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Prediction and detection of skin diseases have always been a challenging and critical task for health care professionals. There are many clinics and skin practitioners who are offering their services at exorbitant costs. At the same time, skin condition prevails in our country in every part. In the current scenario majority of the skincare practitioners are using traditional methods to diagnose the disease which may take a considerable amount of time. Skin Diseases are serious problems in recent times as it is a matter of environmental factors, socioeconomic factors, lack of full diet, etc. This paper is a comparative study about understanding various skin diseases related to normal skin issues as well as cosmetology. A comparison between oily, dry, and normal skin is also projected in this study. A survey of different papers is done on basis of technologies used, results with accuracy, ethical conduct, number of diseases diagnosed, datasets, etc are done.

This paper describes approaches to the use of wearables and related monitoring and diagnostic tools to glean and present data to patients and their caregivers in the form of Personal Health Dashboard. Raw data from devices such as fitness watches, blood glucose and blood pressure monitors can be analyzed by machine learning algorithms ensembles over the cloud or at the edge, and the resulting patterns can be presented to allow for actionable responses. The advent of low-cost computational, sensing, monitoring and diagnostic tools allow for cost-effective solutions that can have wide adaptability. The paper draws from prior and ongoing research conducted by the team to present these positions in the advancement of healthcare.

The objective of this paper is to study the deterioration of impregnated kraft papers immersed in dielectric liquids under the chemical stress conditions by furan analysis according to ASTM D5837 and IEC 61198. Mineral oil and natural ester (FR3) were liquid used in this study. Kraft paper samples, 3 pieces per each case study, are prepared in rectangle shape with 25.4 ± 0.5 millimeters (1.00 ± 0.02 inches) wide and approximately 254 millimeters (10.0 inches) long according to the ASTM D828 standard. The paper and liquid insulation are heated to dehydrate at 80 °C for 12 hours with 200 mbar pressure, and then they are filled in 200 milliliter bottles and heated with 5 different temperatures being 60 °C, 80 °C, 100 °C, 120 °C and 140 °C respectively. In the case of 120 °C and 140 °C are only conducted with FR3 due to its thermal characteristics. After that, 98% concentration of acetic acid of 2 quantities, 0.04 and 0.08 milliliters, and oxygen (O2) at 1 psi for 1,200 ml, are used for the chemical aging process for 9 days of the test samples before being tested to find furanic compounds. According to the test result, it can be concluded that all 4 factors, temperature, acetic volume, oxygen and moisture, effect on generated furanic compounds of aging paper insulation.

In power transformers in which is dominated the oil-paper insulation system, it is the effort to use innovative insulating materials to achieve greater quality, reliability and longer service life of the transformer. In this paper, we present the results of research into the insulating properties of an oil-paper insulation system in a DC and AC electric field. In the experiments MOL TO 40A transformer oil and two types of paper used in transformers, KREMPEL DPP and insulating paper used in BEZ transformers, were used. The results from the experiments show that KREMPEL insulating paper has a higher electrical strength and the electrical strength of both oil-impregnated insulating papers is greater when applying DC voltage.

The assessment of the aging condition is becoming increasingly important for operators of high voltage assets. Power transformers are especially one of the most important units in the electrical power grid. Due to the fact that oil-paper insulation is still the most economical form of insulation, and is therefore found in the majority of transformers, the condition assessment of the paper insulation is decisive for estimating the remaining service life. Since the determination of the condition via furans is associated with certain fluctuations, several other aging parameters are investigated. Therefore, this study intends to determine how those aging markers of the insulating liquid behave in the absence of insulating paper and how the values change with insulating paper; thus, from the difference between important parameters, indicating the paper aging might be possible. For the investigation, a non-inhibited and an inhibited insulating oil as well as a further inhibited oil with a different composition, are tested as the most common insulating liquids. For this purpose, an open system is reproduced, which has permanent contact with the environment air. Accordingly, the study is carried out for long-term thermal stress to obtain samples with a wide spectrum of aging status. The entire study extended over a period of 14–15 weeks at a temperature of 130 °C with performing the measurements of the parameters at various aging times. The study reveals that the results can be used for an improved condition assessment of transformers.

This paper presents a novel, low cost flexible paper substrate suitable for biosensing applications. A microstrip patch antenna consisting of copper tape foil and a cellulose filter paper as a substrate with thickness of 180 μm is fabricated and tested. The substrate has measured dielectric constant (e r ) of 1.9 and losses (tan δ ) of 0.025. For 3.8 GHz resonance, the antenna has size of 29.5 mm x 38 mm on a ground plane of 50 mm x 60 mm. Measurements of the final design are in excellent agreement with simulations. Moreover, measurements of the patch antenna on the proposed substrate (cellulose filter paper) collected at different bending radii and folding angles demonstrate performance consistency.

