Intelligent Technologies and Engineering Systems

A wireless physiological signal measurement system has been developed in which physiological signals can be transferred to a host server via a personal digital assistant (PDA) with wireless transmission using Bluetooth technology. The subject’s personal information is also included with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag. Both DES and RSA algorithms have been used to encrypt all the measured data and the key of DES algorithm to preserve the measured signal data with high security. This system is especially useful in the care and nursing environment, with efficient and high-accuracy security data transmission.

This chapter designs and implements multimedia social services over an open social network engine, denoted as Elgg. Elgg with basic elements such as blogging, e-portfolios, and file sharing possesses a plug-in architecture, so that developers can design plug-ins to provide particular social services. The three plug-ins about video, photo, and blog with a number of Elgg’s APIs based on the Representational State Transfer architectural style are provided in the study. Therefore, external applications can easily announce and manage data on Elgg through these APIs. Not only providing details on the design of the Elgg APIs, but we also describe their request and response formats in REST styles. The prototype services are validated with a simple client. The data including text and multimedia from external applications can be automatically separated into the blogs and albums on Elgg.

In this research, we target at the investigation of a dynamic energy-aware management framework on the execution of independent workloads (e.g., bag-of-tasks) in hybrid CPU-GPU PARA-computing platforms, aiming at optimizing the execution of workloads in appropriate computing resources concurrently while balancing the use of solely virtual or physical resources or hybridly selected resources, to achieve the best performance in executing application workloads and minimizing the energy associated with computation selected. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy can contribute to improve performance by introducing optimization techniques, such as workload consolidation and dynamic scheduling. We observed that workload consolidation can potentially improve performance, depending on characteristics of the workload. Also, the workload scheduling results present the importance of resource management by revealing the performance gap among different execution schedules for shared computing resources.

SAN (storage area network) is a dedicated network that provides access to consolidated data storage and offers major advantages as simplified administration, high speed, and flexibility. This chapter proposes a security encryption storage system named ANGLE, which contains two major parts – the key management system (KMS) and the encryption engine (E-Engine). E-Engine is in charge to encrypt/decrypt storage disks under AES128 and SHA256 cryptographic algorithms, according to keys provided by KMS. These two parts communicate by IPsec protocols, and a well-defined UI (User Interface) for applications is provided. The proposed ANGLE system is implemented in both FC SAN and IP SAN, and performance tests show that the bottleneck of ANGLE’s reading and writing throughput relies on data transmission speed of the storage network.

A neural-network-based adaptive state estimation is presented to measurement fusion for use of a multisensor system tracking a maneuvering target. The proposed approach consists of a group of parallel alpha-beta-gamma filters and a general probabilistic neural network (GPNN). By incorporating a general probabilistic formulation and Markov chain into a general regression neural network, GPNN is developed as a decision logic algorithm for online classification. Each activation function of GPNN is defined as Gaussian basis function whose smooth factor is a constant selected from filter’s innovation covariance matrix by utilizing the parametric method. Based upon fused outputs of alpha-beta-gamma filters and a GPNN-based classifier, an adaptive alpha-beta-gamma filter is developed to improve tracking accuracy. The simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the main transport protocol that provides reliable transmission in the current Internet. However, TCP still has problems that may affect its performance on various network environments. Packet reordering, which is one of the problems on TCP, refers to the out-of-order event of packets. There are many reasons that can cause packet reordering. In this chapter, we propose RA-TCP, a novel TCP variant which modifies the retransmission occasion and the congestion response of the traditional TCP mechanism, to improve the performance on packet reordering. In particular, we replace the three duplicate ACKs with a retransmission detection timer (RDT) for the trigger of fast retransmit. Our simulation studies reveal that RA-TCP performs consistently better than existing mechanisms that try to make TCP more robust to packet reordering.

While configuring firewalls, firewall rule ordering and distribution must be done cautiously on each of cooperative firewalls, especially in a large-scale network. However, network operators are prone to incorrectly configuring firewalls because there are typically hundreds of thousands of filtering rules (i.e., rules in the access control list file, or ACL for short) which could be set up in a firewall, not to mention these rules among firewalls could affect mutually. To speed up the crucial but laboring inspection of rule configuration on firewalls, this chapter describes our developed diagnosis system which can not only figure out anomalies among firewall rules effectively but also infer/correlate the main reasons from the diagnosed anomalies for filtering (behavior) mismatching between firewalls. At the end of this chapter, the system prototype is shown as a demonstration of our system implementation.

As a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is dynamically formed by wireless mobile devices, which generally have limited computing resources, low network bandwidth accessibility, and limited power supply, and does not have any physical infrastructure and central base station, network management and operations are done cooperatively by all mobile devices in the network. In consequence, malicious mobile devices can easily join a MANET and launch attacks. Among those attacks, cooperative black hole attack requiring at least two malicious device nodes is a serious security threat since this attack is very easy to launch and hard to detect by other nodes. In this study, we introduce a secure routing protocol to defend against the cooperative black hole attack. Simulation experiments using QualNet has shown that our protocol provides up to 2.6 times performance in terms of the packet delivery ratio when comparing with AODV protocol under cooperative black hole attack.

The ability to deploy resources and services in cloud computing utilizing virtualization technologies in a timely and cost-effective manner is important, bringing with it significant economical gain and business performance, yet accelerating the pace of innovation. Services in cloud platforms are scheduled and executed in optimized and on-demand resources, taking into consideration flexibility and scalability. Due to the existing limitation on the quantity of allocated IPv4 IP addresses, a number of alternatives have been discussed. In this chapter, we propose a novel yet low-overhead method for cloud service providers based on the concept of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) framework and network virtualization. The idea behind the design is to respond quickly to the infrastructure needs for the creation of virtual machines (VMs) that meet the capacity requirements of those cloud services as requested by users. It improves the utilization of providers’ resources within this infrastructure as heterogeneous hardware resources are aggregated to the existing platform on demand. Testing on the prototype built demonstrates its effectiveness and performance.

This study proposes fuzzy C-means method (FCMM) to analyze motor’s current waveforms for determining the motor’s quality types. The idea of the FCMM is to partition

N

input sampled vectors into

c

clusters by minimizing the objective function. The objective function is the sum of the squared Euclidean distances between each input sampled vectors and its corresponding cluster center, with the distances weighted by the fuzzy memberships. The proposed FCMM consists of three following main stages: (i) the preprocessing stage for enlarging motor’s current waveforms’ amplitude and eliminating noises, (ii) the qualitative features stage for qualitative feature selection of a motor’s current waveform, and (iii) the classification stage for determining motor’s quality types using the FCM algorithm. In the experiment, the error rates are 5.42 and 0.28 % for type

A

and

B

, respectively. The right rates are 94.58 and 99.72 % for type

C

and

D

, respectively.

License plate recognition belongs to the field of computer vision and pattern recognition, and plays an important role in the field of intelligent transportation. The license plate location is a key technology in license plate recognition; the accuracy in the positioning of a license directly affects the accuracy of character segmentation and character recognition, and has a direct impact on the efficiency of the license plate recognition system. In this chapter, a plate positioning system is constructed based on the knowledge acquisition and knowledge reduction ability of a rough set, as well as the learning ability and generalization ability of a neural network,. By combining the rough set with neural networks and fuzzy logic, a rough fuzzy neural network recognition is proposed. The experimental results show that this system not only simplifies the structure of the system but also improves the generalization capability of knowledge, and improves the accuracy of character positioning.

An analysis system for the single-trial electroencephalogram (EEG) recognition is presented. In combination with wavelet and amplitude modulation (AM), the gray-based competitive Hopfield clustering network (GCHCN) is applied to the clustering of left-finger lifting and resting. The fractal features in multiscale are extracted from the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) data by using fractal dimension. GCHCN is used for the recognition of features. GCHCN is an unsupervised clustering approach for the biomedical signals. Compared with popular supervised linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier and multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier, GCHCN achieves promising results in lifting recognition.

This chapter surveys the imaging properties inside cup-shaped objects. AOI is rarely discussed in this topic since the normally applied camera spans limited view angle and fails to capture images clearly if objects are inspected with ROI to a larger depth. Oppositely, fisheye cameras are a major issue, due to the inherently enormous scales of the focusing depth and the spanning view angle. Accordingly, closely placing a fisheye camera directly toward the bottom of a cup-shaped object, an exposure can cover the whole internal, including both the bottom and the sidewall. Through simple experimental implementation, this chapter surveyed the involved overall radial intensity degradation and the geometrically deformation profiles. The concluded photonic and morphological models are based to enhance the imaging fidelity and adapted to develop advanced images processing technologies.

Lane detection has drawn great attention in vehicle assistant driving and intelligent navigation systems, some of them are developed using Android operating system. This chapter presents a method to implementation of lane detection under Android system based on Open Source Computer Vision Library. To resolve the problem between C/C++ and Java mixed-language programming, the native code should be written using JNI with the Android NDK which makes available to use native code languages such as C/C++ in the Android at application level. Implementation of image processed with several processing techniques using OpenCV, such as RGB to grayscale conversion, set region of interest (ROI) crop, Canny edge detection, Hough transform, and linear fitness to detect the road lane. The method is verified on Android Virtual Device at the end of the chapter.

In this chapter, a broadcast soccer video analysis system is proposed for the detection and tracking of the players. Our method consists of two phases. The first one is the scene analysis phase which automatically classifies the video into different scenes based on 2-D Gaussian color model of hue and saturation. An adaptive incremental model update scheme is proposed so that even under shadow condition, good scene analysis result can still be provided. The second one is the player analysis phase. A color histogram-based method is proposed to classify the player with a decision tree, and a linear prediction model based on spatial similarity matrix (SSM) is used for tracking of the players. Experimental results show that the proposed method is simple yet effective.

Dot representation is the only format accepted in a special 3D printing application called laser stippling, which outputs the shape and texture tone of a 3D model inside a lead glass by using laser beam. To fully utilize existing abundant and exquisite 3D triangular-meshed models, this study proposes a two-phase technique, i.e., a sampling phase followed by a halftoning phase, to convert models in triangular-meshed format to dot representation. The sampling phase generates a set of dense sample points that cover the entire surface of the model, and the halftoning phase removes some of the sample points to reflect the tone of the model’s texture. The actual stippled results demonstrated the technique could deliver products in good quality.

