Comparison of COSMIC Radio Occultation Refractivity Profiles with Radiosonde Measurements

In recent years, radio occultation （RO） technology making use of global positioning system （GPS） signals has been exploited to obtain profiles of atmospheric parameters in the neutral atmosphere. In this paper, the RO refractivity profiles obtained from the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate （COSMIC） mission are statistically compared with the observations of 38 radiosonde stations provided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology during the period from 15 July 2006 through 15 July 2007. Different collocation criteria are compared at first, and COSMIC RO soundings that occur within 3 hours and 300 km of radiosonde measurements are used for the final statistical comparison. The overall results show that the agreements between the COSMIC refractivity profiles and the radiosonde soundings from the 38 stations are very good at 0-30 km altitude, with mean absolute relative refractivity deviations of less than 0.5%. Latitudinal comparisons indicate that there are negative refractivity deviations in the lower troposphere over the low latitude and middle latitude regions and large standard deviations exist in the lower troposphere of low latitude regions, which can reach up to ～6%. The comparisons of COSMIC RO refractivity profiles and radiosonde observations for 3 polar stations in four different seasons indicate that the accuracy of GPS RO profiles is better in the Austral summer and autumn than in the Austral spring and winter during the year from September 2006 to August 2007.

TOPSIS based Taguchi design optimization for CVD growth of graphene using different carbon sources: Graphene thickness, defectiveness and homogeneity

Chemical inhomogeneity of chemical vapor deposition(CVD) grown graphene compromises its usage in highperformance devices. In this study, TOPSIS based Taguchi optimization was performed to improve thickness uniformity and defect density of CVD grown graphene. 1.56% decrease in the mean 2 D/G intensity ratio, 87.96% improvement in the mean D/G intensity ratio, 56.07% improvement in the standard deviation D/G intensity ratio, 25.21%improvement in the standard deviation 2 D/G intensity ratio, and 69.32% improvement in the surface roughness were achieved with TOPSIS based Taguchi optimization. The statistical differences between the copper and silicon substrates have been found significantly in terms of their impacts on the graphene's properties with the0.000 p-value for the mean D/G intensity ratio and with the 0.009 p-value for the mean 2 D/G intensity ratio, respectively. Graphene having 11% lower mean D/G intensity ratio(low defective graphene products) compared to the values given in the literature using single-response optimization was obtained using multi-response optimization.

Viscoelastic Models for Passive Arterial Wall Dynamics

This paper compares two models predicting elastic and viscoelastic properties of large arteries.Models compared include a Kelvin(standard linear)model and an extended 2-term exponential linear viscoelastic model.Models were validated against in-vitro data from the ovine thoracic descending aorta and the carotid artery.Measurements of blood pressure data were used as an input to predict vessel cross-sectional area.Material properties were predicted by estimating a set of model parameters that minimize the difference between computed and measured values of the cross-sectional area.The model comparison was carried out using generalized analysis of variance type statistical tests.For the thoracic descending aorta,results suggest that the extended 2-term exponential model does not improve the ability to predict the observed cross-sectional area data,while for the carotid artery the extended model does statistically provide an improved fit to the data.This is in agreement with the fact that the aorta displays more complex nonlinear viscoelastic dynamics,while the stiffer carotid artery mainly displays simpler linear viscoelastic dynamics.