Methanol in oil can be used to evaluate the aging status of oil-paper insulation system of power transformers. Many scholars have shown that the production of methanol in oil is closely related to the degradation of paper. However, the methanol distributed in oil is affected by the oil-paper adsorption equilibrium. In this paper, the equilibrium distribution of methanol between oil and paper at different temperatures were investigated. The equilibrium experiments were conducted by soaking methanol-oil standard solution with ordinary Kraft paper at 20°C, 45°C and 60°C respectively. The results showed that temperature obviously affects the adsorption capacity of oil and paper for methanol: with the increase of temperature, the equilibrium time of methanol between oil and paper is accelerated. Within a certain temperature range, the adsorption capacity of paper for methanol will decrease with the increase of temperature. However, when the temperature was near the boiling point of methanol, the content of methanol in oil declined, which might be related to the existence of gaseous methanol at high temperature. At this time, the equilibrium distribution model of methanol changed from the two-phase model of oil-paper system to the three-phase model of oil-paper-gas system.

This paper presents a set of modeling procedures which are substantial for developing a data-driven soft sensor for paper strength parameters in production environment. Special focus is put on describing methods for efficient data aggregation, data cleaning and feature selection, which were employed to appropriately model the inherently complex process of papermaking and handle the challenging nature of collected data. The resulting soft sensor for tensile index deployed at a paper machine shows solid performance. Moreover, good quality of calculated real-time predictions is also confirmed by means of experiment-based validation.

The degree of polymerization is a useful technique to monitor insulation capabilities of oil impregnated paper. In present work, accelerated thermal ageing experiments have been conducted by taking Kraft and thermal upgraded papers along with two types of dielectric oil (mineral oil and vegetable oil) at different temperatures $(90^{\circ}C, 110^{\circ}C$ and $130^{\circ}C)$. An improved 2nd order kinetic model has been developed based on experimental results which utilized to develop a relationship between temperature and final degree of polymerization. The proposed model can be used to analyze and monitor thermal deterioration of oil paper insulation at any temperature. Moreover, the proposed novel mathematical modelling can be employed to predict premature failure as well as end of life criteria of power transformers.

The use of vegetable oil (natural ester) in electrical devices like power transformers is increasing due to their high biodegradability and better safety. The lifespan of power trans- formers is mainly defined by cellulose insulation condition, which usually works together with dielectric oil as electrical insulation and also as mechanical winding protector and compactor. That is why the aim and results of this research shows us not only the dielectric parameters evolution, but also the relationship between the mechanical factors and the moisture content of thermal accelerated ageing processes, with commercial vegetable oil, of Kraft paper and Diamond Dotted Paper (DDP). These are two of the most common insulating materials in electric power transformers. In addition, the new tests have been done by a different method of paper ageing analysis. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement Nº 823969 - BIOTRAFO.

Paper-based digital microfluidic biochip (PB-DMFB) technology provides a promising solution to many biochemical applications. However, PB-DMFB manufacturing process may suffer from potential security threats. For example, both Trojan insertion and man-in-the-middle attack may affect the functionality of PB-DMFBs. To ensure the correct functionality of PB-DMFBs, we propose a watermarking scheme to hides information in the PB-DMFB layout, which allows users to check design integrity and authenticate the source of the PB-DMFB design. As a result, it serves as a first countermeasure against both Trojan insertion and man-in-the-middle attacks for PB-DMFBs.

Even today, oil-paper insulation is one of the most important insulation systems for high-voltage components, which is mainly used in transformers. Due to an increase of regulations and obligations for transformer operators, alternative insulating liquids are becoming more and more important, especially esters, as these liquids are characterized as an environmentally friendly and low flammability substitute. So far there is only little experience on the ageing behaviour of ester-paper insulations and on the formation of ageing products with this mixed dielectric. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of a synthetic based ester, a rapeseed-based and a soya-based natural ester on the ageing behaviour of a Kraft paper insulation. In this context, the correlation of ageing markers, such as the acid value, the moisture content etc., is measured in the liquid and the current condition of the paper insulation is investigated. It could be observed that the ageing behaviour of studied samples is different to mineral oil based liquids and also differences between synthetic and natural esters could be seen.

Basic repair and maintenance tasks of industrial machines are usually performed by local service personnel at the location of the component to be maintained. Complex maintenance tasks require an expert who travels to the customer to solve a specific problem. This process is time and cost intensive. Augmented Reality (AR) Remote Assistance offers means to support newcomers on site by guiding personnel through the maintenance process with novel visualizations. This paper describes an Augmented Reality based remote assistance tool for industrial purposes. We present the technology and our implementation approach, as well as the challenges and limitations we have encountered. The potential of the tool was evaluated and analyzed in an industry oriented use case for repairing an industrial PC. The results were compared with a maintenance procedure that was carried out using standard paper repair instructions. Our approach enabled the users to perform complex tasks faster and with fewer errors. Overall, the error rate decreased significantly due to the AR-based remote support. We also found that paper-based instructions are still more efficient in solving simple tasks.

