Reduction of three industrial nickel oxides (Goro, Tokyo and Sinter 75) with a hydrogen bearing gas was revisited in the temperature interval from 523 to 673 K (250 to 400°C). A pronounced incubation period is observed in the temperature interval tested. This period decreases as the reduction temperature increases. Thermogravimetric data of these oxides were fitted using the Avrami-Erofeyev kinetic model. The reduction of these oxides is controlled by a nucleation and growth mechanism of metallic nickel over the oxides structure. Rate kinetic constants were re-evaluated and the activation energy for the reduction of these oxides was re-calculated.

In the paper a new implementation of a compact smart resistive sensor based on a microcontroller with internal ADCs is proposed and analysed. The solution is based only on a (already existing in the system) microcontroller and a simple sensor interface circuit working as a voltage divider consisting of a reference resistor and a resistive sensor connected in parallel with an interference suppression capacitor. The measurement method is based on stimulation of the sensor interface circuit by a single square voltage pulse and on sampling the resulting voltage on the resistive sensor. The proposed solution is illustrated by a complete application of the compact smart resistive sensor used for temperature measurements, based on an 8-bit ATxmega32A4 microcontroller with a 12-bit ADC and a Pt100 resistive sensor. The results of experimental research confirm that the compact smart resistive sensor has 1°C resolution of temperature measurement for the whole range of changes of measured temperatures.

The paper deals with fault diagnosis of nonlinear analogue integrated circuits. Soft spot short defects are analysed taking into account variations of the circuit parameters due to physical imperfections as well as self-heating of the chip. A method enabling to detect, locate and estimate the value of a spot defect has been developed. For this purpose an appropriate objective function was minimized using an optimization procedure based on the Fibonacci method. The proposed approach exploits DC measurements in the test phase, performed at a limited number of accessible points. For illustration three numerical examples are given.

A simulation-based optimization approach to design of phase excitation tapers for linear phased antenna arrays is presented. The design optimization process is accelerated by means of Surrogate-Based Optimization (SBO); it uses a coarse-mesh surrogate of the array element for adjusting the array’s active reflection coefficient responses and a fast surrogate of the antenna array radiation pattern. The primary optimization objective is to minimize side-lobes in the principal plane of the radiation pattern while scanning the main beam. The optimization outcome is a set of element phase excitation tapers versus the scan angle. The design objectives are evaluated at the high fidelity level of description using simulations of the discrete electromagnetic model of the entire array so that the effects of element coupling and other possible interaction within the array structure are accounted for. At the same time, the optimization process is fast due to SBO. Performance and numerical cost of the approach are demonstrated by optimizing a 16-element linear array of microstrip antennas. Experimental verification has been carried out for a manufactured prototype of the optimized array. It demonstrates good agreement between the radiation patterns obtained from simulations and from physical measurements (the latter constructed through superposition of the measured element patterns).

Sensing technology has been developed for detection of gases in some environmental, industrial, medical, and scientific applications. The main tasks of these works is to enhance performance of gas sensors taking into account their different applicability and scenarios of operation. This paper presents the descriptions, comparison and recent progress in some existing gas sensing technologies. Detailed introduction to optical sensing methods is presented. In a general way, other kinds of various sensors, such as catalytic, thermal conductivity, electrochemical, semiconductor and surface acoustic wave ones, are also presented. Furthermore, this paper focuses on performance of the optical method in detecting biomarkers in the exhaled air. There are discussed some examination results of the constructed devices. The devices operated on the basis of enhanced cavity and wavelength modulation spectroscopies. The experimental data used for analyzing applicability of these different sensing technologies in medical screening. Several suggestions related to future development are also discussed.

When an artificial neural network is used to determine the value of a physical quantity its result is usually presented without an uncertainty. This is due to the difficulty in determining the uncertainties related to the neural model. However, the result of a measurement can be considered valid only with its respective measurement uncertainty. Therefore, this article proposes a method of obtaining reliable results by measuring systems that use artificial neural networks. For this, it considers the Monte Carlo Method (MCM) for propagation of uncertainty distributions during the training and use of the artificial neural networks.

In this paper, a filtering stage based on employing a Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter is proposed to be used in the spectrum sensing phase of a Cognitive Radio (CR) communication paradigm for Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access (VDSA). It is used to smooth the acquired spectra, which constitute the input for a spectrum sensing algorithm. The sensing phase is necessary, since VDSA is based on an opportunistic approach to the spectral resource, and the opportunities are represented by the user-free spectrum zones, to be detected through the sensing phase. Each filter typology presents peculiarities in terms of its computational cost, de-noising ability and signal shape reconstruction. The SG filtering properties are compared with those of the linear Moving Average (MA) filter, widely used in the CR framework. Important improvements are proposed.

