Theoretical Considerations of the Influence of Mechanical Uniaxial Stress on Pixel Readout Circuits

In this work the effects of uniaxial mechanical stress on a pixel readout circuit are theoretically analyzed. It is the effects of mechanical stress on the in-pixel transistors do not arise at the output, when a correlated double sampling circuit is used. However, mechanical stress effects on the photodiode will directly appear at the readout chain output. Therefore, compensation techniques are needed to overcome this situation. Moreover simulation technique of mechanical stress is proposed and diverse layout as well as design recommendations are put forward, in order to minimize stress related effects on the output of a circuit. he shown, that wever, Moreover, a out

Star-Hexagon Transformer Supported UPQC

A new topology of unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) is proposed for different power quality (PQ) improvement in a three-phase four-wire (3P-4W) distribution system. For neutral current mitigation, a star-hexagon transformer is connected in shunt near the load along with three-leg voltage source inverters (VSIs) based UPQC. For the mitigation of source neutral current, the uses of passive elements are advantageous over the active compensation due to ruggedness and less complexity of control. In addition to this, by connecting a star-hexagon transformer for neutral current mitigation the over all rating of the UPQC is reduced. The performance of the proposed topology of 3P-4W UPQC is evaluated for power-factor correction, load balancing, neutral current mitigation and mitigation of voltage and currents harmonics. A simple control algorithm based on Unit Vector Template (UVT) technique is used as a control strategy of UPQC for mitigation of different PQ problems. In this control scheme, the current/voltage control is applied over the fundamental supply currents/voltages instead of fast changing APFs currents/voltages, thereby reducing the computational delay. Moreover, no extra control is required for neutral source current compensation; hence the numbers of current sensors are reduced. The performance of the proposed topology of UPQC is analyzed through simulations results using MATLAB software with its Simulink and Power System Block set toolboxes.

The Decentralized Nonlinear Controller of Robot Manipulator with External Load Compensation

This paper describes a newly designed decentralized nonlinear control strategy to control a robot manipulator. Based on the concept of the nonlinear state feedback theory and decentralized concept is developed to improve the drawbacks in previous works concerned with complicate intelligent control and low cost effective sensor. The control methodology is derived in the sense of Lyapunov theorem so that the stability of the control system is guaranteed. The decentralized algorithm does not require other joint angle and velocity information. Individual Joint controller is implemented using a digital processor with nearly actuator to make it possible to achieve good dynamics and modular. Computer simulation result has been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme under the occurrence of possible uncertainties and different reference trajectories. The merit of the proposed control system is indicated in comparison with a classical control system.

Optimal Switching Strategies for Tracking of Currents of Voltage Source Converters

This paper proposes a new optimal feedback controller for voltage source converters VSC's, for current regulated voltage source converters, which allows compensate the harmonics of current produced by nonlinear loads and load reactive power. The aim of the present paper is to describe a novel switching signal generation technique called optimal controller which guarantees that the injected currents follow the reference currents determined by the compensation strategy, with the smallest possible tracking error and fixed switching frequency. It is compared with well-known hysteresis current controller HCC. The validity of presented method and its comparison with HCC is studied through simulation results.

Development of Machinable Ellipses by NURBS Curves

Owning to the high-speed feed rate and ultra spindle speed have been used in modern machine tools, the tool-path generation plays a key role in the successful application of a High-Speed Machining (HSM) system. Because of its importance in both high-speed machining and tool-path generation, approximating a contour by NURBS format is a potential function in CAD/CAM/CNC systems. It is much more convenient to represent an ellipse by parametric form than to connect points laboriously determined in a CNC system. A new approximating method based on optimum processes and NURBS curves of any degree to the ellipses is presented in this study. Such operations can be the foundation of tool-radius compensation interpolator of NURBS curves in CNC system. All operating processes for a CAD tool is presented and demonstrated by practical models.