Due to the shortcomings of electrical properties and furfural in characterizing the aging characteristics of paper insulation and the limitations of field application, this paper focuses on the feasibility of evaluating the polymerization degree of insulating paper by the ethanol (EtOH) content in transformer oil. The accelerated thermal aging test is conducted, during which ethanol is produced by degradation of insulating paper. For each oil-paper samples, with different ethanol concentrations are prepared by controlling the aging time. In this paper, a gas chromatograph equipped with a mass spectrometer (GC-MS) measurement method with headspace injection is applied to obtain a fitting curve between ethanol content in oil and average degree of polymerization (DPv), which is a method for judging the degree of paper insulation aging condition. Then, showing the influence of temperature on ethanol generated in this experiment. At last, it is indicated that it is feasible to evaluate the polymerization degree of insulating paper by using the ethanol content in transformer oil.

In this paper, we study the state-dependent Gaussian wiretap channel with action encoder and noncausal state at the transmitter, which is also called the action-dependent dirty paper wiretap channel. Two lower bounds on the secrecy capacity of this model are provided, and we find that the two bounds have their advantages and disadvantages, i.e., none of the two always performs better than the other. In addition, we find that taking action on the state helps to increase the achievable secrecy rate of the dirty paper wiretap channel.

Disposable low-cost sensors are essential for the detection of urea for environmental and healthcare applications. In this paper, we proposed a hand-drawn electrode paper chip sensor by utilising the enzyme modified cellulose fibre as a sensing and substrate material. Further modified cellulose fibres increase the impedance measurement stability and facilitate for performing detection. By demonstrating detection of the low-level concentration of urea in the micromolar range, it shows that developed paper chip has excellent potential as a low-cost disposable sensor.

Flexible supercapacitors are considered as a promising candidate for power supplementation in wearable electronics due to their high power density. However, effectively fabricate flexible and low-cost supercapacitor electrodes in a big scale is still a key challenge. Herein we demonstrate a scalable fabrication method for hierarchical electrodes via metalizing air-laid paper and loading with MnO2 as cathode active materials. To be specific, we coat a thin layer of Ni on air-laid paper by magnetron sputtering, then deposit Ni nanocone arrays (NNAs) on the Ni sputtered paper and finally deposit MnO2 on the NNAs to obtain the NNAs@MnO2 paper electrode. The as-prepared paper-based electrode possesses high conductivity and fine wettability, which facilitates the electrons and ions transporting through the conductive network. Additionally, this electrode provides large specific surface area with a hierarchical architecture. Thus the electrode shows high capacitance (451 F/g) and favorable cycle performance (92.9% capacity retention after cycling for 5000 times). By coupling with activated carbon (AC) coated on the NNAs conductive paper as anode, an NNAs paper-based asymmetric supercapacitor is constructed. Benefiting from the high mechanical durability and the 3D hierarchical architecture of the electrodes, the asymmetric supercapacitor exhibits excellent mechanical flexibility and high energy density (26.9 μWh/cm2 at 1.08 mW/cm2). This method can be easily scaled up to produce lightweight and low-cost conductive paper electrodes, making it promising for the application of flexible supercapacitors in wearable electronics.

To realize the detection of pesticide, this study developed a paper-based chip involving a 2D to 3D flow channel and automatic time delay for detecting pesticides. The time delay was controlled by different pullulan concentrations. The 3D channel was fabricated by hot embossing (optimized printing parameters were 28 kg at 80°C, and Advantec No. 1 filter paper was used) and transfer printing the hydrophobic material into the paper. Finally, the limit of the detected concentration of the pesticide was 4 ng/mL, which was achieved using 250 U/mL of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and 2.5% pullulan solution.

Microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (μPADs) have recently attracted the attention of researchers and industry because they are small, easily fabricated, inexpensive, and require small sample volumes. However, it is difficult to simplify complex assays on such devices because there are limited means of fluid control. Therefore, in the present study we developed a thermoresponsive valve membrane by polymerizing N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAAm) in a porous membrane. PNIPAAm is a thermoresponsive polymer; it becomes hydrophilic below, and hydrophobic above, the lower critical solution temperature (LCST; 32 °C). We used a green dye solution to investigate flow in a three-dimensionally stacked, T-shaped paper network containing the thermoresponsive valve. The valve membrane was able to prevent the passage of green dye at 25 °C ( LCST). The result demonstrates that our thermoresponsive valve could be used in µPADs. Moreover, it has the potential to automatically enable complex immunoassays in µPADs and improve their versatility.

