Liquid crystal lens with four driving voltages and its applications in imaging system with rectangular aperture

Liquid crystal lens has the characteristic of variable focal length. Many studies have demonstrated that electronically controlled focusing without mechanical movements can be realized by using liquid crystal lenses in imaging system. In this paper, a four-electrodes liquid crystal lens with a rectangular aperture is applied to focus. The aperture’s aspect ratio of the liquid crystal lens can be designed arbitrarily so that installing it with the periscope lens in phones becomes possible.

A Pioneer Study on a Non-invasive Method for in Ovo Chicken Egg Sexing.

Background: Day-old male chicks culling is one of the world most inhumane problems in the poultry industry. Every year, seven billions of male chicks are being killed in laying-hen hatcheries, due to their higher feed exchange rate, lower management compare to female ones and production costs. This work reports a novel non-invasive method for the gender identification of chicken eggs. Four electrodes were attached onto each egg during the incubation process for the data gathering period of fourteen days. Standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based chicken gender determination protocol was applied to the eggs on the last day of the incubation process to get the gender information. Result: A relationship between the collected data and the gender of the egg was built, and it was found to have a reliable connection, indicating that by measure the impedance data of the eggs from day 9 of incubation with the four electrodes setting and applying the self-normalization technique, we can determine the chicken egg gender.Conclusion: This is a pioneer founding, proving that impedance spectroscopy can be use to sexing of chicken eggs, before its life has been formed, relieving the poultry industry from such an ethical burden.

MEMS-Based Electrochemical Seismometer with a Sensing Unit Integrating Four Electrodes

This paper presents a new process to fabricate a sensing unit of electrochemical seismometers using only one silicon–glass–silicon bonded wafer. By integrating four electrodes on one silicon–glass–silicon bonded wafer, the consistency of the developed sensing unit was greatly improved, benefiting from the high alignment accuracy. Parameter designs and simulations were carried out based on this sensing unit, which indicated that the sensitivities of the developed electrochemical seismometer decreased with the decrease in the number of flow holes in the sensing unit, and the initial stabilization time decreased gradually with the decrease in the thickness of the glass layer. Based on experimental results of four devices, the peak sensitivity was quantified as 5345.45 ± 43.78 V/(m/s) at 2 Hz, which proved high consistency of the fabricated electrochemical seismometer. In terms of the responses to random ground motions, high consistencies between the developed electrochemical seismometer and the commercial counterpart of CME6011 (R-sensors, Moscow, Russia) were found, where the developed electrochemical seismometer produced comparable noise levels to those of CME6011. These results validated the performance of the device and it may function as an effective tool for a variety of applications.

Development of a two-dimensional piezoelectric traveling-wave generator

In this article, we present a new method to control the direction of traveling waves in either an x-direction or y-direction on a two-dimensional square plate. The core structure was composed of a piezoelectric serial bimorph with four electrodes. Each electrode was spatially designed to activate one of the bending modes and which included the ability to reduce adjacent modes and minimize interference. Our new method differs from other reported methods in that the four electrodes were driven at designated resonant frequencies. In our wave generator, different driving amplitudes and phases were applied to induce the traveling waves to propagate in a specific direction. To design the directional movement and to better understand the pattern of induced traveling waves, an analytical solution was derived to assist in the design of the four driving electrodes. Using our newly developed analytical method, traveling waves can be controlled to travel in either the x-direction or y-direction using two different sets of electrodes, where each electrode can be driven at a specific but different bending mode. We found that both the voltage ratio and phase difference between the two driving electrodes are important factors for optimization.

A new system for measuring electrical conductivity of water as a function of admittance

This paper presents a new system for measuring water conductivity as a function of electrophysical property (admittance). The system is cheap and its manufacturing is easy. In addition, it does not require any sort of electrolysis and calibration. The system consists of four electrodes made of silver (Ag 92.5 g to Cu 7.5 g) fixed in a plastic tube filled by water which allows the use of two and four electrode setups. The admittance (reciprocal of impedance) was measured for different water sources (distilled, rainfall, mineral, river and tap water) using different frequencies between 50 Hz and 100 kHz. These measurements were taken twice, first with four electrodes and then with two electrodes of two modes (inner and outer electrodes). The results showed good correlation between the measured admittance and the conductivity of all the water sources and the best correlation was found at low frequencies between 50 Hz and 20 kHz. The highest efficiency can be achieved by using the four electrode system which allows circumventing the effect of the electrode impedance. This result makes the system efficient compared to traditional conductivity meters which usually require high frequencies for good operation.