Vanliga arkoffsetfärger innehåller pigment, trioglycerid, mineraloljor eller vegetabiliska oljor, naturliga hartser, alkyder och tillsatser såsom torkmedel, antioxidanter och vaxer.Tryckfärger för olika ändamål torkar genom skilda processer. Arkoffsetfärger torkar i två steg. Först sker oljeabsorption och sedan sker en kombination av oxidation och polymerisation. I detta steg är det bindemedlet och oljorna som förlorar dubbelbindningar, kortare molekyler reagerar och bildar längre molekylkedjor, vilket resulterar i att färgen torkar. Den kemiska torkningen initieras av luftens syre. Tryckfärgers torkningsförlopp tar alltför lång tid och detta arbete avsåg att genom GRT-utvärdering utvärdera hur temperatur, tillgång av syre och fuktvattenhållningen i tryckpressen påverkar torktiden för tre olika papperskvaliteter.Examensarbetet visade att temperaturen påverkar torktiden mycket. En ökning från 23 ºC till 40 ºC minskade torktiden med upp till en tredjedel. För att syret ska reducera torktiden måste tillgången vara stor. Endast ökning av sprutpulvrets grovlek gav inget utslag, men torkning vid fritt lufttillträde minskade torktiden till en sjättedel jämfört med torkning i stapel. För att torkningen inte ska ta onödigt lång tid ska fuktvattennivån i pressen vara låg.

Papers are coated in order to improve the properties of the surface, to improve printability and to include new functionalities like barriers properties. Typical coating formulation contains a high number of components, some are made from minerals and others are manufactured from petroleum. The barrier properties of today's paper based packages are plastics and/or aluminum             foil. Environmentally friendly substitutie of these nonrenewable materials are needed.  Nanocellulose is a promising material                 and of a growing interest as an alternative to petroleum-based materials, since nanocellulose films/coatings have been shown to have excellent mechanical and barrier properties.   This project aimed to evaluate nanocellulose in combination with minerals in paper coatings. The project had two approaches. One was to evaluate the barrier properties of MFC coatings with mineral included. The second part was about coatings for           printing matters, and evaluation of the possibility to replace petroleum-based binders in the coating color with MFC. Barrier properties were evaluated by measuring the air permeability of the coatings. The properties of the coating affecting the         printability in offset printing examined was the surface energy, the gloss, the roughness of the coatings, the strength and the offset ink setting.   Carboxymethylated nanocellulose formed denser films and had superior barrier properties compared with enzymatically pretreated nanocellulose. Adding of minerals did not affect the barrier properties of the MFC coatings to a significant extent.         Therefore, minerals cannot be added to enhance the barrier but it can be added to reduce the cost of the coating process without losing any barrier properties.                                 The print quality depends on how the ink interacts with the coating. These coatings did have a relatively high surface energy, which is preferable for printing with waterborne ink. It was also shown that the absorption abilities increased when the amount of MFC was increased. However, offset printing demands high surface strength and addition of MFC in the coating color                     drastically decreased the strength. This means that the coatings produced in this work are not strong enough and thereby not           suitable for offset printing. However other printing technologies put lower demand on surface strength and are still possible.

The goal of this final year project is to investigate various techniques to up-convert a baseband signal into radio frequency signals, and to investigate the practical problems encountered in an offset phase locked loop design by implementation. Phase locked loops are commonly used in radio transmitters and receivers to generate accurate RF signals from a low-frequency reference. This thesis will highlight some of the problems and strengths of various up-conversion schemes, and suggest an offset-PLL architecture free from many of those problems. An offset-PLL is often used in mobile communication systems where the required levels of out of band transmission are tough and the use of superheterodyne up-conversion cannot be used due to spectrum or bandwidth requirements. However a drawback of an offset-PLL is the high locking time; this can render the offset-PLL useless in TDMA communication systems. This problem among others has been studied theoretically as well as practically on an actual implementation of an offset-PLL for mobile communications. The offset-PLL was designed and manufactured as part of this project.

A tool path generation method for sculptured surfaces defined by triangular meshes is presented in this thesis along with an algorithm that helps determine the best type of cutter geometry to machine a specific surface. Existing tool path planning methods for sculptured surfaces defined by triangular meshes require extensive computer processing power and result in long processing times mainly since surface topology for triangular meshes is not provided. The method presented in this thesis avoids this problem by offsetting each triangular facet individually. The combination of all the individual offsets make up a cutter location surface. A single triangle offsetting results in many more triangles; many of these are redundant, increasing the time required for data handling in subsequent steps. To avoid the large number of triangles, the proposed method creates a bounding space to which the offset surface is limited. The original surface mesh describes the bounding surface of a solid, thus it is continuous with no gaps. Therefore, the resulting bounding spaces are also continuous and without gaps. Applying the boundary space limits the size of the offset surface resulting in a reduction in the number of triangular surfaces generated. The offset surface generation may result in unwanted intersecting triangles. The tool path planning strategy addresses this issue by applying hidden-surface removal algorithms. The cutter locations from the offset surface are obtained using the depth buffer. The simulation and machining results show that the tool paths generated by this process are correct. Furthermore, the time required to generate tool paths is less than the time required by other methods. The second part of this thesis presents a method for selecting an optimal cutter type. Extensive research has been carried out to determine the best cutter size for a given machining operation. However, cutter type selection has not been studied in-depth. This work presents a method for selecting the best cutter type based on the amount of material removed. By comparing the amount of material removed by two cutters at a given cutter location the best cutter can be selected. The results show that the optimal cutter is highly dependent on the surface geometry. For most complex surfaces it was found that a combination of cutters provides the best results.