To evaluate the performance of Nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) modified insulating paper under long term running process, 10 wt. % NFC modified insulating paper and ordinary insulating paper were subjected to accelerate thermal aging for 720 hours in a 130°C thermal aging chamber. The aging characteristics and electrical performance were measured during the aging process. Results show that NFC modification can delaying the thermal aging rate of oil immersed insulating paper and enhancing the electrical strength of oil immersed insulating paper during thermal aging process. NFC makes oil-impregnated insulating paper more compact during thermal aging process, resulting in higher polymerization degree and crystallinity. NFC modification can increase the relative permittivity and dielectric loss of the oil-impregnated paper during thermal aging process slightly. The AC and DC breakdown strength of the NFC modified paper are better maintained than the conventional oil-impregnated paper.

Moisture in transformer paper insulation is one of the most important parameters to be monitored in order to assess the useful life of the transformer. Time domain spectroscopy based on polarization and depolarization current measurements is one of the methods that can be used for detection of moisture content in the transformer paper insulation. However, these measurements could be influenced by thermal transient during the application of voltage, which may lead to an inaccurate interpretation of the insulation condition. In this paper, a novel method is proposed in order to avoid this thermal transient effect by using the high frequency component of the of depolarization current acquired during the measurement. Preliminary results show a correlation between the high frequency component of the depolarization current waveform and the moisture content in the paper insulation within a moisture content range of about 3 %. At higher moisture content, a resistive leakage current seems to have a negative effect on the measured depolarization current., 2019 IEEE 20th International Conference on Dielectric Liquids (ICDL), June 23-27, 2019, Roma, Italy

Machine learning (ML) has increasingly been adopted in safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles (AVs) and industrial robotics. In these domains, reliability and safety are important considerations, and hence it is critical to ensure the resilience of ML systems to faults and errors. On the other hand, soft errors are becoming more frequent in commodity computer systems due to the effects of technology scaling and reduced supply voltages. Further, traditional solutions for masking hardware faults such as Triple-Modular Redundancy (TMR) are prohibitively expensive in terms of their energy and performance overheads. Therefore, there is a compelling need to ensure the resilience of ML applications to soft errors on commodity hardware platforms.We first experimentally assess the resilience of safety-critical ML applications to soft errors. We demonstrate through fault injection experiments that even a single bit flip due to a soft error can lead to misclassification in Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications deployed in AVs, leading to safety violations. However, not all the errors in an DNN will result in serve consequences such as safety violations, and hence it is sufficient to protect the DNN from the ones that do. Unfortunately, finding all possible errors that result in safety violations is a very compute intensive task. We propose BinFI, a fault injection approach that efficiently injects critical faults that are highly likely to result in safety violations, based on the unique properties of DNNs. Finally, we propose Ranger, an approach to protect DNNs from critical faults with minimal performance overheads and no accuracy loss. We will conclude by presenting some of our ongoing work, and the future challenges in this area.

The exchange of academic marks between HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) is mandatory in every student mobility programs (i.e. the EU Erasmus Program) but that process remains to present date with insufficient technological support and the absence of a comprehensive reference model that allows the integration of potential technological solutions for the exchange of academic data with existing Academic Information Systems seems to limit greatly the possibility of adopting solutions of this type referred to in the existing literature. This work addresses this issue, conducting an initial bibliographic review aimed at the identification of the fundamental requirements of such an architecture as well as explores some of the technologies that are showing potential for usage in the safe exchange of academic results between partner HEIs, with particular interest in blockchain technology applied in an educational context. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This paper describes a user identification method conducted across online social networks (OSNs) using information regarding friends’ locations, in contrast to a conventional method based on the similarity of two display names. This latter method encounters the problem of decreased identification accuracy if a user registers different display names across OSNs. Our proposed method aims at addressing this issue by utilizing information on friends’ locations. We convert location information extracted from an OSN to that of such geographic administrative units as country, state and city, and calculate the weighted occurrence frequency of a location pair on the basis of distance between the pair. This is based on the hypothesis that a friend list relatively rarely includes an account pair whose locations are extremely distant from one another. We calculate a similarity score between two accounts’ weighted occurrence frequencies for each geographic administrative unit. Finally, we identify a user on the basis of individual similarity scores or weighted average scores for a given geographic administrative unit. Evaluation experiments show that our proposed method improves performance over that of a conventional method (accuracy: 83.1%$\rightarrow$91.2%).

