Lot Of Research Activities Research Articles

Immobilised antimicrobial peptides in downregulation of biofilm.

Colonisation of sessile bacterial species on biotic and abiotic surfaces is responsible for the development of various infections in humans. At present, biofilm-associated chronic infections have been a prime concern among the healthcare practitioners since they are impermeable to drugs, resulting in the development of antibiotic resistance or multi-drug resistance. For a few decades, a lot of research activity has been performed in the development of alternative therapeutics to combat biofilm-associated chronic infections. The presence of extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) prevents the permeation of most of the drugs rendering drug failures. The use of small molecules has been necessary to penetrate easily through the EPS and act on the targeted cells. In present days, the use of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) has gained immense importance as alternative therapeutics since they exhibit a novel class of antibiotics exhibiting a wide spectrum of activity and possess a low rate of development of resistance. In the last few decades, a large number of AMPs have been identified from varied groups of organisms as effector molecules for innate immune system acting as an important line of defence. In this review, we will discuss the use of AMPs as effective agents to combat various biofilm-associated chronic infections.

Rate-depending plastic deformation behaviour in a nickel-base alloy under hydrogen influence

Despite a lot of research activities, the influence of hydrogen on the plastic deformation process is controversially discussed and often underestimated. Therefore, in this work strain rate jump tests were performed, using an electrochemical nanoindentation setup to investigate the deformation processes in a nickel-based alloy 725 under the influence of hydrogen, with the aim of determining thermally activated parameters such as strain rate sensitivity and activation volume. A hydrogen-induced hardness increase of about 8% was detected for all applied strain rates. The measured increase in strain rate sensitivity and the decrease in activation volume could be related to short-range order effects, which can lead to a more localized deformation. Furthermore, the optical evaluation of the remaining imprints showed a clear change in the formation of the plastically deformed zone during hydrogen charging. These insights into the deformation behaviour give further understanding regarding hydrogen-induced localized plasticity.

Development of an adhesion model for graphite-based lithium-ion battery anodes

Lithium-ion Batteries (LIBs) have become a key technology for energy storage in electromobility or stationary applications. However, lifetime, energy density and production costs of LIBs need to be improved in order to satisfy the growing demands of these applications. Two possible approaches to improving the specific energy are the use of thicker electrode coatings or the use of high capacity materials such as silicon. Unfortunately, these two levers lead to a decrease of the adhesion strength of the electrodes which compromises the lifetime of a cell and leads to high production scrap. That is why a lot of research activity is directed at improving the adhesion strength of electrodes. However, due to the high complexity of the physics of adhesion, further investigations are necessary. In this work, a thorough analysis of adhesion theories is conducted and supplemented by an expert survey in order to select significant influencing factors of the adhesion strength of graphite-based anodes. The investigation of the influence of the boundary layer properties on the adhesion strength constitutes the focus of the present work. The obtained results are presented in a mathematical-empirical adhesion model for graphite-based anodes.

Line-Coalescing DRAM Cache

Die-stacked DRAM has emerged as an effective approach to address the memory bandwidth wall as it offers much higher bandwidth than off-chip DRAM. It is typically used along with much larger off-chip DRAM to form a hybrid memory system with sufficient capacity and abundant bandwidth. Lots of research activities have been drawn to exploit the potentials of such memory systems. One of the approaches is to use Die-stacked DRAM as a cache of off-chip DRAM. Judicious mechanisms have been proposed to manage these on-chip DRAM caches with tailored line sizes, fetch sizes, replacement policies, and allocation mechanisms. One such example is Footprint Cache[16] which uses 2KB lines but populates each line with only referenced 64B blocks to avoid transferring dead blocks. Doing so significantly reduces the traffic between on-chip DRAM and off-chip DRAM.In this paper, we propose to extend the idea of Decoupled Sector Cache [32] to the DRAM Cache by allowing multiple sparsely populated lines to be coalesced and stored in one DRAM Cache line (we call it Line-Coalescing DRAM Cache (LCDC)). Our experimental results show that LCDC can effectively increase the utilization of on-chip DRAM and provide 16.7% performance boost over prior designs. In addition, it is orthogonal with many existing DRAM Cache techniques and can work with them to increase the performance improvement to 27.5% and achieve 89.1% of the performance of an ideal DRAM Cache design.

