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Disease discrimination using an electronic nose is achieved by measuring the presence of a specific gas contained in the exhaled breath of patients. Many studies have reported the presence of acetone in the breath of diabetic patients. These studies suggest that acetone can be used as a biomarker of diabetes, enabling diagnoses to be made by measuring acetone levels in exhaled breath. In this study, we perform a chemical sensor array optimization to improve the performance of an electronic nose system using Wilks’ lambda, sensor selection based on a principal component (B4), and a stepwise elimination (SE) technique to detect the presence of acetone gas in human breath. By applying five different temperatures to four sensors fabricated from different synthetic materials, a total of 20 sensing combinations are created, and three sensing combinations are selected for the sensor array using optimization techniques. The measurements and analyses of the exhaled breath using the electronic nose system together with the optimized sensor array show that diabetic patients and control groups can be easily differentiated. The results are confirmed using principal component analysis (PCA).

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Home Gateway (HG) is a device that connects multiple home network devices to an access network.The HG is to be always in operating state for providing any requested digital home services without suspension and user's waiting because these services can be started at any time, by any device and from any network. Furthermore, most home network devices are also required to be ready to operate at any time in the digital home environment. We call this characterized digital home network by 'Always-On home network'. The characteristic of the 'Always-On' in home network environment gives rise to consume more electrical power.In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to reduce the power consumed by a HG and the architecture to implement the proposed HG. The proposed scheme uses sleep and wake-up mechanism based on existence of real data traffic for user service. In the proposed scheme, almost hardware components of the HG are working, power-on, only in the period that some user service traffic is in the proposed HG; wake-up state or normal stat. On the other hand, some hardware components such as Network Protocol Agent (NPA) with low power consumption are working in the period of no user service traffic. The NPA controls these sleep and wake-up for the proposed HG with cooperating with CPU.

An ultrasonic nanocrystal surface modification (UNSM) technique was applied to the thermally sprayed yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) ceramic thermal barrier coating (TBC) deposited onto a hot tool steel substrate to improve the mechanical and tribological properties. The surface microstructure of the as-sprayed and UNSM-treated coatings was examined using a scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and Raman spectroscopy, while the hardness of the coatings was measured by Vicker`s hardness tester. The friction and wear behavior of the coatings was assessed using a ball-on-disk tribometer against bearing steel (SAE52100) ball at temperatures of 25 °C and 200 °C under dry reciprocating conditions. Results showed that the UNSM-treated coating had smoother surface, lower friction and higher resistance to wear compared to that of the as-sprayed coating. It was found that hybrid use of thermal spray coating (TSC) and UNSM technique is meaningful to bring together synergy effect of two emerging surface technologies.

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