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The ability to identify electric shock in the human body is a crucial consideration in the design of touch/leakage protective devices. In this paper, the $\alpha$ -dispersion characteristics of electrical impedance in the human body are investigated based on the Cole–Cole model. An improved electric shock identification method is proposed accordingly. The effects of various factors (e.g., transition resistance and feeder reactance) on the accuracy and reliability are analyzed. Feasibility and effectiveness of the method are verified via numerical simulation. The results indicate that 1) $\alpha$-dispersion is an effective feature for distinguishing living or nonliving organisms; 2) the proposed method is robust and unaffected by transition resistance; and 3) the computational cost is low to satisfy standard leakage current protective device requirements. This paper provides a solution to the dead-zone problem as well as a set of workable guidelines for protective device design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, the UHVDC transmission lines in the Northwest China are inevitably built across sandstorm-prone areas, whereas the influences of strong wind and dust particles have not been paid enough attention in the existing design guidelines and standards. Since the corona characteristics are greatly influenced by environmental factors, to study the effect of sandstorm environment on the corona characteristics, corona tests were carried out on five ?1100 kV fitting models under different experimental conditions of wind speed and dust particle size in artificial sandstorm environment. The results show that the corona inception voltage decreases under the influence of wind and dust particles. Moreover, the voltage increases along with the wind speed rising, whereas the particle size shows little effect on the corona characteristics. Then the test results were verified and analyzed by electric field simulation and flow field simulation using ANSYS and Fluent software. These results could promote future DC corona mechanism study and practical engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The instantaneous vital sign rates, which are related to physiological dynamics, are important indicators of human health condition. This paper presents a noncontact way to measure the human instantaneous vital signs using digital-intermediate frequency (IF) Doppler radar. The synchrosqueezing transform-based algorithm has been proposed to get a concentrated time-frequency (TF) distribution, so that the high-resolution instantaneous heartbeat and respiratory rates and the time-domain signals can be acquired. Moreover, the developed radar with customized radio frequency module employs the direct IF sampling technique to achieve high sensitivity to capture the tiny vital sign variations. Experiments with different human subjects and physiological conditions have been carried out. Compared with the landmark-based method and traditional TF algorithms, the results show that instantaneous vital signs can be acquired more accurately within 3 m at a −13 dBm transmit power by the proposed method. Therefore, the radar can be used for evaluating the physiological dynamics and assessing health condition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Long range transmission lines in north-west China are inevitably set up across sandstorm-prone areas. Pollution deposition of insulators working under such rigorous environment is nonuniform due to the influences of flow field and electric field, thus withstand characteristics obtained in traditional artificial pollution test might not be accurate enough. In this paper, sandstorm simulation experiments were carried out to simulate the actual working conditions, and a comparison was made between the withstand characteristics obtained in simulation experiments and artificial pollution tests. The results show that the withstand voltages of insulators went through sandstorm simulation experiment decreased significantly comparing to those prepared by quantitative Brushing Method, which applies the pollution layer uniformly on the insulator surface. Moreover, the withstand voltages of each shed on the insulator string are different at different position and various wind speeds, which reflect the influence of electric field and flow field. In addition, the mechanisms of the influences of flow field and electric field on withstand characteristics of insulators were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shear wave speed can be used to assess tissue elasticity, which is associated with tissue health. Ultrasound shear wave elastography techniques based on measuring the propagation speed of the shear waves induced by acoustic radiation force are becoming promising alternatives to biopsy in liver fibrosis staging. However, shear waves generated by such methods are typically very weak. Therefore, the penetration may become problematic, especially for overweight or obese patients. In this study, we developed a new method called external vibration multi-directional ultrasound shearwave elastography (EVMUSE), in which external vibration from a loudspeaker was used to generate a multi-directional shear wave field. A directional filter was then applied to separate the complex shear wave field into several shear wave fields propagating in different directions. A 2-D shear wave speed map was reconstructed from each individual shear wave field, and a final 2-D shear wave speed map was constructed by compounding these individual wave speed maps. The method was validated using two homogeneous phantoms and one multi-purpose tissue-mimicking phantom. Ten patients undergoing liver magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) were also studied with EVMUSE to compare results between the two methods. Phantom results showed EVMUSE was able to quantify tissue elasticity accurately with good penetration. In vivo EVMUSE results were well correlated with MRE results, indicating the promise of using EVMUSE for liver fibrosis staging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancelable biometrics is a powerful remedy for information leakage caused by the extensive usage of unprotected biometric data. Current measures usually suffer from deteriorated accuracy, which is known as the security–performance tradeoff. Motivated by these concerns, in this