Highly tunable topological system based on PbTe-SnTe binary alloy

Despite lots of research activities on topological materials, a highly tunable system is yet to be realized as a material platform for exploration of versatile magneto-/opto-/thermoelectronic properties. The authors followed an important scheme for topological phase transitions proposed by S. Murakami et al. and could find a highly tunable topological system based on PbTe-SnTe alloy doped with In. By varying parameters, Pb/Sn ratio and In doping, they can tune the system from trivial to topological-crystalline insulators across a finite range of materials, where the system shows polar distortion and topological semi-metal behaviors with low-carrier density, high mobility and anomalous (in-plane as well as out-of-plane field) Hall effects.

Current Advances of Polymer Composites for Water Treatment and Desalination

Over the past five years, a lot of research activities in polymer composites were done in order to improve environmental sustainability and to present advantages for commercial applications of water treatment and desalination. Polymers offered tunable properties, improved processability, remarkable stability, high surface area for fast decontamination, selectivity to eliminate different pollutants, and cost-cutting of water treatment. Hence, the development of polymeric materials is one of the future directions to meet the environmental water standards and to supply the water requirements of the growing populations. This review highlighted the very recent achievements in fabrication, characterization, and applications of polymeric composites used for water treatment and desalination. The polymeric modifications, the addition of functional groups, and the assemblies of nanomaterials were also discussed in detail. In particular, great attention was paid to the recent advances in polymer/polymer composites, polymer/carbon composites, and polymer/clay composites, presenting their usage in the removal of various types of contaminants, e.g., metal ions, dyes, and other toxic pollutants. The review also summarized the main advantages and disadvantages of the different adsorbent materials. Specific attention was paid to the mechanism of adsorption, including chemisorption and physisorption mechanisms. In addition, the challenges and the future perspectives were identified to reach the optimal performance of the different adsorbents.

Hydrothermal liquefaction-isomerization of biomass for biofuel production

During the last years, a lot of research activity has been devoted to a biomass conversion into liquid fuels. In order to produce fuels of the same quality as those obtained from crude oil, an appropriate conversion technology is required. Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of biomass is a catalytic process that is considered to be a very promising technology for biofuel production. HTL products have a relatively high content of gasoline and diesel fractions, low oxygen content and high heating value. Moreover, HTL does not require a drying of the raw materials prior to conversion that allows a significant reduction of the price of the biofuel. We developed a new catalytic system for HTL, consisting of halloysite nanotubes as aluminosilicate carrier and strontium/titanium/tin oxide as an isomerizing component. Due to the sufficiently high specific surface area of halloysite nanotubes, a higher content of gasoline fraction in biocrude products was achieved. In addition, the introduction of the isomerizing component significantly increased the octane number of the gasoline fraction.

Studies on Wear Behaviour of Aluminium 6061Alloy Reinforced with B4C & Mica Particulates Hybrid Metal Matrix Composite

Hybrid Metal matrix composites are commonly used in Aerospace, Automobile industries because of its light weight, High tensile strength, high resistance to wear and improved specific strength. This is mainly due to improved mechanical and tribological properties like strength, stiffness, abrasion, impact resistance and wears resistance. In the present scenario, a lot of research activities were on automobile. This paper direct the researchers and engineer towards suitable selection of materials by its properties in the relevant area and various techniques involved in fabrication of metal matrix composites, predominantly on the liquid state metal processing method. In this work Al6061, Boron carbide, mica and hybrid Aluminium metal matrix composites are fabricated using Stir casting Techniques with varying mass fraction of mica 3%, 4%, 5% incorporated into the alloy, Sustaining the mass fraction of boron carbide as 10% for all proportions. Mica and B4C ceramic particles were incorporated into Al 6061 alloy by stir-casting method. In Stir casting method of composite materials synthesis, a dispersed phase (ceramic particles, short fibers) is mixed with a molten metal matrix by means of mechanical stirring. The samples were studied using scanning electron microscope (SEM) one of the most useful instrument for future research to know its microstructure. This study emphasize on the dry siding wear behaviour of aluminium reinforced with 3%,4%,5% mica and constant quantity of 10% boron carbide hybrid composite using a pin on disc. Wear performance of the hybrid composites were evaluated over a different load ranges and at different sliding velocities.

