Electrical/​Electronics

A report describes a study of nominal-performance (H2), robust-performance (μ-synthesis), and mixed H2/μ methods for designing fixed-order controllers applied to an active-tendon control system for suppressing seismic vibrations in a structure. The study involves an application of...

Several modifications of the design and operation of lithium-ion rechargeable electrochemical cells have been proposed to prolong the cycle lives of the cells. As explained below, overdischarge can result in dissolution of a metal current collector in the anode of a cell, with consequent...

Thermoplastic coupling is a patented welding process that is used to join thermoplastic parts. At the drill press, during a connector design brainstorming session, an engineer at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories inserted a plastic rod into a cavity that was slightly too small in its...

Active-pixel-sensor (APS) circuits and perhaps other dense complementary metal oxide/semiconductor (CMOS) very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits would be powered by infrared beams transmitted by laser diodes and received by photodetectors, according to a proposal. Clock signals for...

A proposed charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera would be mechanically shuttered by a planar array of micromachined, electromechanically actuated shutters. This proposal has arisen as part of the solution to the problem of designing a visible/near-infrared imaging spectrometer using a commercial...

A Luneberg lens is a microwave lens consisting of a series of concentric shells of differing dielectric constants. The highest dielectric constant, or refractive index, resides at the core and the lowest, at the outer shell. Microwaves passing through this arrangement of shells are focused in the...

A proposed wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical communication system would feature a single optical fiber carrying eight channels of digital data signals. In the original application, the signal in each channel would be a serial digital video-camera output, but the system could just...