article, a novel cancelable fingerprint approach, i.e., Indexing-Min–Max (IMM) hashing, is proposed to securely transform a fixed-length fingerprint feature vector to a discrete index hashed code. IMM hashing is essentially established upon the min–max hash and further strengthened by the integration of the partial Hadamard transform, which alleviates performance deterioration while maintaining a high security level. Extensive experiments on FVC2002 and FVC2004 fingerprint datasets coupled with comprehensive theoretical analyses demonstrate the favorable accuracy and strong anti-attack resilience of the proposed method. Besides, compared to the unprotected counterpart, the matching precision of the protected templates yields little accuracy loss or even improved performance, which means the security–performance tradeoff is well handled. Furthermore, IMM hashing also meets the unlinkability and revocability requisites of cancelable biometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rotary ultrasonic machining (RUM) is a superior technology to machine hard and brittle materials. Traditionally, the compensation optimization for the RUM system is limited to a single resonant frequency. This article presents a novel double compensation approach for the impedance and frequency regulations of RUM via multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) aiming to achieve the system resonance and monitor the machining process in real time. For this, we first establish the impedance model of the rotary ultrasonic holder (RUH) by adopting the T-type circuit that includes the comprehensive electromagnetic parameters. The obtained impedance model reveals that both frequency mismatch and impedance mismatch exist in the RUM system, causing the low voltage gain and low vibration transmission. To obtain the optimal compensation to match both the frequency and impedance, an optimization model-based MOGA is developed to intelligently search the accurate capacitance values, where the Pareto frontier is employed to visualize the capacitance solution distribution. Moreover, the response feature of the RUH system is attained by using the state-space equation. Detailed comparisons of four compensation topologies show that the series–series (SS) topology offers the optimal performance, which can match both of the frequency and the impedance well, improving the output active power 7.634 times compared to the conventional one. Finally, the validity of the proposed optimization method is confirmed by using both simulations and experiments. Note to Practitioners—This article was motivated by the transmission efficiency and the stability of ultrasonic vibration in the rotary ultrasonic machining (RUM). The matching issue is critical in RUM because the whole system is very complicated with multiple components such as electrical devices, piezoelectric rings, and mechanical horn. In the conventional RUM, the system matching is limited to a single resonant frequency between the piezoelectric transducer and the electrical driver. However, the impedance matching is also important to influence the ultrasonic vibration. The problem of the ultrasonic matching stems from empirical experiences of the engineers’ or simple heuristic rules instead of advanced approaches. On the other hand, optimization-based techniques are viewed as a great success in industrial and engineering applications. With the assistance of our proposed numerical model and the corresponding simulation, we found that the multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) can intelligently search the optimal compensated parameters to achieve the double matching for both the resonant frequency and the impedance in the RUM system. Finally, our experiments prove that the MOGA optimization can attain optimal transmission efficiency for the electrical voltage and current compared with conventional approaches. This significantly benefits the application of the RUM technology in industry, especially for the precision machining of the hard and brittle materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-dimensional shear-wave elastography presents 2-D quantitative shear elasticity maps of tissue, which are clinically useful for both focal lesion detection and diffuse disease diagnosis. Realization of 2-D shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners, however, is challenging because of the low tracking pulse-repetition-frequency (PRF) of these systems. Although some clinical and research platforms support software beamforming and plane-wave imaging with high PRF, the majority of current clinical ultrasound systems do not have the software beamforming capability, which presents a critical challenge for translating the 2-D shear-wave elastography technique from laboratory to clinical scanners. To address this challenge, this paper presents a time-aligned sequential tracking (TAST) method for shear-wave tracking on conventional ultrasound scanners. TAST takes advantage of the parallel beamforming capability of conventional systems and realizes high-PRF shear-wave tracking by sequentially firing tracking vectors and aligning shear wave data in the temporal direction. The comb-push ultrasound shear elastography (CUSE) technique was used to simultaneously produce multiple shear wave sources within the field-of-view (FOV) to enhance shear wave SNR and facilitate robust reconstructions of 2-D elasticity maps. TAST and CUSE were realized on a conventional ultrasound scanner. A phantom study showed that the shear-wave speed measurements from the conventional ultrasound scanner were in good agreement with the values measured from other 2-D shear wave imaging technologies. An inclusion phantom study showed that the conventional ultrasound scanner had comparable performance to a state-of-the-art shear-wave imaging system in terms of bias and precision in measuring different sized inclusions. Finally, in vivo case analysis of a breast with a malignant mass, and a liver from a healthy subject demonstrated the feasibility of using the conventional ultrasound scanner for in vivo 2-D shear-wave elastography. These promising results indicate that the proposed technique can enable the implementation of 2-D shear-wave elastography on conventional ultrasound scanners and potentially facilitate wider clinical applications with shear-wave elastography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]