Time-Frequency (t-f) distributions are frequently employed for analysis of new-born EEG signals because of their non-stationary characteristics. Most of the existing time-frequency distributions fail to concentrate energy for a multicomponent signal having multiple directions of energy distribution in the t-f domain. In order to analyse such signals, we propose an Adaptive Directional Time-Frequency Distribution (ADTFD). The ADTFD outperforms other adaptive kernel and fixed kernel TFDs in terms of its ability to achieve high resolution for EEG seizure signals. It is also shown that the ADTFD can be used to define new time-frequency features that can lead to better classification of EEG signals, e.g. the use of the ADTFD leads to 97.5% total accuracy, which is by 2% more than the results achieved by the other methods.

This paper presents signal processing aspects for automatic segmentation of retinal layers of the human eye. The paper draws attention to the problems that occur during the computer image processing of images obtained with the use of the Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD OCT). Accuracy of the retinal layer segmentation for a set of typical 3D scans with a rather low quality was shown. Some possible ways to improve quality of the final results are pointed out. The experimental studies were performed using the so-called B-scans obtained with the OCT Copernicus HR device.

A new configuration of rectifier suiting CMOS technology is presented. The rectifier consists of only two n-channel MOS transistors, two capacitors and two resistors; for this reason it is very favourable in manufacturing in CMOS technology. With these features the rectifier is easy to design and cheap in production. Despite its simplicity, the rectifier has relatively good characteristics, the voltage and power efficiency, and bandwidth greater than 89%, 87%, and 1 GHz, respectively. The performed simulations and measurements of a prototype circuit fully confirmed its correct operation and advantages.

The Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) scheme is a statistical/physical secure key exchange system based on the laws of classical statistical physics to provide unconditional security. We used the LTSPICE industrial cable and circuit simulator to emulate one of the major active (invasive) attacks, the current injection attack, against the ideal and a practical KLJN system, respectively. We show that two security enhancement techniques, namely, the instantaneous voltage/current comparison method, and a simple privacy amplification scheme, independently and effectively eliminate the information leak and successfully preserve the system’s unconditional security.

The operating principles of RFID antennas should be considered differently than it is applied in the classical theory of radio communication systems. The procedure of measuring the radiation pattern of antennas that could be applied to RFID transponders operating in the UHF band is seldom discussed correctly in the scientific literature. The problem consists in the variability of the RFID chip impedance that strongly influences measurement results. The authors propose the proper methodology for determining the radiation pattern with respect to an individual transponder as well as an electronically tagged object. The advantage of the solution consists in the possibility of using components of different measuring systems that are available in typical antenna laboratories. The proposed procedure is particularly important in terms of parameter validation - the identification efficiency and costs of an RFID system implementation can be evaluated properly only on the basis of real values of considered parameters.

Power system state estimation is a process of real-time online modeling of an electric power system. The estimation is performed with the application of a static model of the system and current measurements of electrical quantities that are encumbered with an error. Usually, a model of the estimated system is also encumbered with an uncertainty, especially power line resistances that depend on the temperature of conductors. At present, a considerable development of technologies for dynamic power line rating can be observed. Typically, devices for dynamic line rating are installed directly on the conductors and measure basic electric parameters such as the current and voltage as well as non-electric ones as the surface temperature of conductors, their expansion, stress or the conductor sag angle relative to the plumb line. The objective of this paper is to present a method for power system state estimation that uses temperature measurements of overhead line conductors as supplementary measurements that enhance the model quality and thereby the estimation accuracy. Power system state estimation is presented together with a method of using the temperature measurements of power line conductors for updating the static power system model in the state estimation process. The results obtained with that method have been analyzed based on the estimation calculations performed for an example system - with and without taking into account the conductor temperature measurements. The final part of the article includes conclusions and suggestions for the further research.

The low-frequency optical-signal phase noise induced by mechanical vibration of the base occurs in field-deployed fibers. Typical telecommunication data transfer is insensitive to this type of noise but the phenomenon may influence links dedicated to precise Time and Frequency (T&F) fiber-optic transfer that exploit the idea of stabilization of phase or propagation delay of the link. To measure effectiveness of suppression of acoustic noise in such a link, a dedicated measurement setup is necessary. The setup should enable to introduce a low-frequency phase corruption to the optical signal in a controllable way. In the paper, a concept of a setup in which the mechanically induced acoustic-band optical signal phase corruption is described and its own features and measured parameters are presented. Next, the experimental measurement results of the T&F transfer TFTS-2 system’s immunity as a function of the fibre-optic length vs. the acoustic-band noise are presented. Then, the dependency of the system immunity on the location of a noise source along the link is also pointed out.