In this paper we employ the phenomenon of bending deformation induced transport of cations via the polymer chains in the thickness direction of an electro-active polymer (EAP)-metal composite thin film for mechanical energy harvesting. While EAPs have been applied in the past in actuators and artificial muscles, promising applications of such materials in hydrodynamic and vibratory energy harvesting are reported in this paper. For this, functionalization of EAPs with metal electrodes is the key factor in improving the energy harvesting efficiency. Unlike Pt-based electrodes, Ag-based electrodes have been deposited on an EAP membrane made of Nafion. The developed ionic metal polymer composite (IPMC) membrane is subjected to a dynamic bending load, hydrodynamically, and evaluated for the voltage generated against an external electrical load. An increase of a few orders of magnitude has been observed in the harvested energy density and power density in air, deionized water and in electrolyte solutions with varying concentrations of sodium chloride (NaCl) as compared to Pt-based IPMC performances reported in the published literature. This will have potential applications in hydrodynamic and residual environmental energy harvesting to power sensors and actuators based on micro-and nano-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS) for biomedical, aerospace and oceanic applications.
The document images that are fed into an Optical Character Recognition system, might be skewed. This could be due to improper feeding of the document into the scanner or may be due to a faulty scanner. In this paper, we propose a skew detection and correction method for document images. We make use of the inherent randomness in the Horizontal Projection profiles of a text block image, as the skew of the image varies. The proposed algorithm has proved to be very robust and time efficient. The entire process takes less than a second on a 2.4 GHz Pentium IV PC.
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