The recent advance in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has been largely embraced by the communication industry, which views this technology as an effective and economical alternative to the design of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). The primary reasons for switching to FPGAs are lower development and non-recurring engineering costs, the flexibility to design to a preliminary standard and adapt the design as the standard evolves, as well as the option of performing software updates in the field.<p> A sector with strong interest in FPGAs is the coaxial cable TV/Internet distribution industry. The creation of soft preliminary standards by the standards organization governing the industry has been the main catalyst for the massive adoption of FPGAs by small to medium size companies, which see this technology as an opportunity to compete in this open market.<p> Both the circuit speed and the economy of FPGA technology depend upon using algorithms that map efficiently into its fabric. Often it is prudent to sacrifice performance to improve either clock speed or economy when developing with FPGAs. The purpose of this research is to both revise and devise synchronization algorithms / structures for cable digital receivers that are to be implemented in FPGA. <p> The main communication scheme used by the coaxial cable distribution industry is digital Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). The problem of synchronizing to the QAM signal in the receiver is not a new topic and several synchronization-related circuits, which were devised with ASICs implementation in mind, can be found in the open literature. Of interest in this thesis is the non-data-aided digital timing synchronizer that was proposed by D'Andrea to recover timing with no knowledge of the transmitted data. Accurate timing estimation was achieved by reshaping the received signal with a prefilter prior to estimating the timing. <p> A problem with D'Andrea's synchronizer is that the prefilter for reshaping the signal is a relatively long Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter, whose implementation requires a large number of multipliers. This may not have been an issue with ASICs in as much as the number of hardwired multipliers on a chip is not limited as it is in an FPGA chip. One contribution in this research is to propose an alternative to D'Andrea's synchronizer by replacing the long FIR filter with two single-pole Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters that are directly placed inside the timing recovery loop. This novel architecture, which drastically reduces the number of multipliers, is well suited for FPGA implementation.<p> Non-data-aided feedforward synchronizers, which use the same prefilter as D'Andrea's synchronizer, have been receiving significant attention in recent years. Detailed performance analysis for these synchronizers can be found in the open literature. These synchronizers have the advantage of using a feedfordward structure rather than a feedback structure, as it is the case in D'Andrea's synchronizer, to estimate the timing. While D'Andrea's synchronizer has an advantage in performance over a non-data-aided feedforward synchronizer, this has not been reported in the literature. In this thesis a second contribution consists of thoroughly analyzing the steady state timing jitter in D'Andrea synchronizer by deriving a closed-form expression for the noise power spectrum and a simple equation to estimate the timing jitter variance. <p> A third contribution is a novel low-complexity and fast acquisition coherent detector for the detection of Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) (i.e., 4-QAM) symbols. This detector performs carrier phase synchronization much faster than a conventional coherent detector. The acquisition time is comparable to that of a differential detector. The fast acquisition comes at the expense of phase jitter, and the end result is a 1 dB performance loss over theoretical coherent detection. This detector can be used in place of the differential detector with no economic penalty. Doing so yields a performance advantage of about 2 dB over differential detection.

Switching power converters are an indispensable part of every battery-operated consumer electronic product, nourishing regulated voltages to various subsystems. In these circuits, sensing the inductor current is not only necessary for protection and control but also is critical to be done in a lossless and accurate fashion for state-of-the-art advanced control techniques, which are devised to optimize transient response, increase the efficiency over a wide range of loads, eliminate off-chip compensation networks, and integrate the power inductor. However, unavailability of a universal, integrable, lossless, and accurate current-sensing technique impedes the realization of those advanced techniques and limit their applications. Unfortunately, use of a conventional series sense resistor is not recommended in high-performance, high-power switching regulators where more than 90% efficiency is required because of their high current levels. A handful of lossless current-sensing techniques are available but their accuracies are significantly lower than the traditional sense resistor scheme. Among available lossless but not accurate techniques, an off-chip, filter-based method that uses a tuned filter across the inductor to estimate current flow and its accuracy is dependent on the inductance and its equivalent series resistance (ESR) was selected for improvement because of its inherent continuous and low-noise operation. A schemes is proposed to adapt the filter technique for integration by automatically adjusting bandwidth and gain of an on-chip programmable gm-C filter to the off-chip power inductor during the system start-up through measuring the inductance and its ESR with on-chip generated test currents. The IC prototype in AMI s 0.5-um CMOS process achieved overall DC and AC gain errors of 8% and 9%, respectively, at 0.8 A DC load and 0.2 A ripple currents for inductors from 4 uH-14 uH and ESR from 48 mOhm to 384 mOhm when lossless, state-of-the-art schemes achieve 20 40% error and only when the nominal specifications of power component (power MOSFET or inductor) are known. Moreover, the proposed circuit improved the efficiency of a test bed current-mode controlled switching regulator by more than 2.6% at 0.8 A load compared to the traditional sense resistor technique with a 50 mOhm sense resistor.