This chapter approaches the binary signature for each image on the base of the percentage of the pixels in each color image and builds a similar measure between the images based on EMD (earth mover’s distance). Next, it aims to create S-tree in a similar measure EMD to store the image’s binary signatures to quickly query image signature data. Then, from a similar measure EMD and S-tree, it provides an image retrieval algorithm and CBIR (content-based image retrieval). Last but not least, based on this theory, it also presents an application and experimental assessment of the process of querying image on the database system over 10,000 images.

Tri-axis accelerometers are widely used to detect physical activity. Three-axis accelerometers are sensing devices that measure gravitational changes. In this chapter, a body motion index was derived using an axis accelerometer with additional signal filtering and feature extraction. Various body motion factors, motion rates, motion angles, and directions were examined during an experiment. Six participants were recruited for this study. A TD1A system (K&Y Labs) was employed; this wireless system comprised one electrocardiogram (ECG) and tri-axis acceleration sensor. Using a belt, an amplifier was fixed to each participant in the same relative position between the abdomen and chest for each experimental measurement. The participants were instructed to move in both directions seven times for varying durations and at differing motion angles. Features were extracted from the motion index series. Both the mean and maximum values of the motion index series were used. The results showed that specific posture change patterns had corresponding axis acceleration variations. The influence of the motion angle on the motion index value was considerably greater than that of the motion rate. Higher motion angles were achieved with higher motion index values. Generally, anterior-posterior swaying caused greater motions than left-to-right swaying under the same motion conditions for angle and rate. Therefore, the proposed motion classification algorithm combined with a tri-axis accelerometer has significant potential for motion detection. However, the use of accelerometers has a number of limitations. In the future, a multi-sensor system will be employed to detect body movements.

The sorted-set intersection problem is important because it plays a key role in many algorithms. Instead of processing multiple short sorted-set intersections concurrently in previous work, this work focuses on how to efficiently find the intersection from two long sorted sets using emerging general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs). We have implemented and evaluated four different algorithms to solve the set intersection problem. According to the experimental results, we identify which algorithm is the best choice based on the problem size.

High-power lithium-ion batteries are being deployed in various transportation carriers such as hybrid, plug-in, or full electric vehicles recently. Power fade of lithium cells regarding temperature and charging and discharging rates are being the significant barrier that mitigates its widespread commercialization in the electric vehicle market. A novel double dynamic stress accelerated degradation test (D

2

SADT) taking an advantage of closing the real driving conditions is developed to reduce the prediction error. The test contains two dynamic stress factors, temperature and cell charging and discharging currents, by which is implemented simultaneously. The test results show that the D

2

SADT is capable of accelerating the battery degradation where the power of the test cell decreases near 10% after 18 temperature cycles and 900 dynamic cell charging and discharging cycles. Compared to the traditional constant stress test, D

2

SADT represents more realistic and efficient to evaluate the power fade of batteries used in the electric vehicles.

A novel concept of computer graphics, point-based graphics, has grasped researchers’ attentions in this decade. In 2000, the point rendering system QSplat was developed by a Stanford research team. It had successfully solved the rendering problem of point clouds. This has made point clouds very potential in 3D related computational applications, especially the applications in 3D scanning. For exploring advanced, possible, and practical applications of point clouds, this chapter proposed two methods for estimating deviations of two point clouds directly. The proposed methods are the Nearest Point method and the Neighborhood method. They were developed based on the Kd-tree structure and the concept of neighbor clusters. Those methods did not involve a complicated surface reconstruction, so they can be implemented to perform a virtual inspection efficiently.

2D barcode is an important interface to connect physical environment with virtual (digital) world. It is commonly presented at printing substrates whose embedded information can be captured through optical recognition system. Yet, for human perception, the black-and-white barcode is not only meaningless but also aesthetically displeasing. Therefore, this study utilized a modified digital halftoning technique to make 2D barcode invisible under normal reading condition; however, it can still be detected by infrared devices. The research composes halftone dots of both amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) to create an infrared watermark due to the different absorption properties between K (black) ink and CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow) inks under infrared light. The results show that the proposed method successfully avoids 2D barcode distracting people from normal reading. The method conforms to the existing printing process without requiring any special inks or materials. In the future, the technique can be applied to product packaging and brand protection.

Visual evoked potential (VEP) by checkerboard stimulation with red, green, and blue color for myopia subject was investigated. There are 10 subjects involved. The average VEP pattern derived from 100 times stimulation showed that peak N2 latency and peaks P1 and P2 amplitude had significant variation among three colors. There was higher P2 amplitude response by red color than the other two colors. Myopia subjects without glasses had higher P1 and P2 amplitude response for green color.

License plate recognition (LPR) is an important technique in automobile management and traffic control. Experiments show that the recognition rate dropped significantly when the illumination on the license plate is nonuniform. In this chapter, we proposed a simple block-based method to resolve the problem. Experiments show that the proposed method is not only fast but also outperforms well-known Otsu as well as state-of-the-art NiBlack and MAT, with recognition rate of 86% for the 100 nonuniformly illuminated license plate test images.

This chapter proposes a MIMO fuel cell design by integrating both Ziegler-Nichols-based PID and intelligent fuzzy-neural controllers. Comparing with the other PID methods by Matlab simulation, the proposed system performances are better and robust by using scaled conjugate gradient algorithm to determine the neural network weighting factors and biases; even the system has stack current disturbance variation and gas valve hysteresis effects.

In the twenty-first century, for the science and technology peripheral auxiliary, mostly computer software are used to do a bulk of numerical analysis and verification, especially in soft computing calculation after the 1990s. Currently, for the studies on the related soft-computing field, auxiliary calculation software are available. However, through the actual validation, it is a very professional software system. Hence, the goals of this chapter are extensiveness and practicability. By using the powerful engineering function in Matlab, it is possible to develop an auxiliary computer toolbox of comprehensive evaluation and approaching degree in the fuzzy system theory. Through experimental validation, it not only helps in calculation and validation but also enhances the popularity and practicability of comprehensive evaluation and approaching degree in the field of soft computing.

This research proposes an effective method for assessing the design of the coordination of autonomous agents, which can be applied to urban outdoor space design based on the developed “cozy place” model base. The purpose of this research is to assess the coordination effectiveness of coordination agents during the interaction process of the design model. This project adopts autonomous coordination agents to simulate the design goal, constructs a coordination model, defines the coordination collections of agent groups, and regards the conflicts in the coordination process as the coordination problems of agents in each group. Finally, this research used the design model of the coordination mechanism of cozy place design as an example to verify the assessment method proposed by this research.

The well-known ANFIS (adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system) has demonstrated good performance and applicability. This chapter presents a quantum version of ANFIS model, namely, qANFIS, whose network structure is similar to ANFIS but it is with quantum membership functions (qMF). A hybrid learning procedure is proposed to update the parameters. First, we develop a genetic algorithm with trimming operator to determine the number of quantum levels in qMF. Second, the least squares estimate method is applied to update the consequent parameters. Finally, we introduce two methods to update the qMF parameters, the gradient descent and the quantum-inspired particle swarm optimization methods, and one of them is selected for training purpose. The simulation results of path planning had demonstrated that the proposed method could reach satisfactory performance and smaller error measure as compared with ANFIS.

Online mining the maximal frequent itemsets over data streams is an important problem in data mining. In order to solve mining maximal frequent itemsets from data streams using the Landmark Window model, Mao et al. propose the INSTANT algorithm. The structure of the INSTANT algorithm is simple and it can save much memory space. But it takes long time in mining the maximal frequent itemsets. When the new transaction comes, the number of comparisons between the old transactions of the INSTANT algorithm is too much. Therefore, in this chapter, we propose the Set-Checking algorithm to mine frequent itemsets from data streams using the Landmark Window model. We use the structure of the lattice to store our information. The structure of the lattice records the subset relationship between the child node and the parent node. From our simulation results, we show that the process time of our Set-Checking algorithm is faster than that of the INSTANT algorithm.

In this chapter, we propose two parallel algorithms for sparse matrix transposition and vector multiplication using CSR format: with and without actual matrix transposition. Both algorithms are parallelized using OpenMP. Experimentations are run on a quad-core Intel Xeon64 CPU E5507. We measure and compare the performance of our algorithms with that of using CSB scheme. Our experimental results show that actual matrix transposition algorithm is comparable to the CSB-based algorithm; on the other hand, direct sparse matrix-transpose-vector multiplication using CSR significantly outperforms CSB-based algorithm.

In this chapter, we propose a parallel algorithm for sparse matrix transposition using CSR format to run on many-core GPUs, utilizing the tremendous computational power and memory bandwidth of the GPU offered by parallel programming in CUDA. Our code is run on a quad-core Intel Xeon64 CPU E5507 platform and a NVIDIA GPU GTX 470 card. We measure the performance of our algorithm running with input ranging from smaller to larger matrices, and our experimental results show that the preliminary results are scaling well up to 512 threads and are promising for bigger matrices.

Neural networks have the potential to analyze many possible situations and learn the correct information through training, learning, and validation. The development of a neural network that is capable of replicating the food groupings in the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Nutrient Database will be analyzed. This database contains 7,906 food items that are grouped into several different categories such as fats and oils, breakfast cereals, and pork products. A single-layer perceptron network is then created to analyze this data and train the network to classify the food items correctly. The neural network data is divided into three categories. Seventy-five percent of the data is used for training the neural network, 15 % is used for validation, and 10 % is used for testing. The results of the network show that certain food groups were harder to classify correctly than others, but overall, the entire testing data set had a misclassification of approximately 10 %. There is still much potential for this network to become better. Expanding the data set in certain categories should help the classification error to decrease even more.

