Unlike traditional passive filters, modern active filters have the following multiple functions; harmonic filtering, damping, isolation and termination, reactive-power control for power factor correction and voltage regulation, load balancing, voltage-flicker reduction, and/or their combinations. Significant cost reductions in both power semiconductor devices and signal-processing devices have inspired manufactures to put active filters on the market. This paper deals with general pure active filters for power conditioning, and specific hybrid active filters for harmonic filtering of three-phase diode rectifiers, as well as traditional passive filters.

Extremely intense development of civilization requires from foundry casting technologies very high quality and not expensive castings. In

the foundries, there are many treatments that allow increasing of the final properties of produced castings such as refining, modification,

heat treatment, etc. One of the methods of increasing the quality of the casting by removing inclusions from the liquid alloy is filtration.

The use of ceramic-carbon foam filters in filtration process is still analysed phenomenon that allows improving the final properties of

castings. A modern method of research, testing and synthesis of innovative chemical compositions allows improving the properties of such

filters. In the paper the evaluation of application properties of developed ceramic-carbon bonded foam filters is presented. The quality of

the foam filters is evaluated by Computer Tomography and foundry trials in pouring of liquid metal in test molds. Additionally computer

simulations were made to visualize the flow characteristics in the foam filter. The analysed filters are the result of the research work of

Foundry Research Institute and the Institute of Ceramics and Building Materials, Refractory Materials Department in Gliwice.

Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) stores all the information gathered by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from aircraft flying in the US airspace. The data stored from each flight includes the 4D trajectory (latitude, longitude, altitude and timestamp), radar data and flight plan information. Unfortunately, there is a data quality problem in the vertical channel and the altitude component of the trajectories contains some isolated samples in which a wrong value was stored. Overall, the data is generally accurate and it was found that only 0.3% of the altitude values were incorrect, however the impact of these erroneous data in some analyses could be important, motivating the development of a filtering procedure. The approach developed for filtering ETMS altitude data includes some specific algorithms for problems found in this particular dataset, and a novel filter to correct isolated bad samples (named Despeckle filter). As a result, all altitude errors were eliminated in 99.7% of the flights affected by noise, while preserving the original values of the samples without bad data. The algorithm presented in this paper attains better results than standard filters such as the median filter, and it could be applied to any signal affected by noise in the form of spikes

A novel current-inversion type negative impedance converter (CNIC) is presented. It is built without the use of any resistors. Furthermore, a second-order low-pass filter based on this CNIC is also analysed. It shows a bandwidth of 50 MHz at 320 µW power consumption and 2 V supply voltage when realized in a 0.35 µm CMOS process.

The paper includes a summary of long-time research conducted by a research team in the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Silesian University of Technology. The research work has principally been related to selected problems in the field of analysis and synthesis of systems aimed at symmetrisation and improvement of some power quality parameters. This paper constitutes the second part of the report on the research. It has been devoted to three-phase system symmetrisation as well as effective elimination of higher harmonics and substantial improvement of power quality by means of hybrid active power filters.

In the paper, a general topology of continuous-time Active-RC filter is presented. The model includes all possible Active-RC filter

structures as particular cases and allows us to analyze them using a unified algebraic formalism. This makes it suitable for use in computeraided analysis and design of Active-RC filters. By its construction, the model takes into account the finite DC gain and the finite bandwidth as well as non-zero output resistance of operational amplifiers. Filters with ideal OPAMPs can be treated as particular cases. Sensitivity and noise analysis of Active-RC filters is also performed in the proposed general setting. The correctness of the model is verified by comparison with SPICE simulation.

The paper makes a comparison of the results of the application of two-sided and one-sided versions of the Hodrick-Prescott filter on GDP data concerning 27 EU Member States. Based on the results, the overall finding is that, contrary to its assumed advantages, the one-sided filter does not help overcome endpoint unbiasedness. Quite the opposite, it rather spreads and consolidates the endpoint bias that plagues the two-sided version over the entire filtered data. In addition, regression-based results on the influence of the second, third, and fourth moments of the GDP acceleration rates on the differences between onesided and two-sided HP trends are presented.

Presented study aimed to determine metals distribution on the quartz fiber filters surface coated with particulate matter by using high and low-volume samplers. The distribution pattern was tested using two different sub-sampling schemes. Each sub-sample was mineralized in the nitric acid in a microwave oven. An analysis was performed by means of atomic absorption spectroscopy with electrothermal atomization GF-AAS technique, and the determined elements were: As, Cd, Pb and Ni. A validation of the analytical procedure was carried out using NIES 28 Urban Aerosols standard reference material.

It was assumed that metal is distributed uniformly if its normalized concentrations on a single sub-sample is within ±15% of the mean concentration over the whole filter. The normalized concentrations values exceed this range, indicating a non-homogenous metals distribution. There were no statistically significant differences in metals concentrations between particular sub-samples in the function of its position along the filters diameter.

In this paper a survey of analog application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for low-level image processing, called vision chips, is presented. Due to the specific requirements, the vision chips are designed using different architectures best suited to their functions. The main types of the vision chip architectures and their properties are presented and characterized on selected examples of prototype integrated circuits (ICs) fabricated in complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. While discussing the vision chip realizations the importance of low-cost, low-power solutions is highlighted, which are increasingly being used in intelligent consumer equipment. Thanks to the great development of the automated design environments and fabrication methods, new, so far unknown applications of the vision chips become possible, as for example disposable endoscopy capsules for photographing the human gastrointestinal tract for the purposes of medical diagnosis.

The wavelet transform has been successfully used in the area of power quality analysis. There are many published papers with methods for power quality disturbance classification or harmonics measurement, which use wavelet transform. However, the properties of the wavelet transform can drastically vary from the choice of the wavelet. In this paper we analyze the influence of the choice of the wavelet to the accuracy of the power quality classification method and to high frequency harmonics measurements. Additionally to the well known wavelet filters we introduce near perfect reconstruction filter banks. The simulation results indicate that these filter banks are a good choice for classification of power quality disturbances, especially in the presence of noise and for high frequency harmonics measurements

Over the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in the design of tunable devices at microwave frequencies by us- ing liquid crystals technology. In particular, the use of liquid crystals with high dielectric anisotropy allows manufacturing voltage-controlled devices to operate in a wide frequency range. In this work the frequency response of a liquid crystal band-pass filter with dual-mode microstrip structure has been studied in depth by using a simulation software tool. A reshap- ing of a conventional dual-mode square patch resonator bandpass filter with a square notch, studied in the literature, has been proposed with the goal of improving the filter performance. The main features achieved are a significant increase in the return loss of the filter and a narrowing of a 3-dB bandwidth. Specifically, a reduction in the filter bandwidth from 800 MHz to 600 MHz, which leads to a return loss increase from 6 dB to 12.5 dB, has been achieved. The filter centre frequency can be tuned from 4.54 GHz to 5.19 GHz.

As a result of the development of modern vehicles, even higher accuracy standards are demanded. As known, Inertial Navigation Systems have an intrinsic increasing error which is the main reason of using integrating navigation systems, where some other sources of measurements are utilized, such as barometric altimeter due to its high accuracy in short times of interval. Using a Robust Kalman Filter (RKF), error measurements are absorbed when a Fault Tolerant Altimeter is implemented. During simulations, in order to test the Nonlinear RKF algorithm, two kind of measurement malfunction scenarios have been taken into consideration; continuous bias and measurement noise increment. Under the light of the results, some recommendations are proposed when integrated altimeters are used.