The thermal conductivity of water- and ethylene glycol-based nanofluids containing alumina, zinc-oxide, and titanium-dioxide nanoparticles is measured using the transient hot-wire method. Measurements are performed by varying the particle size and volume fraction, providing a set of consistent experimental data over a wide range of colloidal conditions. Emphasis is placed on the effect of the suspended particle size on the effective thermal conductivity. Also, the effect of laser-pulse irradiation, i.e., the particle size change by laser ablation, is examined for ZnO nanofluids. The results show that the thermal-conductivity enhancement ratio relative to the base fluid increases linearly with decreasing the particle size but no existing empirical or theoretical correlation can explain the behavior. It is also demonstrated that high-power laser irradiation can lead to substantial enhancement in the effective thermal conductivity although only a small fraction of the particles are fragmented.

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Nanosecond pulsed laser irradiation is shown to be effective for cleaning contaminant particles as small as 0.3 μm in diameter from NiP magnetic hard disk substrates. A micron-thick liquid film is deposited on the disk surface just before the laser irradiation. The cleaning threshold and efficiency are investigated for the fundamental and frequency-tripled Nd:YAG laser harmonics (wavelengths λ=1064 and 355 nm). The rapid phase-change and thin liquid film ablation processes are examined in order to elucidate the cleaning mechanism. Optical reflectance and photoacoustic beam deflection probes are employed for monitoring the vaporization threshold and the acoustic transients generated. The plume evolution and acoustic wave propagation into the ambient air are visualized by laser flash photography. A jet composed of vapor and liquid columns/droplets is expelled from the laser-irradiated area. The pressure enhancement accompanying the explosive-vaporization process and the momentum supplied by the ablation plume are the main sources of the augmented cleaning efficiency at moderate laser energy densities.

Multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) has become a promising candidate for next generation broadband wireless communications. However, like a single-input single-output (SISO)-OFDM, one main disadvantage of the MIMO-OFDM is the high peakto-average power ratio (PAPR), which can be reduced by using an amplitude clipping. In this paper, we propose clipped signal reconstruction methods for the MIMO-OFDMs with spatial diversity, such as space-time and space-frequency block codes (STBC/SFBC). The proposed methods are based on the technique called iterative amplitude reconstruction (IAR) for SISO-OFDM. It is shown that the IAR can be easily employed for the STBC-OFDM, but it cannot be directly applied to the SFBC-OFDM, because the transmitted sequences over different antennas are dependent due to the use of space-frequency code. We propose a new SFBC transmitter for clipped OFDM, which has approximately half the computational complexity of conventional SFBC-OFDM. The proposed clipping preserves the orthogonality of transmitted signals, and the clipped signals are iteratively recovered at the receiver. Further, we theoretically analyze the performance of IAR with optimum equalization, and also provide highly accurate channel estimation of the OFDM with amplitude clipping. Simulation results show that the proposed receivers effectively recover contaminated OFDM signals with a moderate computational complexity.Index Terms-Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), amplitude clipping, space-time and space-frequency block code (STBC/SFBC), iterative amplitude reconstruction (IAR).

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