Residual Noise Identification for PIM Measurement Systems using Variable Low-PIM Termination

<p>In this letter, we describe the design for the variable low-PIM termination composed of the voltage-controlled IM-source, a fixed attenuator, and a linear attenuator.</p> <p>The design method for evaluating PIM-level of the fixed attenuator is presented in order not to limit the variable range of entire termination.</p> <p>It is possible to maintain low-PIM performance in spite of using active voltage-controlled IM-source, whose IM level is extremely high. </p> <p>This termination is used for a dynamic residual noise identification for PIM measurement systems by observing the saturation value for voltage sweep.</p> <p>The validity is confirmed by experiments in 2GHz band.</p>

Residual Noise Identification for PIM Measurement Systems using Variable Low-PIM Termination

<p>In this letter, we describe the design for the variable low-PIM termination composed of the voltage-controlled IM-source, a fixed attenuator, and a linear attenuator.</p> <p>The design method for evaluating PIM-level of the fixed attenuator is presented in order not to limit the variable range of entire termination.</p> <p>It is possible to maintain low-PIM performance in spite of using active voltage-controlled IM-source, whose IM level is extremely high. </p> <p>This termination is used for a dynamic residual noise identification for PIM measurement systems by observing the saturation value for voltage sweep.</p> <p>The validity is confirmed by experiments in 2GHz band.</p>

Acoustic Sensing and Noise Identification of a Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Unit: Industrial Case Study

Reducing the noise and improving the sound quality of vehicles’ interior space is one of the challenges to enhance passengers’ experience. This is an ever-growing issue as entirely electric cars are becoming commonplace, making previously unnoticed noise a significant problem. Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) units are a major noise source in a vehicle’s interior space, yet automotive manufacturers only give a maximum dB specification to HVAC unit manufactures. Problematic noise is only typically identified once the unit is within the vehicle at the late stages of a project. Psychoacoustics is the study of human perception to sound, allowing unpleasant noise to be identified within recorded data. Within this study, an industrial prototype HVAC unit was analysed using a 96-channel acoustic camera capable of isolating and locating noise sources from the unit using beamforming. In addition to identifying the location of noise sources, several psychoacoustic metrics were used, such as sharpness and loudness, to identify undesirable noise within an extensive data set due to the vast range of test configurations. Testing was conducted to analyse the unit. Within the initial testing, an ‘annoying’ sound was identified at a particular motor RPM, and this was located using the camera to an area which indicated that it was a result of structural resonance. In addition, present was a high-frequency source which could not be located accurately. The results of this testing enable modifications to the unit to be made early in its’ development, either structurally to alter the resonance of the unit or within the settings to ensure certain RPMs are avoided.

Identification of Transient Noise to Reduce False Detections in Screening for Atrial Fibrillation

Screening for atrial fibrillation (AF) with a handheld device for recording the ECG is becoming increasingly popular. The poorer signal quality of such ECGs may lead to false detection of AF, often caused by transient noise. Consequently, the need for expert review in AF screening can become extensive. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for transient noise identification in AF detection. The network is trained using the events produced by a QRS detector, classified into either true beat detections or false detections. The CNN and a low-complexity AF detector are trained and tested using the StrokeStop I database, containing 30-s ECGs from mass screening for AF in the elderly population. Performance evaluation of the CNN-based quality control using a subset of the database resulted in sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 96.4, 96.9, and 96.9%, respectively. By inserting the CNN before the AF detector, the false AF detections were reduced by 22.5% without any loss in sensitivity. The results show that the number of recordings calling for expert review can be significantly reduced thanks to the identification of transient noise. The reduction of false AF detections is directly linked to the time and cost spent on expert review.

Multi-level quantum noise spectroscopy

System noise identification is crucial to the engineering of robust quantum systems. Although existing quantum noise spectroscopy (QNS) protocols measure an aggregate amount of noise affecting a quantum system, they generally cannot distinguish between the underlying processes that contribute to it. Here, we propose and experimentally validate a spin-locking-based QNS protocol that exploits the multi-level energy structure of a superconducting qubit to achieve two notable advances. First, our protocol extends the spectral range of weakly anharmonic qubit spectrometers beyond the present limitations set by their lack of strong anharmonicity. Second, the additional information gained from probing the higher-excited levels enables us to identify and distinguish contributions from different underlying noise mechanisms.

Separation of magnetotelluric signals based on refined composite multiscale dispersion entropy and orthogonal matching pursuit

Magnetotelluric (MT) data processing can increase the reliability of measured data. Traditional MT de-noising methods are usually filtered in entire MT time-series sequence, which result in losing of useful MT signals and the decrease of imaging accuracy of electromagnetic inversion. However, targeted MT noise separation can retain the part of data not affected by strong noise, and enhance the quality of MT data. Thus, we proposed a novel method for MT noise separation, which using refined composite multiscale dispersion entropy (RCMDE) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP). Firstly, the RCMDE characteristic parameters are extracted from each segment of the MT time-series. Then, the characteristic parameters are input to the fuzzy c-mean (FCM) clustering for automatic identification of MT signal and noise. Next, OMP method is utilized to remove the identified noise segments independently. Finally, the reconstructed signal consists of the denoised data segments and the identified useful signal segments. We conducted the simulation experiments and algorithm evaluation on the EMTF data, simulated data and measured sites. The results indicate that the RCMDE can improve the stability of multiscale dispersion entropy (MDE) and multiscale entropy (MSE) by analyzing the characteristics of the signal samples library, effectively dividing MT signals and noise. Compared with the existing techniques of the entire time domain de-noising and signal-noise identification, the proposed method used RCMDE and OMP as characteristic parameter and noise separation, simplified the multi-features fusion, and improved the accuracy of signal-noise identification. Moreover, the de-noising efficiency has accelerated, and the MT data quality of low-frequency band has improved greatly.