Environmental Responsibility and Firm Performance: Evidence from Nigeria

The objective of this paper is to establish a possible relationship between sustainable business practice and firm performance. Using a field survey methodology, a sample of sixty manufacturing companies in Nigeria was studied. The firms were categorised into two groups, environmentally 'responsible' and 'irresponsible' firms. An investigation was undertaken into the possible relationship between firm performance and three selected indicators of sustainable business practice: employee health and safety (EHS), waste management (WM), and community development (CD), common within the 30 'responsible' firms. Findings from empirical results reveal that the sustainable practices of the 'responsible' firms are significantly related with firm performance. In addition, sustainable practices are inversely related with fines and penalties. The paper concludes that, within the Nigerian setting at least, sustainability affects corporate performance and sustainability may be a possible tool for corporate conflict resolution as evidenced in the reduction of fines, penalties and compensations. The paper therefore recommends research into the relationship between sustainability and conflict management.

A High Precision Temperature Insensitive Current and Voltage Reference Generator

A high precision temperature insensitive current and voltage reference generator is presented. It is specifically developed for temperature compensated oscillator. The circuit, designed using MXIC 0.5um CMOS technology, has an operating voltage that ranges from 2.6V to 5V and generates a voltage of 1.21V and a current of 6.38 ӴA. It exhibits a variation of ±0.3nA for the current reference and a stable output for voltage reference as the temperature is varied from 0°C to 70°C. The power supply rejection ratio obtained without any filtering capacitor at 100Hz and 10MHz is -30dB and -12dB respectively.

Adaptive Fuzzy Control of Stewart Platform under Actuator Saturation

A novel adaptive fuzzy trajectory tracking algorithm of Stewart platform based motion platform is proposed to compensate path deviation and degradation of controller-s performance due to actuator torque limit. The algorithm can be divided into two parts: the real-time trajectory shaping part and the joint space adaptive fuzzy controller part. For a reference trajectory in task space whenever any of the actuators is saturated, the desired acceleration of the reference trajectory is modified on-line by using dynamic model of motion platform. Meanwhile an additional action with respect to the difference between the nominal and modified trajectories is utilized in the non-saturated region of actuators to reduce the path error. Using modified trajectory as input, the joint space controller incorporates compute torque controller, leg velocity observer and fuzzy disturbance observer with saturation compensation. It can ensure stability and tracking performance of controller in present of external disturbance and position only measurement. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of proposed control scheme.

Design of a Fuzzy Feed-forward Controller for Monitor HAGC System of Cold Rolling Mill

In this study we propose a novel monitor hydraulic automatic gauge control (HAGC) system based on fuzzy feedforward controller. This is used in the development of cold rolling mill automation system to improve the quality of cold strip. According to features/ properties of entry steel strip like its average yield stress, width of strip, and desired exit thickness, this controller realizes the compensation for the exit thickness error. The traditional methods of adjusting the roller position, can-t tolerate the variance in the entry steel strip. The proposed method uses a mathematical model of the system together with the expert knowledge to perform this adjustment while minimizing the effect of the stated problem. In order to improve the speed of the controller in rejecting disturbances introduced by entry strip thickness variations, expert knowledge is added as a feed-forward term to the HAGC system. Simulation results for the application of the proposed controller to a real cold mill show that the exit strip quality is highly improved.

Nonlinear Sensitive Control of Centrifugal Compressor

In this work, we treat the problems related to chemical and petrochemical plants of a certain complex process taking the centrifugal compressor as an example, a system being very complex by its physical structure as well as its behaviour (surge phenomenon). We propose to study the application possibilities of the recent control approaches to the compressor behaviour, and consequently evaluate their contribution in the practical and theoretical fields. Facing the studied industrial process complexity, we choose to make recourse to fuzzy logic for analysis and treatment of its control problem owing to the fact that these techniques constitute the only framework in which the types of imperfect knowledge can jointly be treated (uncertainties, inaccuracies, etc..) offering suitable tools to characterise them. In the particular case of the centrifugal compressor, these imperfections are interpreted by modelling errors, the neglected dynamics, no modelisable dynamics and the parametric variations. The purpose of this paper is to produce a total robust nonlinear controller design method to stabilize the compression process at its optimum steady state by manipulating the gas rate flow. In order to cope with both the parameter uncertainty and the structured non linearity of the plant, the proposed method consists of a linear steady state regulation that ensures robust optimal control and of a nonlinear compensation that achieves the exact input/output linearization.