International audience; Internet of Things (IoT) is a network where several and various interconnected, smart objects continuously generate alarge amount of data transmitted over Internet. Several efforts and research works in IoT focused on hardware constraints, lowcost, application design, as well as good communication technologies. However, due to the intrinsic characteristics of diversity,heterogeneity, large-scale, dynamic and large volume of data generated and various IoT applications needs, using traditionaldatabase management mechanisms and analytics architectures is not generally suitable. Then, it is challenging to provideefficient IoT data storage and query processing mechanisms for satisfying IoT application needs. This paper identifies the mainspecifications and mechanisms of data and query management for IoT and classifies them. Moreover, this work presentsadvances on data and query management mechanisms on IoT, shows their advantages and limits and discusses the challengingopen research issues that need to be addressed for providing guidelines for further contributions.

Porous microneedles (MNs) are considered as promising methods to collect biosamples for painless and minimal invasive diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes. MNs have microscale size and interconnected pores and thus they can penetrate through epidermis without pain and collect interstitial fluid. These properties can be utilized for a new method for glucose sensing for diagnosis of diabetes. We thus focus on an integrated porous polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based MNs (PDMS MN) with paper-based glucose sensor to realize the device for colorimetric diagnosis of diabetes. Disc-shaped PDMS MN layer consisting of 21 microneedles within an area of 1.7 cm2 was prepared. The microneedle showed a length of 800 μm and a porosity of 70 %. In this integrated system, porous media connects needles and sensor via a microfluidic channel. We successfully demonstrated the qualitative andquantitative analysis of glucose in the sample solution collected by porous MNs.

Several applications can benefit from recording information about the places a mobile entity visits and the length of time it spends there (e.g., shoppers, employees, buses, movable equipment, autonomous robots, etc.). In this paper, we present our approach to recording spatio-temporal information in a secure and inviolable way using a Distributed Ledger Technology. So far in this work, we observe that, although sending data to the blockchain is a heavy process, there are ways that this transaction time does not disrupt the flow of new data such as adding these data to a queue. However, this makes the sending process overall longer. We intend to continue this study by testing different blockchain services and comparing their performances.

We report on THz metamaterials for chemical sensing fabricated on low-loss, plastic, flexible substrates. The metamaterial is bonded to a paper sheet, which is saturated with the liquid to be analysed. Liquids in contact with the metamaterial surface with different refractive indices result in a shift of the metamaterial resonant frequency. This shift in frequency can be detected by measuring its complex transmission using a THz vector network analyser, in the frequency range 0.75–1.1 THz. The sensitivity of the metamaterial is 0.0015 refractive index units for a spectral resolution of 1 GHz which is well achievable with the VNA system.

The problem of joint information transmission and input signalling estimation over a state-dependent channel is considered. The general single-letter upper and lower bounds of the optimal capacity-distortion trade-offs are provided. For the Gaussian dirty paper channel, we calculate the bounds by choosing parameters carefully, and obtain a computable form eventually. In such a way, we obtain a complete characterization for this problem setting.

Our proposed method focuses on offline friends who are acquainted with a target user in the real world. We use Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to distinguish between online friends of a target user who are also offline friends and online friends who are acquainted with the target user only in cyberspace. By utilizing the probability of friendship as a function of the geographical distance between users’ home locations, our proposed method achieves an estimation accuracy 1.7 percentage point better than that of a conventional method. We have also been able to verify the effectiveness of an optimization method that narrows down candidate areas for a target user’s home location.

The present work presents a hybrid identification of recursive least squares with a metaheuristic called radial movement optimization (RMO) applied to the joints of a cylindrical robotic manipulator. The main contribution of the research is to consider the covariance matrix with RMO. At the end a comparative analysis will be made with some classic methods. The results of the identifications were tested with the RMSE. A covariance matrix has also been generated from manipulator identifications.

In the power transformer, the oil-impregnated paper is used for providing insulation between live conducting parts, which comprises of transformer oil and insulating paper (either Kraft paper/Pressboard). These insulating papers are made up of cellulose fibers and it gets easily degraded at higher hot-spot temperature with increase in aging periods. So this affects the lifetime of solid insulation and further transformer life. In this research work, the latest advanced solid insulation named “Nomex paper” made up of aramid polymers is considered as a solid insulating paper material for analyzing the aging behavior. Furthermore, the electrical properties such as breakdown voltage of both oil and paper, flash point and fire point, viscosity have been measured to study the change in characteristics during aging. Also, the level of degradation of solid insulation has been identified by measuring Breakdown voltage of paper under all aging times. On looking standard IEEE C57.91, all these samples were analyzed at the maximum hot-spot temperature of about $130^{\mathbf {\circ }}$C. The results clearly show that the solid insulation gets affected due to deterioration and decomposition.

