G. Doyle

Design from Chaos - Applying Data Entropy Methods for Complex System Design

The paper critically assesses and illustrates the use of the data entropy budget method in both product and systems engineering based on the experience of developing an optoelectronic instrument known as the tensiograph. The design of such a system involving optoelectronic, electronic, thermal, mechanical, chemical and data processing noise components presents difficult engineering problem from the complex of noise spectrum contributions. This project provides perhaps an important case study for optical engineers because it was developed over a period of 15 years. The design history recorded in the data entropy-time graph, shows clearly the step-wise improvements achieved from the various engineering efforts. The present 11-bits information content of the instrument, with impressive signal-to-noise ratio exceeding 1000:1, was developed from prototype with less than 3-bit resolution. The paper concludes with an assessment of the relevance of this method to optical engineering in which a diverse number of technologies are frequently integrated in products and systems. Finally, the role of data entropy methods in third level education is then briefly considered with very clear lessons drawn from the foregoing concrete example offered by this case study.

An introduction to the generalised theory of data scatter

Phase Coherent Data-scatter (PCD-S) was originally developed for the area of tensiographic data mining and analysis. This development has been augmented with the engineering of a software toolkit called TraceMiner, which integrates this technique with additional data mining and statistical tools for general use. This paper presents, for the first time, a theoretical treatment of data-scatter as a generic data mining tool, cognisant of the data set descriptions, data transformations, measurands and data model visualisations possible with data-scatter. Data-diffraction resulting from data scatter is also presented here for the first time. The use of the two approaches in a Hough technique to analyse the resulting data-diffraction patterns is discussed briefly in the context of applications of this new data scatter approach.

Application of characteristic vector analysis to multianalyser tensiography for the study of aqueous-ethanol solutions and French wine solutions

A study was conducted to determine the alcohol concentration, refractive index and surface tension of binary solutions from multianalyser tensiotrace data. Characteristic vector analysis of multivariate response data has been successfully applied to a variety of optical tensiotraces to explore the quantitative capabilities of the multianalyser tensiograph. Singular value decomposition was used to determine the key vector i.e. the characteristics of the required signal as it affects the data. This vector is then optimised using the known established data to estimate the value of the unknown parameters. By the use of characteristic vector analysis the paper explores the relationship that exists between the tensiotrace features and the physical properties of a liquid. This paper shows the possibility of future work for identifying wines. A second study has been conducted where five wine samples were run on the multianalyser and their tensiotraces acquired. This preliminary study demonstrates that wine archiving and fingerprinting is possible.