Chassis dynamometers

Chassis dynamometers are a valuable tool for evaluating the performance of full vehicles. The basic concept is flexible enough that a very wide range of
wheeled vehcles can be tested. They are routinely used to evaluate drive train performance, full vehicle noise and vibration characteristics and other ve-
hicle parameters. Of course, their use is limited to situations in which complete, running vehicles are available. For situations in which that is not true, four poster and shaker tables can be used. These systems are described in the next article in this series.     

Simulations and Sensitivity Analysis of the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex

Computer simulations and sensitivity analysis of vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) gain and phase were performed. The analyses were used to identify neural structures and anatomic sites capable of producing abnormal VOR gain and phase behaviors reported to exist in blind adults.     

Characterization of dielectric barrier electrospray ionization for mass spectrometric detection

A novel electrospray interface is presented which induces an electric field by dielectric polarization through a non-conductive barrier. Therefore, a square-wave high-voltage signal is applied. This technique allows mass spectrometric measurements in the positive as well as in the negative mass spectrometry mode without changing the polarity of the potential applied, and it decreases the risk of undesired discharges, induced by high electric currents. The applicability of this technique is demonstrated by mass spectrometric determination of reserpine.     

On decoding concatenated codes

The correcting properties of concatenated codes with parallel decoding over an additive channel are investigated. The ith inner decoder's output is a codeword if the Euclidean distance between the received vector and some codeword is less than Δ_i and an erasure otherwise. The outer decoders correct errors and erasures. The error-correcting capability, which is taken to be the minimum length of any noise vector that can cause an error, is obtained for a bank of z inner and outer decoders as a function of the thresholds used. The set of thresholds that maximize the error-correcting capability is also found. It is shown that for a small number of branches, the error-correcting capability is nearly as large as any decoder     

Design of self-healing arrays using vector-space projections

We consider the problem of reconfiguring array antennas whose performance has been degraded by the failure of one or more elements. We show that the method of vector-space projections is well suited for this task and enables the recovery of reasonable antenna performance when as many as 30% of the elements are inoperable     

A union bound on the error probability of binary codes over block-fading channels

Block-fading is a popular channel model that approximates the behavior of different wireless communication systems. In this paper, a union bound on the error probability of binary-coded systems over block-fading channels is proposed. The bound is based on uniform interleaving of the coded sequence prior to transmission over the channel. The distribution of error bits over the fading blocks is computed. For a specific distribution pattern, the pairwise error probability is derived. Block-fading channels modeled as Rician and Nakagami distributions are studied. We consider coherent receivers with perfect and imperfect channel side information (SI) as well as noncoherent receivers employing square-law combining. Throughout the paper, imperfect SI is obtained using pilot-aided estimation. A lower bound on the performance of iterative receivers that perform joint decoding and channel estimation is obtained assuming the receiver knows the correct data and uses them as pilots. From this, the tradeoff between channel diversity and channel estimation is investigated and the optimal channel memory is approximated analytically. Furthermore, the optimal energy allocation for pilot signals is found for different channel memory lengths.     

Active colloidal suspensions exhibit polar order under gravity

Recently, the steady sedimentation profile of a dilute suspension of chemically powered colloids was studied experimentally [J. Palacci et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 088304 (2010)]. It was found that the sedimentation length increases quadratically with the swimming speed of the active Brownian particles. Here we investigate theoretically the sedimentation of self-propelled particles undergoing translational and rotational diffusion. We find that the measured increase of the sedimentation length is coupled to a partial alignment of the suspension with the mean swimming direction oriented against the gravitational field. We suggest realistic parameter values to observe this polar order. Furthermore, we find that the dynamics of the active suspension can be derived from a generalized free energy functional.     

Dynamics of semi-flexible tethered sheets

The dynamics of a semi-flexible sheet or tethered membrane in a solvent is studied using the method of stochastic rotation dynamics. Hydrodynamic interactions between different parts of the sheet are naturally included in this method. We confirm the scaling law for the radius of gyration versus sheet size predicted for a self-avoiding tethered membrane. The mean-square displacement shows both sub-diffusive and diffusive behavior similar to linear polymers. In the intermediate scattering function the sub-diffusive behavior appears as stretched exponential which we reproduce in our simulations. Thereby, we confirm an early prediction between the roughness and the sub-diffusion exponent derived from Zimm dynamics (E. Frey, D.R. Nelson, J. Phys. I 1, 1715 (1991)). Finally, we show that the diffusion coefficient of the square sheet is inversely proportional to the edge length of the sheet again in good agreement with theoretical predictions.     

A colloidal model system with tunable disorder: Solid-fluid transition and discontinuities in the limit of zero disorder

We study a colloidal model system where disorder can be continuously tuned from no disorder --corresponding to a system that can crystallize-- to large disorder where geometrical frustration occurs. The model system consists of colloidal particles with screened electrostatic repulsion. They can only move on single lines which are parallel and equidistant to each other. We introduce disorder by modulating the particle line density. The system exhibits a solid-to-fluid transition which we study by the structure factor and the temporal evolution of the mean-square distance of nearest neighbors on neighboring lines. A determining feature is the occurrence of discontinuities when disorder is tuned to zero. We observe that the peak height of the pair correlation function in the solid phase does not extrapolate to the value of the perfect crystal. Similarly, the mean interaction energy and the screening length at which the solid-fluid transition occurs seem to be discontinuous when the limit of zero disorder is approached.