Economically paper and pulp mills are important but at the same time it is facing problems due to pollutants that are produced during the process. In this paper we will discuss methods of waste water treatment in the industry. This industry use excessive amount of water because it is used in nearly each and every step of the process as a result large quantity of waste water and residual sludge waste is produced leading to the problems of wastewater treatment, discharge and sludge disposal but advanced technologies with new equipment with the help of some innovative strategies are making it possible for treating wastewater for its reuse by presenting solutions to the industries and helping them in choosing suitable and affordable methods for management of waste

In HVDC converter transformers, the potential DC component in electric stresses imposed on valve windings would unfavorably cause space charge accumulation inside oil-paper insulation. Insulation degradation and aging may have great effects on space charge behaviors in oil-paper insulation. This paper focuses on the effect of the low molecular weight (LMA) and the moisture on space charge phenomenon in oil impregnated-paper insulation. Pulsed electro-acoustic (PEA) technique was used in this study to measure space charge behaviors in 400 $\mu$ m thick, dry and moist single-layer paper sample impregnated in mineral oil prepared with different amounts of formic acid. The measurements were carried out at $30 ^ { \circ } \mathrm { C }$ under a field strength of 20 kV/mm. It was found that LMA greatly strengthens the homo charge accumulation. The combination of LMA and moisture results in even more active space charge accumulations. In dry samples, the existence of LMA causes slower charge decaying rate. However, the introduction of the moisture accelerates the charge dissipation.

Headbox is a critical sub-process of paper machine. Headbox is a two input and two output process with significant loop interaction. Quality of the paper produced depends on its operation. Hence, its precise control is required to produce good quality paper. This paper presents design of proportional integral derivative (PID) controller for headbox using particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. Performance and robustness of PSO - PID controller have been compared with conventional PID controllers on the basis of time response, frequency response and performance indices (ISE, IAE, ITSE and ITAE).

A disposable filter paper based electronic tongue using different conducting polymers is developed in this work. Sensors were prepared using Whatman filter papers of dimensions 6 mm × 5 mm coated with different conducting polymers (polyaniline and polypyrrole, both in doped and de-doped form). Two Ag electrodes were deposited with a separation of 4 mm for AC impedance spectroscopic measurements in the frequency range of 10 Hz – 10 kHz with a 100 mV excitation voltage. The developed sensor was subjected to different concentrations of four basic tastants i.e., salty, sweet, sour and umami. The sensitivity of the sensor was found to be better than the human tongue for all the different tastants. The sensors were also used to differentiate between different water samples and fruit juices, with a promising potential for use in food quality monitoring. Use of principal component analysis on the impedance data aided in formation of clusters, thus distinguishing different types of water samples.

We demonstrate the paper-based hydrogen peroxide sensors for the biomedical and healthcare applications. Porphyrin with central ions of Ti is coated on a PDMS/paper substrate, and Au interdigitated electrodes are sputtered on the porphyrin/PDMS/paper substrate for the sensor applications. The fabricated sensors show a good response in the range of ca. 2 ~ 90 ppm of hydrogen peroxide vapor, and high selectivity to NH 3 , H 2 S, CO, and NO gases, which are representative biomarkers including exhaled breath.

We developed a novel glucose sensor that enabled simple visual screening of specific glucose concentrations in urine. This non-invasive glucose biosensor integrated a disposable, paper-based sensing strip and a simple amplifier circuit with a visual readout. The paper sensor consisted of five enzyme-functionalized electrodes which were individually connected to a specifically designed LED indicator circuit with a predefined threshold value regarding glucose levels. The device features (i) low-cost paper-based glucose oxidase (GOX)/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) sensing electrodes, (ii) simple signal amplification and (iii) on-site, rapid and visual detection. The sensor showed reliable, discrete visual responses for determination of five glucose levels (1, 2, 3, 4 and higher than 4 mM) in urine in less than 2 minutes. This sensor will address the limitations of conventional glucose measurements.

A paper based simple, flexible, and perfect resonant electromagnetic wave absorber is proposed in this article. The absorber consists of the conducting grid patterns where unit cell of the pattern is a two-dimensional grid based structure and the bottom is a conducting ground plane. The grid based top conducting patterns are created by inkjet printing over a thin paper having conducting layer at the bottom. The proposed absorber undoubtedly attains a cost-effective and eco-friendly solution for designing a flexible electromagnetic absorber. The experimental and simulation results are found to be in excellent agreement. The proposed absorber exhibits perfect absorption of 99.99% at 10.84 GHz and possesses an overall thickness of 0.531 mm.