The main purpose of this chapter proposes an improved multigroup ant colony optimization (IMG-ACO) algorithm to improve the traditional ant colony optimization (TACO) algorithm and traditional multigroup ant colony optimization (MG-ACO) for dealing with the optimization path problem. The TACO and MG-ACO algorithms have exhibited good performance on searching the shortest path. But on the search space, it tends to suffer from premature convergence and fall into local optimal. In this study, the IMG-ACO algorithm utilizing traditional multigroup framework and mutation mechanism performs the virtual parallel optimization algorithm. Compared with the MG-ACO, the results show that the shortest path improved by about 11.5, 16.8, and 9.1% for 60, 90, and 120 nodes, respectively. This indicates that IMG-ACO can quickly obtain the optimal or nearly optimal solutions to the path programming problem.

This chapter describes a method to dynamically generate a semantic word network which can properly reflect the semantic status. A conceptual information retrieval system based on the method is also described. The method started with the determination of keywords in a textbase. Keywords can then be clustered using analysis methods. For each cluster of keywords, the hierarchical and sibling interrelationships then are statistically inferred, so that the semantic word network can be dynamically established. The method can be formed as a module in concept information retrieval (IR) system. The query expansion function can be implemented with the module, so that the recall and precision of query result can be improved.

This chapter proposes an intelligence-based approach to solve the optimal power flow (OPF) problem considering flexible AC transmission system (FACTS). FACTS plays an important role in dynamic stability and steady-state control of power systems. This chapter aims at the study of steady-state control which determines the optimal location of FACTS devices and their associated values in the transmission lines. To determine the optimal solution of FACTS, this chapter presents an improved differential evolution (IDE) approach to deal with the OPF problem. The IDE uses a variable scaling mutation operation to enhance the global search capability of basic DE. Therefore, it is very appropriate to solve the OPF problem. The proposed method is verified on an IEEE 30-bus 41-transmission line system. Results show that the proposed approach can save more active power transmission loss and provides better convergence performance than the existing methods.

This chapter reviews modern heuristic optimization approaches for unit commitment (UC) scheduling problem in electrical power system planning, operation, and optimization by discussing recent and historical developments. The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the potential application of the modern heuristic optimization approaches in the optimization of UC scheduling and the advantages of such methods. Relevant publications from international journals covering a broad range of modern heuristic optimization methods applied to UC problems are reviewed. Recent advances and development trends in applying the modern heuristic optimization approaches to solving UC problem are summarized in the conclusions.

A new product design process, the virtual reality transferred by correlation (VRTC) is presented to lower the cost and shorten the product development process. The workflow is based on the comprehensive analysis of the problem to build a simulation-driven design process, which is used for both decisions of making the design parameters and minimizing the need for tests. By combining the VRTC with a system model, the designers can make a quick assessment for the design for the whole system and shorten the product’s time for market with an improved quality. A vibro-acoustic analysis on a loudspeaker diaphragm is presented to show the effectiveness of the workflow. By measuring the mode shapes and sound pressure, the relation between vibrations of diaphragm and sound generated can be found, and then we can redesign the speaker’s structure to generate desired sound quality.

Modern manufacturing is not only more demanding on machining accuracy but also requires the equipment to have a better degree of wisdom. For PMSM control system, it generally uses traditional PID control method due to the control advantages of traditional PID control which are simple algorithm, strong bond, and high reliability. However, the actual industrial processes are often nonlinear, and many nonlinear systems have difficulties to determine the precise mathematical model, which causes PID controller to not achieve ideal control effect. Because BP neural network has arbitrary nonlinear express ability which can achieve the best combination of PID control through the study of system performance. Hence, the control accuracy, robustness, and adaptive capacity of the control system for permanent magnet synchronous motors are improved. Also, PMSM vector control model is established to be a controlled subject. The chapter proposes the advantages of PID control and BP neural network to develop BP neural network PID controller. By using double-layer neural network controller with three inputs and three outputs, and the input refers to deviation, input signal and system output. After correcting the weightings and adjusting the three parameters of PID controller, the purpose of eliminating transient error rapidly and reaching steady state can be achieved. The practical simulation results find that the proposed BP neural network PID controller has parameter self-tuning function, short system response time, no over shooting phenomenon, and stronger robustness.

A dynamic compensation strategy to enhance the driving quality of electric vehicle (EV) is proposed. Statuses of vehicle, road conditions, and vehicle operation scenarios are taken into consideration to account for the undesired vehicle behaviors, such as start slowing, weak acceleration, and time-varying loads. At the instant of starting, an extra power is added against static frictional force. An additional power is considered while there is an extra loading or vehicle is under creeping. Besides, for comprehending the limitation of power output, the behaviors among battery, inverter, and motor are also unveiled to promote the proposed compensation strategy. Finally, the proposed compensation strategy is implemented on

i

-EV developed by Automotive Research & Testing Center to validate the feasibility.

In this chapter, a nonlinear model-based networked control system (MB-NCS) will be proposed to reduce the packet rate and network usage. A model plant that approximates the nonlinear plant dynamics via a transmission attenuation path and makes possible stabilization of the nonlinear plant will be introduced. The comparison system whose states as well as the nonlinear MB-NCS states will be developed such that the stability of the original system can be guaranteed. And then the robust stabilization problems of the nonlinear time-variant MB-NCS with time-variant transmission attenuation will be investigated. Finally, an example with simulation results is given to exemplify the implementation of the proposed controller design technique.

As a branch of the hydraulic hybrid vehicle (HHV) technology, series hydraulic hybrid vehicle (SHHV) has been an important research object of institutions and automotive manufacturers all over the world. Based on the engine experimental map, several control strategies are developed and applied on the system with an expectation that the engine will be controlled to operate in its optimal operation regions where fuel consumption and emissions of the engine are minimized. Simulation results of the system over the Japan 10–15 driving cycle indicate that the engine can be controlled to follow its optimal BSFC line most of the working times. Those results also represent a significant fuel economy improvement in comparison to the vehicle with standard conventional and hydrostatic transmission systems. With different control strategies, the improvement can be up to 80 % compared with a traditional hydrostatic control strategy and up to 60 % compared with a high-quality standard.

In this research, a system for writing Japanese calligraphy using the whole body motion of a humanoid robot has been developed. It consists of an instruction system using a virtual haptic interface and a humanoid robot with a brush on its right hand. The trajectory of human handwriting is given by the instruction system. The humanoid robot can write characters larger than its own size with a walking motion. The experimental results using a humanoid robot Hoap-2 are presented.

The auto-alignment system is designed for aligning the magnet girder system with little manpower and time as well as improving the accuracy of girder system in the whole storage ring simultaneously. The system consists of absolute length gauges between two consecutive girders, laser position-sensitive devices (PSD) between two straight-section girders, and a precision inclination sensor on each girder. The more precise angle and length between two girders obtained from these sensors module, the more precise position that can then be located. A magnet girder system with six cam movers on three pedestals is designed to provide precise adjustments of six axes and align girders automatically driven by six electric motors. This chapter consists of the construction of system, auto-alignment process, and experimental results. In the auto-alignment process, a laser tracker is employed to acquire the data as the feedback one in auto-alignment process to locate the position of girders and to simulate the status of the whole TPS storage ring. Further verification of the proposed technique of auto-alignment based on the results of several experiments in this chapter is merited.

This research proposed a system combining NI Smart Camera, PLC, and KUKA robot for remote control. It lets students manage operating process of an industrial robot in a laboratory through the Internet at anytime and everywhere. It also provides a new solution to manage production line remotely. This system can help students viewing exact status of the robot everywhere when practicing on the robot without being in the laboratory and waiting for available shifts.

In the system, NI Smart Camera will transfer videos about the operating process of system to a central computer. All output and input signals from I/O devices will be integrated on the PLC for building up a human machine interface (HMI) in the central computer. The students can interact with the HMI on the central computer to control and monitor the system. They can also access the central computer to write program for KUKA robot. All data from NI Smart Camera and HMI will help students review their works.

This investigation describes a permanent magnet brushless direct current motor (PMBLDCM) that is based on an intelligent sensorless driver controller. Digital signal processing integrated circuit (DSPIC) is used as the core of the driver since it exploits microcontroller unit (MCU) and digital signal processor (DSP) technology, has the capacity for high-level computing, and is reliable. Not only sample the back electromotive force (back-EMF) by analog-to-digital converter ADC but also a virtual neutral voltage is retrieved from the lead of the motor during the non-driven sector for a particular phase. An intelligent control law that combines Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) with the PI controller proposes to control a driver. The drive controller allows the PMBLDCM to reach the rated speed rapidly. However, when a mechanical load is applied, having good speed regulation response is obtained by the developed motor drive. The controller realizes the self-adjustment pursuit of the speed control to a better performance.

The purpose of this chapter is to establish a photovoltaic simulation system using mixed programming with LabVIEW and Simulink and compare the simulation results of three maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithms for the photovoltaic simulation system. The Matlab/Simulink is used in this chapter to establish the component models of the proposed photovoltaic simulation systems. LabVIEW is responsible for developing the virtual control interface and connects it with Simulink to perform simulation and analysis tasks. The proposed photovoltaic simulation system is developed by combining the models of solar modules and DC-DC boost converter with the tracking algorithms of perturbation and observation (P&O), incremental conductance (INC), and hill climbing (HC), respectively. The system will be simulated and analyzed under different weather conditions and MPPT algorithms. The simulation results will be shown on the interface of LabVIEW by mixed programming method. According to the comparisons of the simulation results, it can be observed that the photovoltaic simulation system can track the maximum power accurately using the three different MPPT algorithms, respectively. The simulation results can also be successfully displayed on the LabVIEW interface. The correctness and feasibility of the proposed photovoltaic simulation system is then validated.

In this chapter, based on the fuzzy method, a PC-based precision force control scheme is proposed for the electrohydraulic servo press system. The main feature of proposed scheme is to develop a composite control of relief valve and flow servo valve. With the feedback of force sensor, the fuzzy-based control system is realized by LabVIEW for achieving the precision force control of hydraulic cylinder. In the experimental testing, a practical platform of hydraulic servo press system is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed scheme. The testing results indicate the accurate output responses.

