Composite films have functioned as chemical bending actuators, where stretchable conducting fabrics were joined to both surfaces of ionomer films. This phenomenon shows that a direct metallization of either electroless or electrolytic plating having a metal dendrite formation on the ionomer film is not essential for functioning as actuators. Conducting fabric polymer composite (CFPC) actuators can be easily fabricated by a simple adhesion process using flexible conducting fabrics as electrodes. Due to their excellent contraction and expansion capabilities, gold‐ and copper‐plated knitted fabrics were employed and stably bound to Nafion‐117 film. Au‐CFPC actuators demonstrated a maximum bending displacement of ±2.5 mm at ±2 V. Cu‐CFPC gave a smaller displacement of ±0.7 mm at ±2 V, having no reverse displacement. The method described here is widely applicable, introducing conducting layers on various flexible, stretchable, and polymer substrates. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper proposes an accurate inspection technique of fabric defects in an electromagnetic wave shield mesh of the plasma display panel (PDP-mesh) for automatic detection. The proposed method utilizes two-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and a Gabor filter for accurate detection. The DFT of the whole image enables the user to detect global defects, such as yam density and yam orientation, of the manufactured PDP-mesh. The determined global features can be utilized to design the optimum Gabor filter to detect the local defects such as clogging, yam lack, and yam slippage. Defective areas can be extracted from the output of the Gabor filter by using a variable threshold method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect the defects from scanned PDP-mesh images.

Abstract:Recently, the size of plasma display panels (PDPs) has been increasing, bringing about a need for a mesh cloth that can function as an electromagnetic shielding material for these new, larger PDPs. A cloth which serves as an electromagnetic wave shield for a PDP is known as a PDP-mesh.The purpose of the present research was to propose a method of measuring yarn density and yarn crossover angle in mesh cloth. Although conventional trials of automatic measurement of yarn density in which one dimensional fast Fourier transform (FFT) was applied were carried out, it was difficult to verify the design value of a mesh cloth with a single trial. In the present method, a measured value is provided mathematically by connecting a texture feature of the mesh cloth with a characteristic of two dimensional FFT. PDP-mesh was used as an example of a measuring cloth. The measurement error of the yarn crossover angle with this method was found to be 0.1 degrees; additionally, we show that there is little measurement error of yarn density. Furthermore, the accuracy of the measurements obtained by the present method does not depend on the installation state of the measurement sample.

Highly-efficient fully air-cooled green laser light source with frequency doubling module is reported. As a result, 3.6 watts green laser light generation with about 9% wallplug efficiency is achieved. By using fully air-cooled RGB lasers including the green SHG (Second Harmonic Generation) laser and illumination optics for speckle noise reduction, a laser projection engine is prototyped. A laser rear-projection system with this laser projection engine shows several merits; wide color gamut (133%NTSC), 61inch large screen size, and low electric power consumption (less than 100W, at 650cd/mP 2 P ).