Transformer is a long run device in a power system network. When transformer oil comes in contact with cellulosic paper in the presence of heat, the paper undergoes polymerization. As a result, both dielectric and mechanical properties of the oil and kraft paper are affected. To understand the mechanism behind the decay in the properties of the kraft paper, thermal ageing study has been performed followed by mechanical strength analysis. Keeping the same kraft paper, a comparative study of mechanical strength has been carried out after thermal ageing in two different insulating oils namely: mineral oil (MO) and exfoliated hexagonal boron nitride (Eh-BN) based nanofluid (NF). Due to enhanced stability and superior thermophysical properties, 0.01 wt.% concentration is chosen to prepare Eh-BN/MO-NF for ageing study. It is also observed that thermophysical properties of 0.01wt.% of Eh-BN/MO-NF are far more superior to the existing MO. Ageing study of both MO/kraft paper and 0.01wt% Eh-BN/MO-NF/kraft paper are performed in two different ageing vessels at same parametric conditions and mechanical strength of the aged kraft paper are investigated in different ageing duration. It is observed from the experimental results that both modulus and tensile strength of the aged kraft paper in the Eh-BN/MO-NF are superior to the aged kraft paper in MO. Early polymerization in MO impregnated kraft paper is the reason for degradation in its mechanical strength. Eh-BN/MO-NF reduces the effect of early polymerization during ageing and hence provides better mechanical stability to the insulating kraft paper.

Paper-based digital microfluidic biochips (PB-DMFBs) provide a promising solution for microfluidic bioassays. Due to the low-cost substrate material and low demand for complicated manufacturing equipment, PB-DMFBs can be fabricated without foundry. On the flip side, convenience of fabrication allows PB-DMFBs to be fabricated everywhere, which makes it is difficult to manage production and distribution of IP (bioassays). As a result, PB-DMFBs are vulnerable to security threats. IP and its creator, the biocoders, may suffer from infringement. To ensure IP protection, in this paper, we proposed the first Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme to protect IPs of PB-DMFBs from security threats. A chip-level synthesis algorithm is also presented to realize not only complex biochemical operations but also the demand of DRM.

The transformer is a long run device in a power system network. When transformer oil comes in contact with cellulosic insulation in the presence of heat, the solid insulation undergoes polymerization. As a result, dielectric, mechanical and chemical properties of the oil and kraft paper get affected. In this present study, electrical, mechanical and chemical degradation of the thermally aged nanofluid (NF), and mineral oil (MO) impregnated kraft papers are analysed. To understand the degradation of the aforementioned properties of the kraft paper, thermal ageing study has been performed. A comparative study of the aged kraft paper is carried out to study the electrical breakdown, tensile strength and the degree of polymerization. The thermal ageing experiment is performed for two different insulating oils, namely: MO and exfoliated hexagonal boron nitride (Eh-BN)/MO-NF impregnated kraft paper. 0.01wt.% of nanofiller concentration is chosen for the preparation of Eh-BN/MO-NF. Highly insulating, thermally conducting and superior physicochemical properties of the NF are suitably chosen for the thermal ageing. An ageing study of both MO and NF impregnated kraft paper is performed in two different ageing vessels at 160°C for different aging durations such as 100, 500, 1000 and 2000 hours respectively. It is observed from the experimental results that both modulus and tensile strength of Eh-BN/MO-NF aged kraft papers are superior than that of MO aged kraft papers. Electrical strength of the NF impregnated aged kraft paper has minimum decrement in the AC breakdown voltage. Early polymerization in MO impregnated kraft paper is the reason for drastic degradation of its mechanical strength. Eh-BN/MO-NF reduces the effect of early polymerization and minimum affinity towards polar contamination during thermal ageing and hence provides better electro-mechanical stability to the insulating NF impregnated kraft paper.

Cyber networks are extremely non-deterministic, complex systems. To address this, we must develop foundational research protocols to enable reproducible cyber experiments that can systematically uncover deep understanding of a cyber system's security posture. One core tenant of this approach is to have a test environment to enable a space to create and test hypotheses about systems and reason about results. To date, this has generally been done through cyber testbeds or cyber ranges. National infrastructure supported by various government agencies have all created multi-million dollar ranges, and support other national infrastructure such as the National Cyber Range (NCR) and the Regional Service Delivery Points (RSDP). The thrust of this paper was based on multi-year studies, the culmination of which uncovered gaps and challenges associated with using various national infrastructures to represent a multitude of complex heterogeneous systems. Ranges, such as the NCR, have experiment life-cycle processes to take a cyber experiment from inception to analysis. However, our position is that processes used are not sufficient to address gaps and challenges. In this position paper, we review current range experiment methodologies and our observations of other considerations that should require inclusion.