Accurate Fault Classification and Section Identification Scheme in TCSC Compensated Transmission Line using SVM

This paper presents a new approach for the protection of Thyristor-Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC) line using Support Vector Machine (SVM). One SVM is trained for fault classification and another for section identification. This method use three phase current measurement that results in better speed and accuracy than other SVM based methods which used single phase current measurement. This makes it suitable for real-time protection. The method was tested on 10,000 data instances with a very wide variation in system conditions such as compensation level, source impedance, location of fault, fault inception angle, load angle at source bus and fault resistance. The proposed method requires only local current measurement.

Optimal Compensation of Reactive Power in the Restructured Distribution Network

In this paper optimal capacitor placement problem has been formulated in a restructured distribution network. In this scenario the distribution network operator can consider reactive energy also as a service that can be sold to transmission system. Thus search for optimal location, size and number of capacitor banks with the objective of loss reduction, maximum income from selling reactive energy to transmission system and return on investment for capacitors, has been performed. Results is influenced with economic value of reactive energy, therefore problem has been solved for various amounts of it. The implemented optimization technique is genetic algorithm. For any value of reactive power economic value, when reverse of investment index increase and change from zero or negative values to positive values, the threshold value of selling reactive power has been obtained. This increasing price of economic parameter is reasonable until the network losses is less than loss before compensation.

Post-Compression Consideration in Video Watermarking for Wireless Communication

A simple but effective digital watermarking scheme utilizing a context adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) method is presented for wireless communication system. In the proposed approach, the watermark bits are embedded in the final non-zero quantized coefficient of each DCT block, thereby yielding a potential reduction in the length of the coded block. As a result, the watermarking scheme not only provides the means to check the authenticity and integrity of the video stream, but also improves the compression ratio and therefore reduces both the transmission time and the storage space requirements of the coded video sequence. The results confirm that the proposed scheme enables the detection of malicious tampering attacks and reduces the size of the coded H.264 file. Therefore, the current study is feasible to apply in the video applications of wireless communication such as 3G system

Advanced Robust PDC Fuzzy Control of Nonlinear Systems

This paper introduces a new method called ARPDC (Advanced Robust Parallel Distributed Compensation) for automatic control of nonlinear systems. This method improves a quality of robust control by interpolating of robust and optimal controller. The weight of each controller is determined by an original criteria function for model validity and disturbance appreciation. ARPDC method is based on nonlinear Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems and Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) control scheme. The relaxed stability conditions of ARPDC control of nominal system have been derived. The advantages of presented method are demonstrated on the inverse pendulum benchmark problem. From comparison between three different controllers (robust, optimal and ARPDC) follows, that ARPDC control is almost optimal with the robustness close to the robust controller. The results indicate that ARPDC algorithm can be a good alternative not only for a robust control, but in some cases also to an adaptive control of nonlinear systems.

The Comparison Study of Current Control Techniques for Active Power Filters

This paper presents the comparison study of current control techniques for shunt active power filter. The hysteresis current control, the delta modulation control and the carrier-based PWM control are considered in the paper. The synchronous detection method is used to calculate the reference currents for shunt active power filter. The simulation results show that the carrier-based PWM control technique provides the minimum %THD value of the source currents compared with other comparable techniques after compensation. However, the %THD values of all three techniques can follow the IEEE std.519-1992.