Anatomy of the Chase

A lot of research activity has recently taken place around the chase procedure, due to its usefulness in data integration, data exchange, query optimization, peer data exchange and data correspondence, to mention a few. As the chase has been investigated and further developed by a number of research groups and authors, many variants of the chase have emerged and associated results obtained. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the area it is frequently difficult to verify the scope of each result. In this paper we take closer look at recent developments, and provide additional results. Our analysis allows us create a taxonomy of the chase variations and the properties they satisfy. Two of the most central problems regarding the chase is termination, and discovery of restricted classes of sets of dependencies that guarantee termination of the chase. The search for the restricted classes has been motivated by a fairly recent result that shows that it is undecidable to determine whether the chase with a given dependency set will terminate on a given instance. There is a small dissonance here, since the quest has been for classes of sets of dependencies guaranteeing termination of the chase on all instances, even though the latter problem was not known to be undecidable. We resolve the dissonance in this paper by showing that determining whether the chase with a given set of dependencies terminates on all instances is coRE-complete. Our reduction also gives us the aforementioned instance-dependent RE-completeness result as a byproduct. For one of the restricted classes, the stratified sets dependencies, we provide new complexity results for the problem of testing whether a given set of dependencies belongs to it. These results rectify some previous claims that have occurred in the literature.

Non-Contact Sensor for Long-Term Continuous Vital Signs Monitoring: A Review on Intelligent Phased-Array Doppler Sensor Design.

It has been the dream of many scientists and engineers to realize a non-contact remote sensing system that can perform continuous, accurate and long-term monitoring of human vital signs as we have seen in many Sci-Fi movies. Having an intelligible sensor system that can measure and record key vital signs (such as heart rates and respiration rates) remotely and continuously without touching the patients, for example, can be an invaluable tool for physicians who need to make rapid life-and-death decisions. Such a sensor system can also effectively help physicians and patients making better informed decisions when patients’ long-term vital signs data is available. Therefore, there has been a lot of research activities on developing a non-contact sensor system that can monitor a patient’s vital signs and quickly transmit the information to healthcare professionals. Doppler-based radio-frequency (RF) non-contact vital signs (NCVS) monitoring system are particularly attractive for long term vital signs monitoring because there are no wires, electrodes, wearable devices, nor any contact-based sensors involved so the subjects may not be even aware of the ubiquitous monitoring. In this paper, we will provide a brief review on some latest development on NCVS sensors and compare them against a few novel and intelligent phased-array Doppler-based RF NCVS biosensors we have built in our labs. Some of our NCVS sensor tests were performed within a clutter-free anechoic chamber to mitigate the environmental clutters, while most tests were conducted within the typical Herman-Miller type office cubicle setting to mimic a more practical monitoring environment. Additionally, we will show the measurement data to demonstrate the feasibility of long-term NCVS monitoring. The measured data strongly suggests that our latest phased array NCVS system should be able to perform long-term vital signs monitoring intelligently and robustly, especially for situations where the subject is sleeping without hectic movements nearby.

(Invited) Catalyst Layer Development at Nissan

Energy security and global warming are critical environmental issues. It is an important role for vehicle manufacturers to develop technologies for reducing greenhouse gas, especially CO2 emission. Nissan has been focusing on both electrification and intelligence technologies so far, including battery and fuel cells technologies as a part of "Nissan Intelligent Mobility".1 The biggest issues to popularize fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) in the market are cost reduction of polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) power system, and development of hydrogen infrastructure. Related to the former issue, one of the most significant challenges is to reduce platinum group metals (PGM) in fuel cell stacks. PGM are used as electrocatalyst and contained in catalyst layers (CLs) of membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) in the stack. A lot of research activities on PEFC electrocatalyst have been reported so far, indicating high oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity and durability mainly measured in aqueous electrolyte systems such as a rotating disk electrode method.2-8 On the other hand, electrocatalyst is mixed with electrolyte to form CLs through deposition and solidification process. From industrial point of view, it is needed that performance of the electrocatalyst should be guaranteed as CL in MEA. CL is a multi-scale component, i.e. micro-scale porous electrode consisting of nano-scale materials, where electrochemical reaction and mass transport occur simultaneously. Micro and nano structure of CL has been revealed gradually by means of characterization techniques remarkably progressed recently, such as electron microscope.9,10 However, it is still under development to characterize and diagnose structure and properties of CLs as overall and average value. To design low-PGM loaded CLs without scarifying performance, Nissan has been trying to understand the correlation between materials and CL/MEAs through properties and structure via key mechanism.11-15 Recently, process analysis such as catalyst ink microstructure has been more focused.16-18 In this presentation, current status and challenges of CL/electrocatalyst design and development at Nissan will be introduced.