Oil impregnated paper is used in power transformers either on the copper windings or between the high-and low-voltage windings. It is aimed in this paper to improve dielectric properties of paper insulation in power transformers by using nanooil, which consists of solid nanoparticles suspended in the base transformer oil. Samples which used in the experiments are Kraft paper with 0.18 width, Shell DIALA mineral oil and titanium oxide TiO2 nanoparticles of 20 nm size. Firstly, paper samples are weighted and put into a vacuum oven at 80 °C for 48 hour to remove moisture content. Secondly, nanooil with two different concentrations are prepared, 0.01 g/L and 0.02 g/L. Then, paper samples are impregnated in the prepared nanooil for 24 hour at 45 °C inside the vacuum oven. Finally, dielectric properties are evaluated by using dielectric spectroscopy device at frequency range from 20 Hz to 2 MHz and oil tester up to 100 kV. The results showed that nanoparticles improve dielectric properties for oil impregnated insulation paper.

The insertion of mica barrier between coaxial electrodes results in a larger reduction of leakage current than the use of kraft paper insertion. The reduction is influenced by the barrier position and the testing voltage level. When using the kraft paper, there is a certain voltage level beyond which the characteristic of leakage current as a function of barrier position is relatively the image of that under the voltage level. At this level, the leakage current is almost the same wherever the barrier position. The use of mica insertion tends to shift the symmetry axis of the characteristic curves, meaning higher leakage current level.

Converter transformer is the important part of high voltage direct current transmission system (HVDC), whose safety reliability is related to the safety of HVDC. Compared to the traditional AC transformer, there is a complex AC-DC electric field inside the converter transformer, which is more likely to cause a decline in insulation performance, after the internal oil-paper insulation is dampened. In this paper, a test platform for insulation breakdown strength of oil-paper insulation was set up according to the standard in IEC60243. This paper analyzed the change regulation of moisture content of oil-paper insulation. The difference of breakdown strength of oil-paper insulation, which contain different percentage of moisture, were studied under AC, DC, different ratio of AC/DC voltage and polarity reversal voltage, and combined with double-layer dielectric theory, the effect of moisture content and voltage type on breakdown characteristics of oil-paper insulation was analyzed. The analysis showed that most of the moisture was concentrated in the insulating paper, with the increase of moisture content, the increasing amplitude of electrical conductivity of insulating paper is larger than that of insulating oil. As a result, the electric field strength on the insulation paper decreases and the electric field strength on the insulation oil increases, which made the insulation gap easier to breakdown

As a new environmentally friendly liquid dielectric material, vegetable insulating oil has good fire-retardant and insulation properties, and it has been used in oil-immersed transformers more and more widely. Thermal ageing and thermal faults are usually occurred in transformers. During these processes the insulating oil and insulating paper will decompose, and gases will be generated and dissolve in the oil, then the dissolved gases formed. In this paper, the microcosmic molecular simulation of thermal decomposition of camellia insulating oil and insulating paper were studied. The molecular model system of camellia oil and insulation paper were established, the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation based on ReaxFF (Reactive Force-Field) was adopted to analyze the pyrolysis process of molecules in insulating oil and paper from 1400 K to 2200 K, and main gas products were obtained. Results showed that the increase of temperature and heating duration promoted the decomposition of the oil, and contents of characteristic gases were positively related to the temperature and the heating duration. C 2 H 6 was the main hydrocarbon gas of camellia insulating oil under thermal decomposition, in addition during the decomposition process there are lots of CO 2 and H 2 generated. H 2 O s the main product and CO 2 as well as CO are main gas products of insulating paper under thermal decomposition process. Finally gas production path and mechanism of camellia oil and insulating paper are obtained through atom tracking method.

This paper focuses on the potential and practice of alternative forms of assessment to the conventional written exam. Readers will be interested in issues such as why would a staff member want to replace the written exam and how can I be sure that the replacement is equally effective at capturing student attainment. The paper summarises a trial at the University of Sheffield where the written exam was replaced by a computer quiz which was marked automatically.

International audience; The design of a dipole antenna printed on a paper substrate is presented in this paper. The antenna which integrates a compact balun is devoted for dual-band 2.4/5 GHz WLAN applications. The antenna is based on a double-side printed multilayer paper substrate and is fed with a coaxial cable for the testing. The simulated results of the whole structure are also presented in detail and compared with the measured performances.

Blockchains (BCs) received significant attentions from FinTeh in recent years. Many proof-of-concepts (POCs) projects and experiments have been carried out to explore the strengths and weaknesses of constructing financial market infrastructures upon BCs. The experiments showed that considerable improvements are still necessary to meet financial requirements such as safety, efficiency, reliability, scalability, security and transparency. The Principles for Financial Market Infrastructure (PFMI), issued by the Committee on Payment and Settlement System (CPSS) and International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), is a key standard for designing Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs) so that global financial markets could be more robust and stable, especially, could withstand financial shocks. It is thus necessary to design BC-based FMIs according to PFMI. This position paper analyzes financial system requirements and the challenges, and discusses the design issues of BCs in meeting PFMI.