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Seit der Saison 2014 veröffentlichen wir alle 4 Monate unseren Newsletter "Werkstattgeflüster", der unseren Unterstützern, Förderern und Freunden gleichermaßen einen Einblick in unser Projekt geben soll. Über die Saison verteilt möchten wir so verstärkt über die Events und unsere Zusammenarbeit mit unseren Sponsoren berichten und unseren Mitgliedern die Chance geben, Ihre Arbeit im Team vorzustellen.

Die theoretische Regelungstechnik beschäftigt sich mit der Entwicklung interdisziplinär anwendbarer Methoden, während die praktische Regelungstechnik schwerpunktmäßig den Einsatz sol­cher Verfahren zum Ziel hat. Hierbei kommen jeweils Erkenntnisse angrenzender Wis­sensgebiete wie der Informatik, der Physik, der Ma­thematik etc. zum Tragen. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung gelten­der Regelwerke behandelt das vorliegende Buch vorwiegend praktische Aspekte, wo­bei die Theorie als unverzichtbares Handwerkszeug in ihren Grundzügen dargestellt wird.

High peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of a transmitted signal is one of the major drawbacks of the complex wavelet packet modulation (CWPM) as usual in any multicarrier communication system. Utilizing the advantage of concentrating the energy to certain subspaces of the discrete wavelet transform, many PAPR reduction techniques are proposed to solve this problem like threshold and clipping methods. In this paper a novel hybrid PAPR reduction method for CWPM called Threshold-Clipping (TC) method has been proposed. The simulation results in Rayleigh multipath fading channel show that the proposed scheme has achieved 4.5 dB and 3 dB reduction in PAPR over the traditional threshold and clipping methods respectively with less than 0.5 dB degradation in bit error probability.

In this paper, the performance evaluation of Frequency Modulated Chaotic On-Off Keying (FM-COOK) in AWGN, Rayleigh and Rician fading channels is given. The simulation results show that an improvement in BER can be gained by incorporating the FM modulation with COOK for SNR values less than 10dB in AWGN case and less than 6dB for Rayleigh and Rician fading channels.

The main requirements of efficient steganographic systems are transparency, robustness and security. In this work, the proposed system is designed to achieve these requirements, as follows: to increase the transparency and robustness, the proposed system uses the transform domain technique, in this case the wavelet domain technique to embed the color secret image into the color cover image. To achieve high security, chaotic systems are used to accomplish the following two purposes: firstly to scramble the secret color image before hiding it into the color cover image, secondly to randomly select the embedding positions in the cover image. Three chaotic systems with many combinations are used for the scrambling and the embedding process. Experimental results including Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Correlation, Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and embedding capacity demonstrate that the proposed system has good performance as compared with other existing methods without attack and under different types of attacks such as filtering and noise attacks. Simulation results show that the combination of chaotic systems providing the best performance include the use of Logistic and Hénon maps for the embedding process and Arnold's cat map for the encryption process. The MSE, PSNR, correlation, SNR and embedding capacity obtained in this case reach up to 0.0010, 78.1dB, 0.9999, 67.2dB and 0.39% respectively when the secret image is Airplane with 32×32 pixels and the cover image is Girl with 512×512 pixels. For the extracted secret image, the chaotic system set that provides the best performance includes the use of Arnold's cat map for the encryption process. The MSE, PSNR, correlation and SNR obtained in this case reach up to 0.0846, 58.9dB, 1 and 56.1dB respectively. As compared with other methods, the proposed method achieves gains without any attack of 8.2dB for the stego image and 32.4dB for the extracted secret image in PSNR when the secret image is Airplane with 256×256 pixels and the cover image is Girl with 512×512 pixels.