Despite business opportunities created by cloud software development becoming an irresistible trend, enterprises are daunted by the high complexity of managing cloud software development. Accurate cost estimations and time scheduling are essential to successfully manage cloud software development; quantification of the size of cloud software has a key role in supporting decisions that may occur. The international standard ISO/IEC 1976-1, a widely used functional-size measurement method, has the advantage of being able to be applied to real-time systems and more easily performing quantitative calculations. Using a case study method, this study guides and explains how to use ISO/IEC 1976-1 to measure the functional size of cloud software. The contributions of this research are primarily divided into the following three points: (a) introducing ISO/IEC 1976-1 to provide practical fields a systematic method to quantitatively measure the functional size of cloud software to support managerial decision-making, (b) using ISO/IEC 1976-1 as a practical guide and system for the management and applications measuring the size of cloud software, and (c) verifying the usability of ISO/IEC 1976-1 on size measurement of cloud software.

The island nation of Taiwan is perfectly suited to design and develop light electric vehicles (LEV) for use in urban areas. In this chapter, a fuzzy-control-based battery charger is proposed. The proposed charger takes the temperature and state-of-charge (SOC) information into account and adjusts the charging current accordingly. According to the experimental results, the performance of the proposed charger can be improved.

This chapter presents the integration of hardware and open-source software to build a low-cost (US$100) and high-speed eye tracker. With minor modifications of PlayStation 3 Eye (PS3 Eye) camera as the main hardware component and the proper coding adjustments in software interface to CL Eye Platform Driver, offered by open-source Code Laboratories, our low-cost eye tracker runs at the speed of 187 frames per second (fps) in 320 × 240 resolution, which is at least three times faster than the ordinary low-cost eye trackers usually running between 30 and 60 fps. We have also developed four application programs, which are ISO 9249-Part 9, Gaze Replay, Heat Map, and the Areas of Interest (AOI). Our design is then compared with the low-cost KSL-240 and commercially available high-price (over US$5,000) Tobii under ISO 9249-Part 9 eye-tracking test. The test performance favored ours in terms of response time and correct response rate.

This chapter presents a controller using Hedge Algebra to control nonlinear object. Then, it opens the possibility for a reasonable application of new theory in the design of automation systems in the industry, suitably for nonlinear objects with variable parameters. The method with a new flexible tool based on quantifying linguistic domains can calculate with higher accuracy than the fuzzy controller.

To achieve maximum output power from wind generator systems, the rotational speed of wind generators should be adjusted in real time according to natural wind speed. This chapter pays attention to an optimum rotational speed of a single-phase AC (SPAC) generator that can obtain maximum output power with natural wind speed. A high-performance online maximum output power control using the optimum rotational speed to obtain maximum output power is proposed for the SPAC generator system. Moreover, an original generated power brake is introduced in the variable-speed wind generator system. By experimental results, the validity and the practicality of the proposed method are confirmed and can be of practical use in the near future.

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based digital control boost power factor correction (PFC) AC-DC converter with average current-mode control (ACC) and load-current-injection control is proposed to achieve high power factor and to improve dynamic performance. The ACC-controlled converter includes a fast inner current loop and a slow outer voltage loop. The current loop regulates the input current such that input average current follows the input voltage to comply with the current standards on power factor and input current distortion of power supplies. The outer voltage loop maintains the output voltage at a reference level against load variation and line voltage fluctuation. The main limitation of the ACC-controlled PFC rectifiers is that the bandwidth of the voltage loop is only about 10–20 Hz. The technique of load-current-injection control is applied to speed up the output voltage response to load variation. A 350 W prototype of boost PFC converter is built to validate the dynamic performance. The experimental results are provided to verify the high power factor complying with IEC 61000-3-2 Class D and fast output voltage regulation against the load variation.

This study applies a five-linked robotic manipulator to track prespecified trajectories in the workspace. It is authors’ intent to see how adequate the method of direct collocation and nonlinear programming (DCNLP) can be in enhancing the capability of robotic manipulator. Creative dig-ins may excavate useful robotic applications not only in welding industry but also in medical-home health caring applications. In this study, the dynamics of the manipulator is constructed by Lagrange-Euler (L-E) formulation and the geometry of the manipulator is defined according to the Denavit-Hartenberg convention. Once the EOM are available, the optimal control theory takes over and the necessary conditions (NCs) confine the manipulator system to the optimality condition of least-energy maneuvering. However, NCs inevitably evoke the two-point boundary-valued problem (TPBVP). The method of DCNLP will convert a TPBVP into a nonlinear programming problem. It assures the certainty of obtaining optimal solutions for TPBVP.

Laser-cutting path arrangements are constrained multimodal optimization problems. In solving these continuous-path control problems, one can improve the time efficiency and power consumption of laser-cutting process. This chapter presents a simplified objective function design methodology for real-number-coding genetic algorithm. In the cutting route determination stage, all the cutting starting and ending points are placed in a plane at the same place to facilitate the completion of routing. These objective functions can be used for path finding in practical laser-cutting assignments.

This chapter presents a load balancing method for dual CAN bus to maximize the use of network bandwidth. The CAN (controller area network) is a serial communication protocol gaining widespread acceptance in automotive and automation industry. The network uses dual bus to improve network bandwidth and performance. The data traffic of CAN bus is degraded on high-load conditions. This chapter proposes a load balancing allocation algorithm using fuzzy control to obtain the maximum data traffic. The load balancing allocation algorithm introduced in the chapter is validated on a four-node dual CAN bus system. Each CAN node uses a LPC2119 ARM development board as hardware platform. The chip LPC2119 is based on the ARM7 CPU core with 2 CAN channels. Experiment results show that the fuzzy control is quite suitable for the load balancing control to improve the performance of dual CAN bus at high-load conditions.

The financial information’s operation of banking cannot allow the services to discontinue and lose data. To reduce the banking service impact because of unexpected disasters, this study plans to use the composite remote backup model and proposes to use the CoD (capacity on demand) model to design the backup center’s host to protect the information system that is suitable to the recovery requirement for banking. This study uses the analysis of variance method to census and analyze the fault factors of some banks’ information system and derives the equation of estimation to calculate how much redundancy capacity to purchase for the remote host. This should reduce the setup cost substantially than is possible using the traditional model.

An LED panel lamp is presented for general indoor illumination. This lamp consists of arrayed LED light sources with each LED united with an evening lens so that the Lambertian distribution of LED light is altered, and the illuminance on a target plane can be uniform. The computer simulation result shows that the illuminance uniformity is 0.737, and the maximum illuminance is 140 lx on a detecting screen at 1.5 m away.

When a high-capacity offshore wind farm (OWF) is connected to a power system, the power quality of the power system can be significantly deteriorated under various wind speeds. This paper presents the analyzed voltage variations of Taiwan Power System connected with a 100-MW OWF using a commercial power system simulation software. The ultrahigh voltage bus of ten onshore substations that are close to the potential OWF is selected as the connection point. The voltage variation results at the connection points under different lengths of submarine cable are accomplished and analyzed when the 100-MW OWF is connected to the selected substations. The simulated results can offer a reference for the development of OWFs in Taiwan in the near future.

Latch-up (LU)/electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection inclinations of a high-voltage (HV) IC reliability are investigated in this chapter, where the test DUTs were fabricated by a 0.25 um 60 V BCD process. In order to effectively evaluate the LU and ESD reliabilities, the source-end layout in two manners were proposed and verified; all of them effectively improved the trigger voltage (

V

t1

) or the secondary breakdown current (

I

t2

) to enhance its ESD immunity. These two kinds of source-end layout are the P

+

of discrete distributed type and P

+

of bulk-contact numbers varied type, while these two different layout methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. It can be concluded that the ESD immunity level or the trigger voltage (

V

t1

) decreasing of a device can be improved by the source-end layout optimization in an HV process. Then, in this work, by using some layout techniques to improve the important reliability robustness, these strategies will be easily used and without added any additional process or mask in an HV process technology.

This chapter aims at enhancing the model validness in the LED luminaire simulation. Regarding the deviation between simulation outcomes and the real measured data, the optical parameters to model the simulation were adjusted or, even, added the newer ones. After recursive simulation, the updated or renewed model would progressively approach to the physical one. Our studies concluded that the formatting of scatter parameter, which ordinarily ignored, factors critically in pursuing a better emulation. Practically, a home-made catoptric LED luminaire is referred to find the suitable parametric set that would derive the candela profiles each other approached. Finally, the example of the desktop lamp having adjustable catoptric optics is instanced to demonstrate the achievements of this study.

An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that uses delta–sigma modulation technique is less restricting to analog circuit specification, consumes less circuit power, and achieves higher resolution. This chapter presents an oversampling, second-order, fully differential design for a sigma–delta ADC, which is suited to audio applications. The modulator architecture is first designed using the behavioral simulator in MATLAB and then the TSMC 0.18 μm single-poly six-metal process. Using a sampling frequency of 6.4 MHz, an oversampling rate of 128 and an input amplitude of −3 dB of the full swing, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 92 dB is achieved using behavioral simulations and a ratio of 89 dB from the circuit simulations. This is equivalent to 15-bit resolution.

Application of wireless transmission technology to construct a family automation system is proposed and realized in this study. In this investigation, we make use of the advantages of ZigBee consisting of power saving, high reliability, and extensibility to build an automatic system so that the problems of the hardware complicity and the maintenance of the family household appliances network can be excluded.

The performance and lifespan of Li-ion batteries are closely related to the quality of their charger. To enhance the charger’s performance, the Smart Battery System (SBS) Specification presents one element of a complete system solution for rechargeable batteries used in portable electronic equipment. The SBS features charging characteristics that are controlled by the battery itself, in contrast to a charger with fixed charging characteristics that will work with only one cell type. Therefore, the smart battery/smart battery charger combination provides distinct advantages in system safety, performance, and cost.

In this chapter, a level 2 SBS is developed and implemented. The power stage is implemented using a level 2 SBC IC ISL88731 from Intersil Corp., and the host controller is realized by using the dsPIC microcontroller from Microchip Corp. The five-step constant-current charging pattern is implemented in the host controller. Comparing to conventional constant-current–constant-voltage (CC-CV) charging pattern, five-step constant-current charging algorithm has the advantages such as higher charging efficiency and shorter charging time.