Abstract 5128: Characterization of tumor immune microenvironment in response to PD-L1 therapy initiated at different time points post inoculation in syngeneic mouse models

Abstract The tumor microenvironment is an important aspect of cancer biology that contributes to tumor initiation, progression and responses to therapy. Cells and molecules of the immune system are fundamental components of the tumor microenvironment which have been known to vary widely and are important in determining the anti-tumor immune response. The approval of immune checkpoint inhibitors like PD-1 and CTLA-4 antibodies has resulted in a lot of research activity in immune-oncology. Syngeneic mouse models have been utilized to understand the preclinical immune response as a surrogate to the clinical response. The timing of immune checkpoint inhibitor dosing is supposed to play an important role on the tumor growth in mouse models. In order to understand the correlation of tumor regression, survival and immune response in a preclinical mouse model, we evaluated the effect of different times of treatment initiation with Program Death Ligand-1 (PD-L1) on tumor volume, survival and tumor infiltrating leukocytes (TIL’s). Various dosing regimens evaluated included initiation of PD-L1 therapy on the day of inoculation, 6 and 12 days post inoculation. Tumors were collected from three different syngeneic mouse models (CT26, RENCA and B16F10) and profiled for the presence of tumor infiltrating leukocytes (TIL’s) using flow cytometry. Major sub-population of TIL's examined included T-regulatory cells (Treg’s), Tumor Associated Macrophages (TAM’s) and Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cells (MDSC’s). Finally, an attempt was made to identify any correlation or lack thereof between tumor growth and tumor immune microenvironment. Citation Format: Geeta Sharma, Susan Wu, Robert Mihalek, Ann Fiore, Matthew Gale, Christa Dias, Wendy Grant, Nidia Hernandez. Characterization of tumor immune microenvironment in response to PD-L1 therapy initiated at different time points post inoculation in syngeneic mouse models. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 5128.

Guilt-free food consumption: one of your five ideologies a day

Purpose Marketing products as guilt-free is not new, especially in the food industry, but what is new is the scope of ethical choice on offer and the variety and complexity of guilt-free narratives sold as part of the consumption package. The purpose of this paper is to present – and test – an innovative framework with which to analyse the key strategies in the creation of guilt-free narratives within the food industry and examine how consumer habits, motivations and attitudes are afforded by these narratives. The trend towards interpassivity, in which a consumer “outsources” moral responsibility to manufacturers, suppliers or retailers, is critically examined. Design/methodology/approach Data collection consisted of a non-probability quota sample of UK residents, administered online. There were three main areas of this study: consumers’ attitudes towards guilt-free products and marketing, consumers’ consumption habits and conscious-motivating factors and insights in unconscious-motivating factors. The questionnaire was designed to provide both qualitative and quantitative insights. It consisted of a variety of open-ended questions, as well as sets of given choices regarding habits and motivations, where the options were designed to encompass as many potential responses as necessary. The survey was shaped using a mini-focus group. Findings The paper demonstrates that consumers are in general willing to pay more for a guilt-free product but not for the reasons normally presented within the marketing literature. The paper shows that while self-accountability and anticipatory guilt are reasons for the effectiveness of guilt-free marketing, they are only minor factors. The paper shows that other motivating factors are more important as many participants buy products they do not entirely trust or have a particular preference for. One motive relates to interpassivity, that is, that guilt and guilt-alleviating actions can be transferred or delegated to the product itself. Research limitations/implications The concept of interpassivity and the idea of transference of actions or emotions to products has potential for new marketing frameworks. There are many different coping mechanisms for guilt or shame, and these could all be packaged into products to arouse a preference with the consumer. The entire area of guilt-free marketing is under-researched but because of the continued growth in consumer guilt-mitigation strategies, it is likely to see a lot of research activity in the near future. The main limitation is the limited statistical analysis afforded by the non-probability nature of the sample. Practical Implications The paper has developed a clearer definition of what constitutes a guilt-free product, that is, a guilt-free product is created when a regular product has any one or more of the three types of guilt (anticipatory, reactive and existential) packaged into it. Using this definition, the paper examined why guilt-free marketing has been effective, identifying that though consumers are willing to pay more for a guilt-free product, self-accountability and anticipatory guilt are only part of the explanation, with guilt and guilt-alleviating actions being transferred or delegated to the product itself a significant factor. Social Implications The paper has impacts for producers and consumers wishing to highlight the social good of a product. The study shows that consumers are sophisticated enough to examine social impact but often express a desire to delegate action to firms. Firms can more clearly frame their activity and contrast their action to the misleading marketing claims of rivals. Originality/value This paper is the first detailed analysis of guilt-free foods of its type. It seeks to create clearer definitions and frameworks with which to examine marketing practices and discourses of guilt in food consumption and marketing. The paper findings suggest that a relatively novel approach to consumption – interpassivity – is a useful explanation for otherwise puzzling consumer behaviour in a newly emerging area of guilt-free food marketing.