Since power dissipation is becoming a significant issue and requiring more consideration in the early design stage, circuit designers must now be experienced in low-power techniques to enhance designing digital systems. Therefore, when teaching low-power design techniques in electrical and computer engineering education, a tool or a method must be made available that enables students to estimate the power dissipation of their digital circuits during the design process. This contribution presents a novel approach, the low-power design remote laboratory system that has been developed at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences to estimate the power dissipation of a digital circuit remotely via the internet using physical instruments and providing real data. The design takes place at abstraction level and the real data is measured at the low level from the hardware devices. The low level provides more information, which is required for accurately measured values that are hidden at the high level. The technical performance results on using the remote system show that the students are enabled to implement their digital design and to meet the performance targets of reliability as well as to observe almost all influencing factors on the design’s power dissipation.

This paper investigates how learning objectives can be complemented by employing a remote system to improve teaching low-power digital circuits design. The low-power design laboratory system that has been developed at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences is composed of two laboratory types: the on-site (hands-on) and the remote laboratories to teach low-power techniques with laboratory exercises. This laboratory system enables online experiments that can be performed using physical instruments and obtaining real data. Digital circuit designers can observe the most influential factors in power dissipation during laboratory exercises in the on-site system and then use the remote laboratory to supplement investigating other factors. This contribution describes teaching activities performed during the Summer Semester 2015 using only the on-site system, and during the Summer Semester 2016 using the on-site and the remote systems. The assessment studies the achieved learning objectives, evaluates the laboratory reports with and without the support of the remote system, and analyses the students' use of the remote system. The assessment and the students' opinions provide positive feedback on this approach and verify that the remote laboratory system is a successful and effective complementary learning tool for remotely reusing the on-site laboratory and achieving additional learning objectives that cover most conceptual theories in low-power digital circuits design.

Very large arrays of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) have the potential to revolutionize ground and space based astronomy. They can offer in excess of 10.000 pixels with large dynamic range and very high sensitivity in combination with very efficient frequency division multiplexing at GHz frequencies. In this paper we present the development of a 400 pixel MKID demonstration array, including optical coupling, sensitivity measurements, beam pattern measurements and readout. The design presented can be scaled to any frequency between 80 GHz and >5 THz because there is no need for superconducting structures that become lossy at frequencies above the gap frequency of the materials used. The latter would limit the frequency coverage to below 1 THz for relatively high gap materials such as NbTiN. An individual pixels of the array consist of a distributed Aluminium CPW MKID with an integrated twin slot antenna at its end. The antenna is placed in the in the second focus of an elliptical high purity Si lens. The lens-antenna coupling design allows room for the MKID resonator outside of the focal point of the lens. The best dark noise equivalent power of these devices is measured to be NEP = 7×10-19 W/[square root]Hz and the optical coupling efficiency is around 30%, in which no antireflection coating was used on the Si lens. For the readout we use a commercial arbitrary waveform generator and a 1.5 GHz FFTS. We show that using this concept it is possible to read out in excess of 400 pixels with 1 board and 1 pair of coaxial cables.

Salts and proteins comprise two of the basic molecular components of biological materials. Kosmotropic/chaotropic co-solvation and matching ion water affinities explain basic ionic effects on protein aggregation observed in simple solutions. However, it is unclear how these theories apply to proteins in complex biological environments and what the underlying ionic binding patterns are. Using the positive ion Ca2+ and the negatively charged membrane protein SNAP25, we studied ion effects on protein oligomerization in solution, in native membranes and in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We find that concentration-dependent ion-induced protein oligomerization is a fundamental chemico-physical principle applying not only to soluble but also to membrane-anchored proteins in their native environment. Oligomerization is driven by the interaction of Ca2+ ions with the carboxylate groups of aspartate and glutamate. From low up to middle concentrations, salt bridges between Ca2+ ions and two or more protein residues lead to increasingly larger oligomers, while at high concentrations oligomers disperse due to overcharging effects. The insights provide a conceptual framework at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology to explain binding of ions to charged protein surfaces on an atomistic scale, as occurring during protein solubilisation, aggregation and oligomerization both in simple solutions and membrane systems.