In this thesis, we study the scattering problem of a vertically offset dielectric slab waveguide, using continuous radiation modes. The calculation of radiation modes of an arbitrarily layered waveguide has been thoroughly investigated in the literature. Most approaches were based on launching two incident waves: one from above and one from below, resulting in two transmitted waves and two reflected waves. Radiation modes were obtained by algebraic adjustments of each incident wave¡¦s amplitude and phase. These radiation modes formed standing waves in both the substrates and superstrates. This implies that walls are located an infinite distance far from the first and the last interfaces. In addition to physical conflicts of simultaneous existence of the incident wave and the walls, the derivation details are complicated and non-intuitive. In our thesis, with a given propagation constant for an arbitrarily layered dielectric waveguide, we propose an intuitive method to obtain two independent radiation mode solutions. We also construct a specific procedure to orthogonalize and normalize these two radiation modes. The second part of this thesis is focused on applying these radiation modes into a customized coupled transverse mode integral equation formulation (CTMIE), to the study of vertically offset slab waveguides. CTMIE requires two artificial boundaries placed in the substrate and superstrate. We choose to compute discretized radiation modes with the periodic boundary conditions. Under these circumstances, modes correspond to different spatial frequencies and thereby do not inter-couple. This means the matrix of the overlap integral between these two groups of modes (slightly vertically shifted) are block-diagonally dominated. The off-diagonal elements are two orders of magnitude smaller than the diagonal ones. As a result, when the two artificial boundaries are pushed towards infinity in the CTMIE formulation, we may obtain an exact inverse of the Greene¡¦s matrix without relying on numerical inversion.

This paper presents a novel power management analysis method to reduce the power consumption for the non-contact vital sign sensor. The sensor consisting of the class-E power amplifier (PA), low noise amplifier (LNA), single pole double through (SPDT) switch, and circularly polarized antenna (CPA) is integrated on the Flame Retardant Class 4 (FR-4) epoxy-glass laminate substrate. The appropriate pulse width and pulse period are determined to decrease the power consumption and accurately detect the human physiological signals (respiration and heartbeat). A simple direct down-conversion architecture with a tunable phase shifter is utilized to eliminate the null detection point and the direct current (DC) offset. The overall power consumption of the proposed sensor with the novel power management technique is only 40 % of the conventional system with the DC bias, which can be utilized for the green energy application.

The instrumentation amplifier (IA) is one of the crucial blocks in an electrocardiogram recording system. It is the first block in the analog front-end chain that processes the ECG signal from the human body and thus it defines some of the most important specifications of the ECG system like the noise and common mode rejection ratio (CMRR). The extremely low ECG signal bandwidth also makes it difficult to achieve a fully integrated system. In this thesis, a fully integrated IA topology is presented that achieves low noise levels and low power dissipation. The chopper stabilized technique is implemented together with an AC coupled amplifier to reduce the effect of flicker noise while eliminating the effect of the differential electrode offset (DEO). An ultra low power operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) is the only active power consuming block in the IA and so an overall low power consumption is achieved. A new implementation of a large resistor using the T-network is presented which makes it easy to achieve a fully integrated solution. The proposed IA operates on a 2V supply and consumes a total current of 1.4µA while achieving an integrated noise of 1.2µVrms within the bandwidth. The proposed IA will relax the power and noise requirements of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that immediately follows it in the signal chain and thus reduce the cost and increase the lifetime of the recording device. The proposed IA has been implemented in the ONSEMI 0.5µm CMOS technology.

In this thesis, the problem of multiple access interference (MAI) suppression for the multi-carrier (MC) code division multiple access (CDMA) system, based on the wavelet-based (WB) multi-carrier modulation, associated with the combining process is investigated for Rayleigh fading channel. The main concern of this thesis is to derive a new scheme, based on the linearly constrained constant modulus (LCCM) criterion with the robust inverse QR decomposition (IQRD) recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm to improve the performance of the conventional MC-CDMA system with combining process. To verify the merits of the new algorithm, the effect due to imperfect channel parameters estimation and frequency offset are investigated. We show that the proposed robust LCCM IQRD-RLS algorithm outperforms the conventional LCCM-gradient algorithm [6], in terms of output SINR, improvement percentage index (IPI), and bit error rate (BER) for MAI suppression under channel mismatch environment. Also, the performance of the WB MC-CDMA system is superior to the one with conventional MC-CDMA system. It is more robust to the channel mismatch and frequency offset. Moreover, the WB MC-CDMA system with robust LCCM IQRD-RLS algorithm does have better performance over other conventional approaches, such as the LCCM-gradient algorithm, maximum ratio combining (MRC), blind adaptation algorithm and partitioned linear interference canceller (PLIC) approach with LMS algorithm, in terms of the capability of MAI suppression and bit error rate (BER).