UNIQUE CBIR – A Unified Method of Retrieving Similar Images

Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a method of extracting image features and calculate visual similarity based on these features. Lot of research activity is continuing for optimizing and improving the feature extraction methods focusing on colour, texture and shape features to minimize the semantic gap. Relevant Feedback (RF) is one variant of CBIR wherein the user provides feedback by selecting the most relevant image from retrieved images and make it a query image for the subsequent iterations. The RF methods improved the performance of the overall system in multiple iterations but the time taken for the total process increases on the other hand. This paper attempts to address the semantic gap problem by having the user interface in the forward path by adding some more key requirements of the user for narrowing down the search options thereby increasing the system performance and reducing the retrieval time.

Encryption-Based Secure Sharing of Data with Fine-Grained Access Control in Public Clouds

Security challenges are still among the biggest obstacles when considering the adoption of cloud services. This triggered a lot of research activities, resulting in a quantity of proposals targeting the various cloud security threats. Current approaches to enforce fine-grained access control on confidential data hosted in the cloud are based on fine-grained encryption of the data. Under such approaches, data owners are in charge of encrypting the data before uploading them on the cloud and re-encrypting the data whenever user credentials change. Data owners thus incur high communication and computation costs. A better approach should delegate the enforcement of fine-grained access control to the cloud to minimize the overhead of the data owners, while assuring data confidentiality from the cloud. To achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for personal health records (PHRs), the authors leverage attribute-based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt each patient's PHR file. Differently from previous works in secure data outsourcing, they focus on the multiple data owner scenario and divide the users in the PHR system into multiple security domains that greatly reduce the key management complexity for owners and users. A high degree of patient privacy is guaranteed simultaneously by exploiting multiauthority ABE. The scheme also enables dynamic modification of access policies or file attributes and supports efficient on-demand user/attribute revocation and break-glass access under emergency scenarios.

A MULTI-CLASSIFIER PREDICTION MODEL FOR PHISHING DETECTION

Phishing is the technique of stealing personal and sensitive information from an email client by sending emails that impersonates like the ones from some trustworthy organizations. Phishing mails are a specific type of spam mails; however the effects of them are much more terrible than alternate sorts. Mostly the phishing attackers aim the clients of the financial organizations, so its detection needs high priority. Lots of research activities are done to detect the phished emails, in the proposed methodology a multi-classifier prediction model is introduced for detecting phished emails. Our contention is that solitary classifier prediction might not be satisfactory to urge the clearest picture of the phishing email; multi-classifier prediction has accuracy 99.8% with an FP rate of 0.8%.