This chapter proposed an intelligent control method for the positioning of a hybrid magnetic levitation (Maglev) system, using the emerging approaches of fuzzy logic and artificial neural network (ANN). A Maglev system depends on controlling the air gap of the electromagnetic actuator. In practice, no precise mathematical model can be established because this hybrid Maglev system is inherently unstable in the direction of levitation, and the relationships between current and electromagnetic force are highly nonlinear. Fuzzy logic has emerged as a mathematical tool to deal with the uncertainties in human perception and reasoning. It also provides a framework for an inference mechanism that allows for approximate human reasoning capabilities to be applied to knowledge-based systems. Moreover, ANNs have emerged as fast computation tools with learning and adaptive capabilities. Recently, these two fields have been integrated into a new emerging technology called fuzzy neural networks (FNN) which combine the benefits of each field. In the method that is proposed herein, the control model uses Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy logic, in which the back-propagation algorithm processes information from neural networks to make suitable adjustments to the parameter of the fuzzy logic controller (FLC) and the control signal for object output tracking of the input. This method can then be applied to improve the control performance of nonlinear systems. System responses transient performance and steady-state performance various processes that are by using a FNN that must be trained through a learning process, to yield suitable membership functions and weightings. The result on the Maglev system of a simulation indicates that the system response satisfies the control performance without overshoot, zero-error steady state, and obtaining the rise time within 0.1 s. The proposed controller can be feasibly applied to Maglev systems with various external disturbances, and the effectiveness of the FNN with self-learning and self-improving capacities is proven.

CMOS transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) suitable for optical wireless communications are presented. The shunt-feedback TIAs are designed using a feedforward current amplifier (CA). In the presence of a large input photodiode capacitance, the CA-based TIA posses a wide dynamic range with a relatively constant bandwidth. The optical wireless preamplifiers are validated by both simulation and measurement.

Contiguity along Gray codes and neighborhood among cluster faults are naturally connected by a novel hypercube-based address remapping unit. A novel memory repair architecture based on redundant hypercube is proposed, which mainly consists of a modified ternary CAM with an address concentrator. A modified ESPRESSO tool is developed for redundancy analysis on clustered-fault repairing optimization. Based on the redundancy analysis for a two-dimensional Gray-code-ordered memory array, every clustered fault with a width of no more than w and a length of no more than l can be repaired by a single hypercube-based spare row with a degree of

$$ \left( {\lceil \log 2(w - 1)\rceil +1} \right)\;\left( {\lceil \log 2(l - 1)\rceil + 1} \right) $$

. Finally 100% of repair rate can be obtained using only a few equivalent rows.

Autonomous vehicles are recently a popular research and development domain in academy and industry. In this research, Arduino was adopted as the system control unit for an autonomous vehicle. Infrared sensors, motors, and all required IO components were installed to form an electromechanical assembly of the vehicle. The versatile vehicle has three functionalities or operating modes, named tracking, obstacle avoiding, and remote operating. The verification results of the vehicle apparently showed that all kinds of operations conformed to the basic design. Furthermore, the expenses are obviously lower than marketing robotic vehicles.

A highly accurate ultrasonic parking sensor system for use in air is described. The proposed system uses a method which combines both the time-of-flight (TOF) method and the phase-shift method. The proposed method can obtain larger range measurement and also get higher accuracy compared with the TOF method. A single-chip microcomputer-based two-frequency continuous signal generator and phase detector was designed to record and compute the TOF, two phase shifts, and the resulting distance. In the test embodiment to confirm concept feasibility, three cost 40±2kHz ultrasonic transducers allow flexibility on bumper for transmitting and receiving ultrasound. The ultrasound transducer on the middle of bumper is transmitting the ultrasound. Two ultrasound transducers on the left and right sides of bumper are receiving the ultrasound simultaneously for detecting multiple objects. Experiments were done in air using two-frequency continuous wave (TFcw) with the frequencies of 40 and 41kHz. Distance resolution of 0.05% of the wavelength corresponding to the frequency of 40kHz was obtained. The range accuracy was found to be within ±0.05mm at a range of over 3,000mm. The main advantages of this ultrasonic parking sensor system are high resolution for detecting multiple objects, low cost, narrow bandwidth requirements, and ease of implementation.

A novel low-power programmable logic array (PLA) structure based on gate diffusion input (GDI) is presented. The GDI technique allows reducing power consumption, propagation delay, and area of digital circuits. It also maintains low complexity of circuit design. In this chapter, we use the GDI technique to modify Kwang’s PLAs. The conditional evaluation circuit in all product lines of Kwang’s PLAs is replaced by a GDI circuit. To verify the proposed PLA, we use the MCNC PLA benchmark circuits to perform experiments. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the number of transistors by 28.1 %, power consumption by 40.6 %, delay time by 15 %, and total power-delay product (PDP) by 49.5 % compared with Kwang’s PLAs, which use the alu2 in MCNC benchmark for 0.18μm CMOS technology.

In this study, a Little Computer 3 (LC-3) core is ported to Altera’s Cyclone III FPGA on the DE0 development board. DE0 input/output devices such as seven-segment display, LED, switch, GPIO devices, and Lego Mindstorms NXT devices are added as memory-mapped devices. The LC-3 core was designed with VHDL on Quartus II 9.0 Web Edition. The input/output devices on DE0 can be manipulated by LC-3 instructions. With these additional devices in LC-3, more diversified and interesting labs can be designed. Students can first test their programs on the simulator and then on DE0. This should add more fun to learning assembly language programming and computer organization and flatten the learning curve.

Due to developing history of EDA tools, current mainstream EDA tools are almost developed on Linux or UNIX. This chapter is a study of discovering some methods or techniques to execute such UNIX-based EDA tools on Microsoft Windows platform without rewriting the entire program. In this chapter, XCircuit, an electrical circuit schematic drawing program executing on UNIX, will be put into experiment for discovering a way to execute the program on Microsoft Windows platform. XCircuit is an open-source program and authorized by General Public License (GPL). This can avoid some problems that may be caused by proprietary software. XCircuit is expected to port and execute on Microsoft Windows XP during the porting experiment in this chapter.

This chapter presents a transparent pipeline architecture based on the synchronous elastic circuits. Compared with a traditional synchronous pipeline, a transparent pipeline can reduce dynamic clock power dissipation by reducing the amount of clock pulses required for data latching. Moreover, with the help of the synchronous elastic properties, our design can also provide tolerance to variations in computation and communication delays. The proposed architecture has been implemented by the Verilog HDL and synthesized with Altera Quartus II. The experimental results performed on a five-stage pipeline have also shown the power efficiency of our architecture.

This chapter presents the design and implementation of a wireless electric guitar with digitally integrated effector. Wireless audio modules are first employed so that electric guitar players no longer have to worry about stumbling on the stage. Furthermore, in a traditional analog way, electric guitar players may face many different kinds of effectors, such as distortion, flanger, and reverberation. It is hard for players to control them by pedals. The digitally integrated effectors are proposed and implemented by DE2-70 Multimedia Development Board. Finally, a little radio transmitter with multiple keys is equipped on the electric guitar such that the players can easily select the desired audio effect.

This chapter presents an LLC resonant converter with constant frequency. Since LLC resonant converters possess the advantages of high efficiency and low electromagnetic interference, they are widely used in many applications. However, the EMI filter design becomes more complex because of the variable-frequency operation of LLC resonant converter. Therefore, in this chapter, a circuit configuration of a buck converter cascade an LLC resonant converter, buck-fed LLC resonant converter, is proposed to complete constant-frequency operation and simplify the EMI filter design. The buck converter is applied in the proposed converter as the input source for the LLC resonant converter. In addition, by adjusting the output voltage of the buck converter, the output regulation and constant-frequency operation of the proposed converter can be achieved. Finally, a prototype of the buck-fed LLC resonant converter with input voltage 380–400 V and output 24 V/10 A is implemented. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed converter.

While the wireless Bluetooth 4.0 technology has been introduced, this study focuses on its low power consumption and quick connection features to develop a system used in sporting events. The system includes a user bracelet, signal reading stations, and individual positioning program by using of the RSSI (received signal strength indication). The proposed system does effectively and accurately capture user’s location, with different characteristics from regular positioning system as GPS and Wi-Fi, which can be applied in indoor and outdoor environments. Due to sporting events, the venue must maintain a certain space for movement, and the loss of multipath fading effects in the open spaces is much lower. Thus, the attenuation of the signal strength is much less, and it will more effectively target the user’s position. The positioning method is similar to Zigbee by using the triangulation algorithm, but the biggest difference is the cellular phones in the market support Bluetooth rather than ZigBee.

Electronic books have the advantages of being portable and low cost; however, there are drawbacks, such as they can be duplicated easily. This research designs and implements an eBook access control protocol and achieves authorized user access verification. This method includes network communication and RFID technique, mainly utilizing the feature of RFID tag that contains unique Tag ID, establishes a database of eBooks tag IDs on a Radius server, and allows access to these eBooks only by the user with legitimate RFID tag. This chapter presents function

F

( ) and

F

−1

( ), the inverse function of

F

( ). The Radius server uses

F

( ) to encrypt and send the data to the RFID tag; besides, it also can decrypt the data sent from RFID tag.

F

−1

( ) in the RFID tag can be used to decrypt and encrypt data to and from the Radius server. Furthermore, SSL over TCP/IP is applied to secure and protect data transfer between Radius server and eBook reader.

Novel dual-mode filters with two differently structured resonators were designed on Al

2

O

3

ceramic substrates to achieve pattern minimization and better filter properties. The input/output microstrip lines were arranged in a straight line, making the designed filter easy to connect with other RF circuits. To promote a coupling effect between the input/output microstrip lines and the resonator, two additional coupling stubs were used to form modified T-shaped microstrip coupling lines. In a dual-mode filter, adding a perturbation stub could generate two degenerate modes and increased the bandwidth in the desired passband. To achieve this, the type-A dual-mode filter was designed on a square-ring resonator with two perturbation stubs. For the type-B filter, two open stubs, one perturbation patch, and one meandering loop ring resonator were investigated to achieve the same purpose but with a smaller pattern size than type-A. According to simulated results, the proposed filters with optimized parameters exhibited the wide passbands.