Genetically Optimized TCSC Controller for Transient Stability Improvement

This paper presents a procedure for modeling and tuning the parameters of Thyristor Controlled Series Compensation (TCSC) controller in a multi-machine power system to improve transient stability. First a simple transfer function model of TCSC controller for stability improvement is developed and the parameters of the proposed controller are optimally tuned. Genetic algorithm (GA) is employed for the optimization of the parameter-constrained nonlinear optimization problem implemented in a simulation environment. By minimizing an objective function in which the oscillatory rotor angle deviations of the generators are involved, transient stability performance of the system is improved. The proposed TCSC controller is tested on a multi-machine system and the simulation results are presented. The nonlinear simulation results validate the effectiveness of proposed approach for transient stability improvement in a multimachine power system installed with a TCSC. The simulation results also show that the proposed TCSC controller is also effective in damping low frequency oscillations.

Robust Fuzzy Control of Nonlinear Fuzzy Impulsive Singular Perturbed Systems with Time-varying Delay

The problem of robust fuzzy control for a class of nonlinear fuzzy impulsive singular perturbed systems with time-varying delay is investigated by employing Lyapunov functions. The nonlinear delay system is built based on the well-known T–S fuzzy model. The so-called parallel distributed compensation idea is employed to design the state feedback controller. Sufficient conditions for global exponential stability of the closed-loop system are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be easily solved by LMI technique. Some simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Self Compensating ON Chip LDO Voltage Regulator in 180nm

An on chip low drop out voltage regulator that employs elegant compensation scheme is presented in this paper. The novelty in this design is that the device parasitic capacitances are exploited for compensation at different loads. The proposed LDO is designed to provide a constant voltage of 1.2V and is implemented in UMC 180 nano meter CMOS technology. The voltage regulator presented improves stability even at lighter loads and enhances line and load regulation.

English Language Learning Strategies Used by University Students: A Case Study of English and Business English Major at Suan Sunandha Rajabhat in Bangkok

The purposes of this research are 1) to study English language learning strategies used by the fourth-year students majoring in English and Business English, 2) to study the English language learning strategies which have an affect on English learning achievement, and 3) to compare the English language learning strategies used by the students majoring in English and Business English. The population and sampling comprise of 139 university students of the Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University. Research instruments are language learning strategies questionnaire which was constructed by the researcher and improved on by three experts and the transcripts that show the results of English learning achievement. The questionnaire includes 1) Language Practice Strategy 2)Memory Strategy 3) Communication Strategy 4)Making an Intelligent Guess or Compensation Strategy 5) Self-discipline in Learning Management Strategy 6) Affective Strategy 7)Self-Monitoring Strategy 8) Self-studySkill Strategy. Statistics used in the study are mean, standard deviation, T-test and One Way ANOVA, Pearson product moment correlation coefficient and Regression Analysis. The results of the findings reveal that the English language learning strategies most frequently used by the students are affective strategy, making an intelligent guess or compensation strategy, self-studyskill strategy and self-monitoring strategy respectively. The aspect of making an intelligent guess or compensation strategy had the most significant affect on English learning achievement. It is found that the English language learning strategies mostly used by the Business English major students and moderately used by the English major students. Their language practice strategies uses were significantly different at the 0.05 level and their communication strategies uses were significantly different at the 0.01 level. In addition, it is found that the poor students and the fair ones most frequently used affective strategy while the good ones most frequently used making an intelligent guess or compensation strategy. KeywordsEnglish language, language learning strategies, English learning achievement, and students majoring in English, Business English. Pranee Pathomchaiwat is an Assistant Professor in Business English Program, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand (e-mail: [email protected]).

Non-contact Gaze Tracking with Head Movement Adaptation based on Single Camera

With advances in computer vision, non-contact gaze tracking systems are heading towards being much easier to operate and more comfortable for use, the technique proposed in this paper is specially designed for achieving these goals. For the convenience in operation, the proposal aims at the system with simple configuration which is composed of a fixed wide angle camera and dual infrared illuminators. Then in order to enhance the usability of the system based on single camera, a self-adjusting method which is called Real-time gaze Tracking Algorithm with head movement Compensation (RTAC) is developed for estimating the gaze direction under natural head movement and simplifying the calibration procedure at the same time. According to the actual evaluations, the average accuracy of about 1° is achieved over a field of 20×15×15 cm3.