Conoscopic holography (CH) is a non-contact interferometric technique used for surface digitization which presents several advantages over other optical techniques such as laser triangulation. Among others, the ability for the reconstruction of high-sloped surfaces stands out, and so does its lower dependence on surface optical properties. Nevertheless, similarly to other optical systems, adjus...

High-speed waterjet peening technology has attracted a lot of interest and is now being widely studied due to its great ability to strengthen metal surfaces. In order to further improve the mechanical properties of metals, self-excited oscillation pulsed waterjets (SOPWs) were used for surface peening with an experimental investigation focused on the surface topography and properties. By imping...

Introduction: One of the most fundamental pieces of information about any planetary body is the elemental composition of its surface materials. The Viking Martian landers employed XRF (x-ray fluorescence) and the MER rovers are carrying APXS (alpha-proton x-ray spectrometer) instruments upgraded from that used on the Pathfinder rover to supply elemental composition information for soils and roc...

This work proposes an alternative computer control method based upon a standard laser pointer and LCD projector, used to control applications and recognise specific contextual gestures at a significant stand-off distance. The use of a 1-d left-to-right hidden Markov model allows a range of predefined gestures to be identified, and interpreted according to the application being used. Additionall...

a stand-off Raman spectrometer has been developed to make observations of liquid samples within a gas pipeline. The instrument is based on a static Fourier Transform spectrometer. The high etendue offered by the instrument enabled four liquid samples to be measured from a distance of 2.4 m within a gas pipeline. Liquids were identified with depths less than 5 mm demonstrating that the concept i...

Laser ablation of a near-Earth object (NEO) on a collision course with Earth produces a cloud of ejecta that exerts a thrust on the NEO, deflecting it from its original trajectory. Ablation may be performed from afar by illuminating an Earth-targeting asteroid or comet with a stand-off “DE-STAR” system consisting of a large phased-array laser in Earth orbit. Alternatively, a much smaller stand...

We consider the collapse behavior of cavitation bubbles near walls under high ambient pressure conditions. Generic configurations with different stand-off distances are investigated by numerical simulation using a fully compressible two-phase flow solver including phase change. The results show that distance has significant effects on dynamics, micro-jet formation, rebound, and maximum wall pre...

XML annotations are a widely occurring phenomenon in many application fields, and XML databases should be used to store and query such data. To provide intuitive and fast querying of annotations, we make a case for extending XPath with four new axis steps, that correspond with socalled StandOff joins, introduced here. The new steps can be efficiently implemented using a region index and fast lo...

An information system that makes use of stand-off annotation stores metadata separately from the data they describe. System architectures separate metadata from data in order to cope with heterogeneous annotations or with multimedia formats. This paper discusses some of the practical aspects of implementing an information system with a stand-off architecture. Two systems that use stand-off anno...