Two dual-band bandpass filters are investigated both using two resonators parallel positioned along with microstrip lines. The proposed dual-band bandpass filter was based on

λ

g

/2 open-loop rectangle-ring resonator (Resonator L). A shorter open-loop rectangle-ring resonator (Resonator S) was parallel positioned at another side of the input/output microstrip lines with the same coupling conditions to the original longer resonator. If phase difference for signals in two paths was equal to 180°, the energy cancellation has happened, and no passband would be found. The longer resonator resonates at 1.23 and 2.4 GHz band. The shorter resonator resonates at 2.4 GHz band to enhance the bandwidth and out-of-band rejection by phase difference method. The bandwidth of 1.23 GHz band is produced by

λ

g

/2 fundamental response of Resonator L. The bandwidth of 2.4 GHz band is produced by combining 1

λ

g

first spurious response of Resonator L and

λ

g

/2 fundamental response of Resonator S. The proposed filters are suitable to use for GPS (L2-band) and WLAN.

EVs have been gradually applied into life, but the demand is uncertain, yet a developed and service infrastructure of charging stations is a prerequisite for growth in EV market. A preliminary operation is therefore constructed in long-term perspective, and this chapter presents a concept of surveillance, message broadcast, and data acquisition design for EV preliminary research. The platform integrated communication technologies and address oriented protocols for simulated scenarios. Mobile communication offers data exchange for remote surveillance when continuously linking. Each parameter acquisition is handled by OBU via CAN bus. To simulate different traffic conditions, DSRC is adopted as the bridge among roadside unit, server center, and vehicle. Server center plays the role of benefit evaluation which has the ability to provide statistic data for further analysis and assessment. Taking an EV as demonstrated vehicle, the power consumption and scheduled traffic condition are used to discuss and verify platform ability.

In this chapter, the main focus is on the design of microstrip dual-band filter function. This chapter presents a new compact, low insertion loss, sharp-rejection, and capacitive coupling dual-band microstrip bandpass filter. The operation of filter was designed in dual band of WLAN 2.45 GHz and WiMax 3.5 Hz. In order to reduce the size, the proposed filter used skew symmetric feed and microstrip line ring structure. The proposed filter additional two winding-type L shape of the stepped impedance resonator increased high-frequency transmission zeros to achieve a good dual-band effect. The filter was using electromagnetic simulator Ansoft HFSS, which was used to adjust and optimize the associated parameters. The filter was fabricated by Rogers RT/duroid 6010 substrate and measured by Agilent-N5230A with the connectors. The dual-band bandpass filter experimental results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results. Experimental results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results.

This chapter integrated an active RFID tag with a thermal convection angular accelerometer on a flexible substrate. The first new idea was to make the device directly on a flexible substrate without any movable parts, so it is very easy to make and reliable. The second idea used the flexible substrate such as polyimide, since its thermal conductivity is much lower than silicon, and thus, it can save more power. The third new idea and the most powerful one is that the angular accelerometer is integrated with an active RFID tag on the same flexible substrate; thus, the device becomes a more useful wireless angular acceleration sensor. By using the traditional square chamber filled with carbon dioxide, the device sensitivity is 18.8 °C/(rad/s

2

) and the response time is 158 μs.

This chapter investigates a technique for a piezoelectric generator system using the synchronized switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) electronic interface. Piezoelectric materials can convert mechanical energy into electrical energy through direct piezoelectric effect. In order to increase the current capability of the power source, several piezoelectric generators are placed in parallel. However, the electricity generated by piezoelectric generator reduces when the piezoelectric materials are parallel connected. To raise the output power density of piezoelectric generator system, a SSHI is used in parallel with the harvesting structure. Two electronic interface structures, the bridge rectifier and the SSHI, are used to harvest the energy from the piezoelectric generator. The structure of the SSHI is better than that of the bridge rectifier. The Taguchi parameter design for the SSHI structure is utilized to harvest energy of piezoelectric generator system, and the results of measurement verify the feasibility of this structure in the experiment.

A thin elastic–plastic annular disk subject to thermomechanical loading is considered. It is assumed that plastic yielding is controlled by Hill’s quadratic orthotropic yield criterion. A distinguished feature of the boundary value problem considered is that there are two loading parameters. One of these parameters is temperature and the other is pressure over the inner radius of the disk. It is shown that the initiation of plastic yielding may occur either at the inner radius or at the outer radius of the disk depending on the value of anisotropy parameters.

This chapter presents the development of a Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) gyroscope-based sensing module and the experiments to verify the functionality of the sensing module in a rotating mechanism. The module integrated a MEMS gyroscope sensor, battery, microprocessor, signal processing circuitry, analog-to-digital converter, memory unit, remote switch to turn on/off the module operation, and signal output port. It has no wire connection for power supply and signal transmission, which avoids the wire twisting problem during spindle rotating test. The module is then firmly secured on a rotating platform to test its function. The measured angular velocities are verified the accuracy through the encoder readout of the driving motor. Also, using this sensing module to detect a rotating plate with intentionally run-out error setting, the acquired signals clearly exhibit the corresponding relationship. The preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of the developed sensing module for dynamic characterization of rotating mechanism.

This chapter selected plastic injection molding to investigate molding real production. Plastic products penetrate plastic injection forming. Recently, 3C products have required light and thin materials. In traditional plastic injection forming, several parameters can influence mold product precision, such as warping, sinking and residual stress, surface quality, size deviation, and shrinkage rate. Therefore, this chapter examines the sheet forming for plastic injections. The experiment investigates the runner gate number and appearance influencing plastic injection finished products. First, mold flow analysis software was used to search for optimum parameters. The primary test offers various parameters in runner and pouring gates and examines their influence on surface roughness in plastic injection thin sheets. The experimental results show useful insights into the optimal processing conditions for plastic injection forming of thin sheets and offer a reference for the industry.

Modal identification from response data only is studied for structural systems under nonstationary ambient vibration. By assuming the ambient excitation to be nonstationary white noise in the form of a product model and introducing a technique of curve fitting, the practical problem of insufficient data samples available for evaluating nonstationary correlation functions or randomdec signatures can be approximately resolved by first extracting the amplitude-modulating function from the response and then transforming the nonstationary responses into stationary ones. Modal-parameter identification can then be performed using the Ibrahim time-domain method in conjunction with the correlation technique and random decrement algorithm, respectively. A comparison of correlation technique and random decrement algorithm is demonstrated through numerical simulations, which also confirm the validity of the proposed method for identification of modal parameters from nonstationary ambient response data.

NiTi alloy is one of the so-called shape memory alloys (SMAs). Its shape memory effect is derived from the phase transformation controlled by the temperature. With the similar spherical indentation produced in the measurement of Brinell hardness, a surface topography accompanied with residual stress is obtained on the polished NiTi alloy. Following the usual controlled heating performed in the SMA, the indented surface can nearly return to its flat surface configuration as the NiTi alloy goes through the martensite to austenite transformation. This study firstly focused on how to implement the SMA material tensile test at different controlled temperatures. Thus, the associated mechanical properties at different temperatures were obtained, and the effect of annealing temperature on the SMA’s phase transformation was also investigated. The thus formed spherical indentations on shape memory alloys could have reversible depth change, i.e., deeper depth in the martensitic phase at low temperature and shallower depth in the austenitic phase at high temperature. Thus, by controlling the temperature of the NiTi alloy, a surface with tunable morphology was demonstrated.

The intake air cooling device of the engine is discussed in this chapter. The thermoelectric module (T.E.M.) is applied on the device for the decrease of the intake air temperature to the engine. The device is placed between the engine and the air filter, and it can increase the efficiency of the induction system by reducing induction air heat and promoting more thorough combustion. The closed water cooling system can remove the heat produced from the thermoelectric module and increase the efficiency of the thermoelectric module. According to the device, it can increase the engine power about 60 % at most and decrease the intake air temperature by 14 %.

A 98 mol % ZnO–1 mol % Al

2

O

3

(AZO) compound was sintered at 1,350 °C as a target and deposited on glass substrates using a radio-frequency magnetron (r.f.) sputtering system, under the 30 sccm 98 % Ar + 2 % H

2

ambient. The effect of deposition temperature (25–300 °C) on carrier concentration, carrier mobility, resistivity, and optical transmission spectrum of the AZO films was studied. The Burstein-Moss shift was observed and used to prove that defects in the AZO films decreased with increasing deposition temperature. The effect of hydrogen (H

2

) plasma on carrier concentration, carrier mobility, resistivity, and optical transmission spectrum of the different temperature-deposited AZO films was also studied. The value variations in the optical band gap (

E

g

value) of the AZO films were evaluated from the plots of

I

=

I

0

e

−αt

, where

α

2

= hν − E

g

. The measured

E

g

value of the as-deposited AZO films increased with increasing deposition temperature and had no apparent trend difference as the H

2

plasma was used.

In this study, Sr

0.6

Ba

0.4

Nb

2

O

6

(SBN) thin films were prepared by radio-frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering. After finding the optimal deposition parameters, the deposited SBN thin films were annealed in a conventional furnace. In comparisons of XRD patterns, the annealing process had improved the crystallization and also had large effects on the crystalline orientation of SBN thin films. As the annealing temperature was risen from 600 to 700 °C, the diffraction intensities of (410) and (001) peaks really increased. Annealed at 800 °C, SBN thin films showed a highly

c

-axis crystalline orientation in (001) peak. Effects of annealing temperature on the electrical characteristics were recorded and analyzed, including the polarization-applied electric field curves, the capacitance-voltage curves, and the leakage current density-electric field curves. As the annealing process was used to treat on the as-deposited SBN thin films, the Pr, Ps, and Ec values were really improved. The theorems to cause the drastic variations in the capacitances, the memory windows, and the flat-band shift voltages of SBN thin films were also discussed.