Smart Green Buildings of Tomorrow

Fast population growth and rapid development of our communities have exerted a huge impact on our natural environment. The design, fabrication, construction and operation of buildings in which we live and work are responsible for significant consumption of our natural resources. Taking the United States as an example, buildings account for 39% of total energy use, 68% of total electricity consumption, 30% of landfill waste, 38% of carbon dioxide emissions and 12% of total water consumption [1] and China is catching up. In order to alleviate the problem, smart green buildings development could well be considered as one of the viable choices. As its name suggests, smart green buildings combine ‘‘smart’’ and ‘‘green’’ concepts. Green buildings are about resources efficiency, lifecycle effects and building performance while keeping the lowest impact to the environment. Smart buildings, in which the core component is an integrated building technology system, are about construction and operational efficiencies, enhanced management and occupant functions. Therefore, the environment, economy and society can benefit from smart green buildings by enhancing and protecting biodiversity and ecosystems, improving air and water quality, reducing waste streams, conserving and restoring natural resources. Besides, smart green buildings can reduce operating costs, improve occupant productivity, enhance asset value and profits and optimize life-cycle economic performance. They can also enhance occupant health and comfort, improve indoor air quality, minimize strain on local utility infrastructure and improve overall quality of life. From another viewpoint, the minimum function of traditional buildings is to provide a shelter. Strength, durability, cost on selecting building materials, planning and construction are focused by civil engineering while aesthetics, comfort and attention to fulfilling psychological needs of the occupant are stressed by architecture. However, smart green buildings seek to conserve and utilize natural resources, emphasize eco-friendly construction and minimize carbon footprint on a global scale. The trend of the development is that smart green buildings should manage to cater more for the needs of humans, with increasing magnitude of personalization. People will be in control of the environment and be able to tune it to their needs. A lot of research activities are being carried out to make our buildings smarter and greener. Absorption, adsorption and various advanced thermodynamic cycles could be considered as renewed interest in thermally activated cooling and heating systems. Micro-channel systems could help improve heat and mass transfer, leading to reduction of fluid inventories, material utilization and environmental impact. Integrating micro-channel systems into smart green buildings could make those buildings more energy efficient. Apart from that, integrating novel heat transfer fluids (e.g. nanofluid) [2] as well as improved heat and mass transfer devices into heating and cooling systems can also further reduce the energy consumption and ecological footprint of some building systems. A trigeneration process is another option to increase the efficiency in thermal and electric generation. Recently, the tri-generation system has been used for power generation and also for air-conditioning systems. Comparing with the co-generation system, tri-generation refers to district energy which can achieve a higher efficiency with a smaller environmental impact. With a

Covalent organic frameworks and their metal nanoparticle composites: Prospects for hydrogen storage

AbstractCovalent organic frameworks (COFs) are microporous crystalline organic frameworks with large specific surface areas. The area of COFs is rapidly developing in the direction of finding potential applications in fields like gas storage, photovoltaics, and catalysis. With respect to hydrogen storage, at first glance, COFs possess all the advantages of metal‐organic frameworks (surface area, pore volume, rigidity of the structure). In addition, since the molecular frameworks of COFs are composed of light elements (C, Si, B, and O), these materials have exceptionally low densities. Due to this advantage, a lot of research activity (both theoretical and experimental) was reported in the recent literature on hydrogen‐storage properties of COFs. Also, several strategies were suggested for enhancing H2‐storage capacities of COFs at cryogenic as well as room temperatures. In this feature article, we broadly discuss the scope of COFs as hydrogen storage media and also review the strategies suggested for enhanced room‐temperature hydrogen‐storage properties. Further, the concept of “spillover” is reviewed critically in metal@COFs and metal@MOFs systems.

Foams, fibers, and composites: Where do we stand?

As of 2012, I am officially a septuagenarian. This means that in the eighth decade of my life, much of which has been devoted to fibers, foams, and composites, I am allowed to indulge in some crystal gazing. I would like to take this occasion to reflect on the progress made in these fields of materials. Materials in the form of foams, fibers, and composites cover a very wide range: in biological and manmade materials. In the area of foams, functional and fiber reinforced foams are likely to see a lot of research activity. In the area of fibers, besides carbon fibers based on nanotubes and natural fibers, the real action is in the materials science and engineering of silk fibers. In the larger field of composites, the success of carbon/epoxy composites is epitomized by Boeing 787. Particle reinforced metal matrix composites, continuous alumina fiber reinforced aluminum composites seem very promising, as are techniques such as application of tomography to investigate the material behavior of these composites.

Advances in Lasers and Optical Amplifiers: Materials, Components, and Systems

During the last decades a lot of research activities in the field of photonics have been accomplished and today there is a disruptive revolution underway where the photons are used to transmit, store, and process information. Laser and optical amplifier technology plays an important role in these events. In particular, the advances in lasers and optical amplifiers, enabling novel, powerful and exciting applications are based on research results arising from different investigation fields. This special issue is an example of these interdisciplinary contributions to the state of the art of optical amplification. Microresonators, interferometry, accuratemodeling, grating, nonlinear optics, and novel materials are the subjects included in the volume.