steps has an effect on the number of peptides identified, with the postsearch processing of results having the largest effect. We compare two commonly used search engines: Mascot and OMSSA. Using an ECD data set of modest size (3341 mass spectra) from a complex sample (mouse whole cell lysate), we demonstrate that search results can be improved from 630 identifications (19% identification success rate) to 1643 identifications (49% identification success rate). We focus in particular on improving identification rates for doubly charged precursors, which are typically low for ECD fragmentation. We compare our presearch processing algorithm with a similar algorithm recently developed for electron transfer dissociation (ETD) data