In this study, the characteristics of the SrBi

4

Ti

4

O

15

(SBT) thin films were investigated by sol–gel method. Bi(NO

3

)

3

and SrCO

3

were mixed with the ethylene glycol and acetic acid at 120 °C. After that, the titanium (IV) isopropoxide was added and mixed, and then the sol–gel precursor formula SrBi

4

Ti

4

O

15

+4 wt% Bi

2

O

3

(SBT) was obtained. After baking at 350 °C for 10min, the one-layer SBT thin films were obtained. The spin coating and baking process were repeated twice for the two-layer SBT thin films. After deposition, the SBT thin films were annealed in a conventional furnace (CTA) at 600, 700, and 800 °C for 60 min in O

2

atmosphere. The cross sections and the surface morphologies of SBT thin films were investigated by using FE-SEM, and the crystalline structures were characterized by XRD patterns. It was found that the grain sizes increased and the pores decreased with rising CTA temperature. The effects of annealing temperature on the electrical properties of SBT thin films were also recorded and analyzed, including the capacitance–voltage curves and the leakage current density–electric field curves.

This work has simulated the flow field in a hot-dip galvanized zinc pot using a water tank simulation. The flow pattern was visualized using laser sheet flow visualization technique. The general flow pattern in the water tank was not sufficiently influenced by the belt speed. The traces of water on the snout side, in the snout region, and close to the surface, where the stabilizing roll and the belt were in contact, were closely examined. The water tank was also investigated numerically. The steady-state CFD solution also indicated that a change in the belt velocity has little influence on the overall flow pattern developed in the tank. The flow patterns obtained via CFD means had a close resemblance with those visualized through laser sheet technique.

ANSYS was used to simulate the temperature field of the nitride semiconductor compound in the laser lift-off (LLO) process. One-dimension thermal conduction model is formulated. When the fluence is 107mJ/cm

2

, the InN temperature starts to rise up, coupled with a large temperature gradient across the InN film, to above 600°C for a region within 108nm below the irradiated InN/sapphire interface. The diameter of the beam spot is 300μm, but the diameter of the decomposed area is around 100μm for InN due to Gaussian beam shape. For GaN, LLO can be achieved by using either a single pulse of 350mJ/cm

2

fluence or multiple pulses of fluence down to 95mJ/cm

2

. The result shows that when six successive 95mJ/cm

2

pulses are used, the thermal stress can be greatly reduced from 0.929GPa in the case of a single 350mJ/cm

2

pulse to 0.332GPa.

A drainer is a very common article in a bathroom or balcony. Wherever the weep hole exists, there is always a drainer. But, the general drainer cannot obstruct cockroaches and stench from the drain. TRIZ method was used to resign and improve the stench and cockroaches problem in this study. In order to solve previous problem, we use quality function deployment (QFD), tech/physical contradictions, and invention principles to find the key point problems and improve them. This study adds a light float in the drainer. When water pours into the drainer, the float in the drain will be opened by water buoyancy. Contrariwise, when water flows out, the float and drain close directly by gravity. Therefore, this drainer can effectively keep from insect pests and bad odor, no matter the water exist or not.

In this study we improve the capacity of the polishing process of silicon reclaim wafer by applying the six sigma approach and the five steps of DMAIC. Based on the Taguchi experiment approach, a four-factor three-level experiment is designed by experimental design method using the existing polishing parameters, in particular such processing conditions as the cylinder head down force of the main process section, the PP rpm, LP rpm, and the flow of polishing slurry. The four factors are as follows: cylinder head down force, PP rpm, LP rpm, and the slurry flow. By studying the correlation between various parameters in the polishing process and the polishing result, the polishing factors’ effect on the material removal rate (MRR) and wafer’s total thickness variation (TTV) after the polishing process is analyzed, to obtain the optimized parameters for the improvement of the quality of polishing process and enhancement of process yield rate.

A conception by using integration of chemical microsensors and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is proposed to sense carbon monoxide (CO). The research is based on the common-path heterodyne interferometer which contains nondestructive, high-sensitivity, and high accuracy optical sensing system and combines the tin dioxide which is chemical stability to sense CO as analyte of SPR. Under this configuration, the method can measure tiny phase differences for SnO

2

with different CO concentration. The minimum resolution of gas concentration is verified with a best value of 0.0207ppm occurring in pH 9.

An APPLE-II elliptically polarized undulator (EPU) is commonly used in third-generation electron accelerator storage ring to provide varied polarization soft X-ray. When electron beam passes through an undulator, the radiation is generated and collimated. In order to have high photon flux, these collimated photons need to be coherent. Therefore, prefect magnetic fields are necessary for electron beam trajectory and phase. EPU46 consists of 1,320 magnet blocks to create sinusoidal magnetic field, and four-phase modes generate various polarization on synchrotron soft X-ray. The objective functions are to minimized electron trajectory/angle deviation and phase error. Without intelligent optimization method, field correction becomes a tedious and time-consuming work. In this chapter, a field shimming adapted with Genetic Evolutionary algorithm is developed; the methodology and results are presented.

Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) is a piezoelectric sensor with multiple application such as antigen-antibody interactions, detection of virus capsids, protein adsorption, and DNA and RNA hybridization. The material of QCM model with diameter of 4.5mm in this research is AT-cut quartz since the resonance mode of AT-cut crystal is thickness-shear mode (TSM). The principle of QCM is sensing the change of resonance frequency caused by the variation of mass. Based on the theory of electricity, decreasing the separation distance and expanding the effective area of electric field are feasible solutions for improving QCM. According to these concepts, novel groove designs for QCM with gold electrodes were proposed to develop electric field distribution. Complete analysis for piezoelectricity and electricity of QCM was simulated via analysis software CoventorWare 2010. The analysis results reveal that innovative designs in this research fulfill the advantages such as larger effective area, lower crystal impedance, and higher quality factor.

Vibration absorber has been used as an effective tool in the vibration reduction of structure-suffered single-frequency excitation. An absorber consisted of a spring element made of hybrid shape memory materials was proposed. A cantilevered beam fabricated by superelastic (SE) core and shape memory polymer (SMP) sleeves was employed as the spring element of the absorber. By controlling the electric current through the SE core and thereby the temperature of the SMP sleeves, the natural frequency of the absorber was tunable. In this study, an absorber with actively tunable frequency capability may offer more powerful solution. The fabricated hybrid shape memory material absorber was capable of changing its natural frequency by more than 45 %. By applying semi-active controllers including fuzzy logic control and self-tuning control to the tunable vibration absorber, system resonance can be avoided, thus ensuring adaptability and robustness of the damping system.

In this chapter, a methodology for simultaneous thickness measurement and material composition analysis using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) technique is present. This research bases on the fundamental parameter (FP) method to reconstruct the composition and thickness of target layers. A monochromatic non-divergent incident radiation is used as a source for generating the emission of characteristic secondary spectrum from a material. The reference set in which material composition is known was used to calibrate and validate measurement of concentrations of elements. XRF measurements of the thickness are correlated as a function of process parameters given by receiving spectra from inspecting target. The method can provide a real-time measurement with high accuracy in determining thickness and material composition.

The electron beam is injected from the end of the transport line into the injection section of the storage ring in Taiwan Photon Source (TPS). A girder system for the injection section has been designed to support AC/DC septum magnets, four kicker magnets (K1–K4), and vacuum chambers. The girder system includes three girders, a Rapson-slide mechanism, and stages for the septum/kicker magnets. To improve the reliability and the stability of the injected electron beam, the girder systems are designed and installed in the injection section of TPS, as described in this chapter. The positioning accuracy of installing three girders and the stages for septum/kicker magnet are, respectively, within 0.3 and 0.05 mm.

We report the effect of UV annealing on post-γ-ray-irradiated spin-coated γ-APTES and γ-APTES + NPs + UV. The structure changes of the membranes were characterized using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). We found that the absorption peaks of the Si-O-Si-related bonds of the FTIR spectrum varied with time after 10 kGy γ-ray irradiation. The absorption peak of the NH

3

+

bonds of the post-irradiated membranes showed less sensitive to hydrogen ions. The AFM surface morphologies showed great grain reconstructions after γ-ray irradiation for all the membranes. However, following the UV annealing process, both the FTIR spectrum and AFM surface morphologies showed that only the spin-coated γ-APTES + NPs + UV membrane could be restored to the pre-irradiated status. It is believed that the nanocomposite of silica NPs mixed with γ-APTES forms a lot of γ-APTES/SiO

2

interfaces which enhance the post-irradiation UV oxidation and hence restore the membrane from degradation.

Our recent study showed that the trapping charges of the polysilicon wire sensor caused by γ-ray radiation primarily concentrated in the γ-APTES/silica nanoparticles composite layer covered on the sensor. In this chapter, we investigate the shielding effect of the glass fiber/epoxy/silica nanoparticles/γ-APTES composite materials for high-energy radiation in commercially available MOSFET. The use of glass fiber/epoxy/silica nanoparticles/γ-APTES composite plate shielding during irradiation improved the post-irradiated degradation of transfer characteristics by three orders of magnitude for the pMOSFET and half an order of magnitude for the nMOSFET, respectively, as compared to the pMOSFET and nMOSFET with the glass fiber/epoxy or glass fiber/epoxy/silica nanoparticles or without shielding.

The present invention pertains to a pneumatically powered and charged LED flashlight that conquers the flashlight of the firefighter deficient in electricity in the emergency rescue work especially in a dark fire scene. A high-pressure air in the air bottle is able to drive an operation of a volute magnet unit in order to generate sufficient electricity for 30 min within 20 s. The present product attains rapid electricity generation with an effort-saving operation, low electricity use, and waterproof effect, which is an excellent green firefighting device.

The goal of the present invention is to design a safety protection device of the new table saw, which applies a transparent safety guard and the spring to form a protection space around a cutting tool of the table saw. The operator clearly sees the processing procedures via the LED unit and the transparent safety guard and prevents hands from touching the cutting tool. A dust-collecting apparatus under the table saw is arranged to gather dust and debris. Therefore, the accidents of cutting and kickback injuries are prevented.

To meet the ever-increasing demand for concrete shelters that house telecommunication equipment, the construction company under study has hired several new employees and grouped them to work in teams; however, the expected increase in production has not been achieved consistently. The objective of this study is to apply the principles of lean manufacturing to identify root causes for productivity variations in their conduit installation process and suggesting ways of improvement. By observing the conduit installation process on-site and timing each task, non-value-added activities that prohibit productivity were recognized, including rework, talking, employee interference, and gathering materials and tools. Based on the findings, we suggested the company to implement training modules to help standardize work methods, prepare assembly kits, move supply carts closer to the work sites, and optimize team size. These suggestions help reduce the non-value-added procedures and add time to productive work.

