Power Electronics in India - Scopes and Careers

To continue its growth trajectory, India would need a lot more emphasis on the power sector. So a career in power electronics could prove to be a good take-off for you. Power is one of those sectors which are showing a promise of growth and expansion amidst the economic slowdown clatter. It may even benefit from the current recession.Its steady rise can be attributed to the immediate need for infrastructure.

Ozone Generator Characteristics

Ozone gas is now-a-days used for treatment of drinking water, disinfection, and air-purification. What one re- quires is a small and handy unit to be plugged into mains to get ozonated air at suitable pressure flowing out from a tube It can then be let into environment or bubbled through water or any other polluted liquid. But the gadget must be completely safe to work with.

Ozone generators invariably make use of a discharge tube to which a high electric field is applied so as to break down the oxygen present in the air. This phenomenon occurs at or near a field strength of 25 kV/cm, and the resulting discharge that takes place is known as corona. The corona has a light bluish glow. It is in this corona field that oxygen becomes ozone (O3).

Ozone has tendency to revert back to its original form in about 10-20 minutes, in the atmosphere. Therefore, it is necessary in any ozone application to generate ozone as and when requied for use since it cannot be kept stored the way chlorine is stored (in cylinders). Chlorine is used in our cities to disinfect drinking water supply. It is highly carcinogenic because when it comes into contact with remnants of pesticides in our foodstuff (vegetables), it generathalomethanes, which are carcinogenic. That is why, ozone is used today in preference to chlorine.  Complete disinfection of water, in any impure form, is realised with an ozone content of 4 mg/litre.

Flexible Circuits - Advantages and Applications

Flexible electronics is a technology for assembling electronic circuits by mounting electronic devices on flexible high performance plastic substrates, such as polyimide. This post is about flexible electronics circuits advantages of flexible boards, and its emerging applications.

Disadvantages Of HDTV

In the previous post, we discussed about HDTV and its advantages. But there are some issues - disadvantages with HDTV.

• To be able to receive HD content, you need to have an HD-ready TV set or TV set with built-in HDTV tuner, which is comparatively expensive. Also, traditional SD programmes originally filmed in the standard 4:3 ratio, when seen on an HDTV monitor, will have empty margins to the left and right of the image because 16:9 wide-screen aspect ratio is the standard for digital HDTV. You can choose to fill this unused display area by stretching the SD shows horizontally to fill the screen, but this will only distort the image.

• Normally, the HDTV transmission is provided through satellite and the same may not be available on free basis. In such a case, you may be required to subscribe to HDTV with the service provider.

• HDMI, or component video cables, must be used to support high-definition signals. HDMI is an all-digital connection that allows both HD audio and video to pass through a single cable. If you use older video cabling standards like com-posite or S-Video for connections from a cable box or satellite dish, you will get only an SDTV-quality picture.

• Another drawback of HDTV is that most of the operators do not fully follow HDTV specifications. So the HD picture quality is usually not as good as promised. Operators tend to use slower bitrates or lower resolution to accommodate more channels within the limited bandwidth, which reduces the video quality.

• While on an analogue TV, the interference causes the picture to slowly deteriorate from bad to worse,
  interference in HDTV broadcast will freeze, skip, or display ‘garbage’ information.

Advantage Of 32-bit Microcontrollers

This post shares the advantages of a 32 bit microcontroller unit (MCU) over 8bit and 16bit.

A design engineer from R&D department says that "Couple of years ago, we replaced our 8-bit design of the smart card terminal and fingerprint detection with 32-bit design. Our move was supported by the reduced price of 32-bit MCU. The major advantage we saw was reduction in the overall cost of the system due to decrease in component counts. 8-bit design almost used 18-20 peripheral chips, whereas 32-bit used only five to six chips. 32-bit microcontroller offers advantage of integrated peripherals like I/O lines, TCP/IP and USB along with high performance".