High temperature superconductivity

SUPERCONDUCTIVITY is the ability of certain materials to conduct electric current with no resistance and extremely low losses. This ability to carry large amounts of currents can be applied to electric power devices such as motors and generators and to electricity transmission in power lines. For example, superconductors can carry as much as 100 times the electricity ordinary copper or aluminium wires of same size.

Scientists had been intrigued with the concept of superconductivity since its discovery in the early 1900’s, but the extreme low temperature the phenomenon required was a barrier to practical and low cost application. This all changed in 1986 when a new class of ceramic super conductors were discovered that ‘SUPERCONDUCTED’ at higher temperatures. The science of high temperature superconductivity (HTS) was born, and Along with it came the prospect for an elegant technology that promises to ‘supercharge’ the way energy is generated, delivered and used.

At the heart of high temperature superconductivity lies a promise for the near future. A promise for transmitting and using electricity with near perfect efficiency and much higher capacity, besides all this it also has a wide range of application like MRI scanning, maglev trains etc. This seminar shall discuss on the concepts of superconductivity, its classifications, its various properties and its applications.

‘We have completed the first electrical century ushered in by Thomas Edison . We are now entering a second electrical century, ushered in by High Temperature Superconductivity.’

E-paper

E-paper is a revolutionary material that can be used to make next generation electronic displays. It is portable reusable storage and display medium that look like paper but can be repeatedly written one thousands of times. These displays make the beginning of a new area for battery power information applications such as cell phones, pagers, watches and hand-held computers etc.

Two companies are carrying our pioneering works in the field of development of electronic ink and both have developed ingenious methods to produce electronic ink. One is E-ink, a company based at Cambridge, in U.S.A. The other company is Xerox doing research work at the Xerox’s palo Atto Research Centre. Both technologies being developed commercially for electronically configurable paper like displays rely on microscopic beads that change colour in response to the charges on nearby electrodes.

Like traditional paper, E-paper must be lightweight, flexible, glare free and low cost. Research found that in just few years this technology could replace paper in many situations and leading us ink a truly paperless world.

Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM)

Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is a fiber-optic transmission technique. It involves the process of multiplexing many different wavelength signals onto a single fiber. So each fiber have a set of parallel optical channels each using slightly different light wavelengths. It employs light wavelengths to transmit data parallel-by-bit or serial-by-character. DWDM is a very crucial component of optical networks that will allow the transmission of data: voice, video-IP, ATM and SONET/SDH respectively, over the optical layer.

From both technical and economic perspectives, the ability to provide potentially unlimited transmission capacity is the most obvious advantage of DWDM technology. The current investment in fiber plant can not only be preserved, but also optimized by a factor of at least 32. As demands change, more capacity can be added, either by simple equipment upgrades or by increasing the number of lambda’s on the fiber, without expensive upgrades. Bandwidth aside, DWDM’s technical advantages are transparency, scalability and dynamic provisioning.

DIGITALWATERMARKING

The growth of high speed computer networks has explored means of new business, scientific, entertainment, and social opportunities. Digital media offer several distinct advantages over analog media, such as high quality, easy editing, high fidelity copying. The ease by which digital information can be duplicated and distributed has led to the need for effective copyright protection tools. Various software products have been recently introduced in attempt to address these growing concerns. It is done by hiding data within digital audio, images and video files. One way such data hiding is copyright label or digital watermark that completely characterizes the person who applies it and, therefore, marks it as being his intellectual property. Digital Watermarking is the process that embeds data called a watermark into a multimedia object such that watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the object. Watermarking is either visible or invisible. Although visible and invisible are visual terms watermarking is not limited to images, it can also be used to protect other types of multimedia object.

Surround-sound systems

Sound, one of the five senses, plays an important role in entertainment especially in the movie industry. With the advances made in special effects and the film projection techniques, the need for better sound technologies was felt. the necessitated the development of the surround sound system capable of giving a feeling of “Being there”. The advent of digital signal processing added momentum to efforts in this direction, resulting in the evolution of digital surround sound systems. In this seminar I cover the history of surround sound, existing technologies, and present digital surround sound technology. Finally a comparison is provided as well as a look into the future.