MEMS performance can be determined from the static and dynamic characteristic. These two parameters can be measured by various measuring systems. In this chapter, a portable measurement system which is able to measure static and dynamic characteristic of MEMS in 2-D and 3-D aspects is presented. Nanoscale static microstructure profiles are measured by means of white-light interferometry with nanometer scale accuracy. Key for dynamic characteristic measurement is the employment of stroboscopic lighting which is synchronized with the excitation signal of the measured sample. The system is capable of measuring multimode resonant frequencies and also mode reconstruction for both in-plane and out-of-plane vibration. The main advantage of the system is its versatility and portability for testing different vibration modes with improved reliability and repeatability. Achievable repeatability of the resonant frequency measurement can reach 0.012 kHz for in-plane vibration, while the repeatability of the out-of-plane resonant frequency is 0.216 kHz for a controlled environment and 0.354 for an environment with disturbance from air conditioner.

In this chapter, the poly(ether imide) (PEI)/BaTi

4

O

9

(BT4) composites were investigated for the applications of the high dielectric constant embedded capacitors or flexible organic substrates. BT4 ceramic was sintered at 1,275°C and ground into microscale power. After that, BT4 ceramic power was mixed with PEI to form PEI/BT4 composites, the effects of the concentration of BT4 filler on the physical and dielectric properties were developed. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) was used to determine the weight loss, thermal degradation temperature (

T

d

), and endothermic-exothermic peak of the PEI/BT4 composites. The Lichtenecker mixing rule was used to predict the variations of dielectric constants of the PEI/BT4 composites, and the mixing rule would fit the measured results. The dielectric constants of the PEI/BT4 composites with various concentrations (0–70 wt%) of BT4 filler were measured, and the dielectric constants were almost unchanged as the measured frequency increased, because the PEI was a nonpolarized material. This research proved that we could investigate the PEI/BT4 composites with stable frequency-dependent properties.

This chapter utilized the IPSO technique with bounded constraints for adjusting the gains of PID controller, ILC controller, and the bandwidth of zero-phase Butterworth filter. Simulation results show that IPSO-ILC-PID controller will have chance of producing high frequencies in the error signals when the filter bandwidth is fixed for every repetition. Since the conventional ILC iterative learning process has the potential to excite rich frequency contents and try to learn the error signals, however, the learnable and unlearnable error signals should be separated for bettering control process. Thus, the adaptive bandwidth of a zero-phase filter in ILC-PID controller with IPSO tuning characteristic is proposed here. Simulation results show that the new controller can cancel the errors as repetition goes. The frequency response of the error signals is analyzed by the EMD and the HHT method. Errors are reduced and validated by good ILC learning with adaptive filter bandwidth.

The pretension for a ball screw is a way to improve the position accuracy. Hollow ball screw without a cooling system has the thermal deformation effect due to increase in temperature. It will reduce precision accuracy in machine tool when the ball screw nut preload or ball screw pretension is lost. The purpose of this study is to use vibration signals for the prognostic analysis for the ball screw pretension. Features of different pretension conditions by 0, 5, 10, and 20μm are discriminated by empirical mode decomposition (EMD), fast Fourier transform (FFT), and marginal frequency method. Temperature effects with long-term operation were discussed. This study experimentally extracts the characteristic frequencies for bettering pretension through the vibration signals. This diagnosis results realize the purpose of prognostic effectiveness on knowing the hollow ball screw preload loss based on pretension data and utilizing convenience.

The principle of a piezoelectric transducer used in this chapter is to transfer the high frequency of electrical energy to mechanical energy. Since the output displacement of piezoelectric transducer is too small, the need of amplifying the displacement of the tool is based on the design of horn shape. Since resonance frequency of the horn should be compatible with the vibration frequency of the piezoelectric vibrator. This chapter is first to conduct experiment to measure the vibration frequency and amplitude of a piezoelectric transducer (PZT) for ultrasonic vibration. According to the experimental result, the resonant frequency of the horn for amplifying the displacement of the PZT is achieved thereafter. Theoretical calculation and ANSYS simulation can be used for figuring out the geometrical shape of the piezoelectric actuated horn. In the simulation, the horn modal frequency and harmonics analysis via the ANSYS simulation reach the error less than 3 %. Experimental results will be compared and validated with the simulated results.

A new fabrication method of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) is presented in this chapter. The traditional fabrication methods of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) using high-temperature processes for working electrodes have been ameliorated. In the new method, TiO

2

powder was ground with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) for the fabrication of working electrodes and graphite powder was ground with PDMS for relative electrodes. The mixtures for both the working and relative electrodes were coated on ITO-glass substrates by the doctor blade technique. PDMS was able to enhance the adhesion of the film and the substrate as well as reduce film cracks. The process temperature of the proposed fabrication method was 150°C. The low process temperature allows the usage of the plastic substrate for the DSSC. This leads to the advantages of low costs and substrate flexibility. The proposed method demonstrates a promising future for the flexible applications of DSSCs.

It is important to study the osteoblast and chondrocyte differentiations of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) due to a significant demand for prerequisite regenerative medicine. Many physical stimulators would also promote cell differentiation. This study presents a time-efficient cell differentiation system to induce and evaluate the stem cell differentiation process under given physical stimulations. In this system, all the driving signals of physical stimulations can be controlled independently by a reprogrammable microcomputer for physical stimulation studies. This chapter focuses on the design methodology and characterization of this cell culture system.

A new spray method was applied for the working electrode of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), instead of the doctor-blade method, to make the film on the working electrode uniform. The working electrode was soaked to the dye which was heated to 60°C, and then the dye was vibrated by a resonator. This procedure was capable of making the dye be well adsorbed into the working electrode. The solar photovoltaic conversion efficiency is increased from 0.26 % for the doctor-blade method to 2.65 % for the proposed spray method. The TiO

2

pastes were widely spread on the fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrate, even with a curved surface, using the spray method to achieve an efficient and simple manufacture technology of DSSCs with the advantage of low cost.

Machining is one of the most important manufacturing processes. Material removal rate (MRR) is a crucial issue in machining, but it is limited by machining stability lobe which depends on cutting dynamics. This chapter investigates an intelligent approach for increasing MRR. The approach increases the MRR by identifying the stability limit rather than constructing the whole stability lobe. Experiments are conducted using a machining center by machining the standard ISO test model with three typical materials: the aluminum alloy, the brass, and the SKD11 molding alloy. The results show that the average MRR for machining each material is increased to 281, 280, and 141 %, respectively. The merit of this approach is to reach high MRR by identifying chatter frequency without exhaustively finding the detailed stability lobes.

A laser PSD positioning system is included in the TPS girder auto-alignment system that is designed for aligning and positioning the straight-segment girders of TPS storage ring. The laser PSD positioning system consists of lasers, PSD, and lenses. This chapter describes the process of assembly, installation, adjustment, and the measurement result of the laser PSD system. Installing the laser PSD system consists of several steps. The first step is to assemble lenses and PSD in mechanism, lens PSD module. The tilt angles of lens on the lens PSD module are fine tuned and the PSD position value is adjusted to zero. The positioning fixture is designed and contains six touch sensors (absolute length gauges) for detecting the position of the lens PSD module. The lens PSD module is installed and adjusted on a girder absolute position precisely by the positioning fixture. So each module is adjusted to with equal distance to the vertical and horizontal reference plane of girder. The laser is adjusted according to the position of the PSD. Finally, use the absolute length gauges to correct the PSD. According to the aforementioned process of assembly and all parameters of PSD module, the girder can be aligned and positioned within 20 um precision scale.

The cutting parameter effect including tool diameter and feed rate on the spindle vibration signal for tool breakage monitoring was studied. The vibration signal obtained from the accelerometer installed on a fixture connected to the spindle housing was considered as the input signal for the monitoring system. The monitoring system was integrated by a signal transformation module, feature selection module for creating the features related to the breakage event, and a classifier module for classifying the tool breakage event based on the selected features. The linear discriminate function was adopted as the classifier in this chapter. To collect the vibration signals for analyzing the signals and system performance affected by cutting parameter, an experiment was implemented on a tapping machine along with 2 mm/3 mm diameter drill and aluminum alloy workpiece. In feature analysis, various wavelet coefficients for the collected signals were analyzed for system performance with various tool diameters and feed rates. The results show that the system developed by combined signals obtained from various cutting parameters is not reliable to detect tool breakage when implementing with any cutting parameters included in the model development. However, 100 % classification rate can be obtained for all case based on the model developed by type 3 signals and with properly choosing wavelet coefficient as features.

This chapter discusses the influence of the peak current, pulse duration, and machining depth of each path on the electrode wear and carbide accumulation in layer-cut electrical discharge machining (EDM) process. During the layer-cut EDM process, the simple electrode runs through the planned path from the top layer to lower layer gradually to obtain any expected cavity, which is similar to the end milling process. It has the merits of end milling such as high flexibility machining by using tool and path but also has the strength of EDM such as easy to machining high hardness material. However, the electrode wear is the key problem that influences the precision for the development of layer-cut EDM process. The result shows that the steady linear electrode wear could be obtained using the pulse duration of 150 μs. The suitable parameters would be the basis of electrode compensation in the layer-cut EDM process.

Engineering advances are often made at the boundary between two fields. This chapter considers synergy between the design of mechanisms used in manufacturing equipment and the design of control systems. Mechanism design often assumes constant velocity of the input shaft, but variations in inertia seen by the driving motor produce speed fluctuations. Typical feedback control cannot fix this, but smart control methods such as iterative learning control and repetitive control can. They can make the mechanism perform in hardware as it was intended to perform. With appropriate sensors they can also fix errors in manufacture and can also make hardware behave as if it were an improved design. The improvement in performance is achieved in software. We call these mechanisms/control systems intelligent mechanism or morphing mechanisms. Examples are discussed.