Juan Carlos Torres

Electrooptical behaviour and control of a suspended particle device

A suspended particle device is made by electrophoretic rod-shape particles suspended in an organic gel. These particles can twist and order with an applied voltage. The light crossing the material suffers more or less scattering according to that voltage. A commercial device is analyzed in this work. Several electrical models are tested, being the best one a series configuration including a shunt double layer capacitance and a Warburg element. Main parameter errors are below 2%, showing the quality of this new electrical model for this kind of devices. A quick method to improve the manufacturing process on-line is also proposed. Impedance measurements will be fitted to the selected electrical model, in order to check physical aspects such as charge diffusion lengths and response times. An electronic driver to obtain several levels of device transmission has been also developed, being its linearity demonstrated too. Colour changes are negligible for the main part of the bleaching process. All these features allow the use of this set in domotics application.

Temperature-Frequency Converter Using a Liquid Crystal Cell as a Sensing Element

A new temperature-frequency converter based on the variation of the dielectric permittivity of the Liquid Crystal (LC) material with temperature has been demonstrated. Unlike other temperature sensors based on liquid crystal processing optical signals for determining the temperature, this work presents a system that is able to sense temperature by using only electrical signals. The variation of the dielectric permittivity with temperature is used to modify the capacitance of a plain capacitor using a LC material as non-ideal dielectric. An electric oscillator with an output frequency depending on variable capacitance made of a twisted-nematic (TN) liquid crystal (LC) cell has been built. The output frequency is related to the temperature of LC cell through the equations associated to the oscillator circuit. The experimental results show excellent temperature sensitivity, with a variation of 0.40% of the initial frequency per degree Celsius in the temperature range from −6 °C to 110 °C.

Sinusoidal Voltage-Controlled Oscillator Based on a Liquid Crystal Cell as Variable Capacitance

A voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) in Colpitts circuit configuration is demonstrated using a twisted-nematic (TN) liquid crystal (LC) cell as a capacitance that can be varied as a function of applied voltage. Oscillation frequencies in the range of kHz have been obtained for the combination of inductance and capacitances used in the circuit. A theoretical study for the whole circuit is proposed and experimentally validated. Applications of this circuit include, among others, modulation and demodulation frequency signal, phase locked-loops, and function generators.

Frequency and Temperature Dependence of Fabrication Parameters in Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal Devices

A series of polymer dispersed liquid crystal devices using glass substrates have been fabricated and investigated focusing on their electrical properties. The devices have been studied in terms of impedance as a function of frequency. An electric equivalent circuit has been proposed, including the influence of the temperature on the elements into it. In addition, a relevant effect of temperature on electrical measurements has been observed.

Note: Phase-locked loop with a voltage controlled oscillator based on a liquid crystal cell as variable capacitance

A phase-locked loop is demonstrated using a twisted-nematic liquid crystal cell as a capacitance that can be varied as a function of applied voltage. The system is formed by a phase detector, a low-pass filter, as well as a voltage controlled oscillator including such variable capacitance. A theoretical study is proposed and experimentally validated. Capture and locked ranges of hundreds of kHz have been obtained for the configuration used in this circuit. An application as frequency demodulator using a practical implementation of this circuit has been demonstrated.

Temperature-Phase Converter Based on a LC Cell as a Variable Capacitance

The main characteristic of liquid crystals is that their properties, both electrical and optical, can be modified through a convenient applied signal, for instance a certain voltage. This tunable behavior of liquid crystals is directly related to the orientation of their nanometric components with respect to a director direction. However, the initial alignment is a fabrication-dependent parameter and may be either planar or homeotropic. In addition, the strong dependence of the properties of liquid crystals with the temperature is well known and widely used for several temperature sensors. This dependence is produced by the influence of the temperature on the ordering of the molecules. In this work, we have studied the temperature dependence of the electric properties of a liquid crystal cell, in particular the dielectric permittivity, with the temperature as a function of the initial alignment set during the fabrication process. Starting from experimental measurements, an equivalent circuit model including the temperature dependence has been proposed. We have observed that a good linearity in a wide temperature range is provided at a suitable exciting frequency. Finally, a proper conditioner circuit is proposed as a powerful tool for linear and high sensibility temperature measurement.

Note: series and parallel tunable resonators based on a nematic liquid crystal cell as variable capacitance.

In this work, tunable series and parallel resonators based on a nematic liquid crystal cell as variable capacitance are proposed and characterized. Tunable resonance frequencies in the range of kHz have been obtained for the combination of the inductance and the liquid crystal cell (capacitance) used in the proposed circuits. Tuning range in frequency obtained is around an octave.

Optimal camera exposure for video surveillance systems by predictive control of shutter speed, aperture, and gain

This paper establishes a real-time auto-exposure method to guarantee that surveillance cameras in uncontrolled light conditions take advantage of their whole dynamic range while provide neither under nor overexposed images. State-of-the-art auto-exposure methods base their control on the brightness of the image measured in a limited region where the foreground objects are mostly located. Unlike these methods, the proposed algorithm establishes a set of indicators based on the image histogram that defines its shape and position. Furthermore, the location of the objects to be inspected is likely unknown in surveillance applications. Thus, the whole image is monitored in this approach. To control the camera settings, we defined a parameters function (Ef ) that linearly depends on the shutter speed and the electronic gain; and is inversely proportional to the square of the lens aperture diameter. When the current acquired image is not overexposed, our algorithm computes the value of Ef that would move the histogram to the maximum value that does not overexpose the capture. When the current acquired image is overexposed, it computes the value of Ef that would move the histogram to a value that does not underexpose the capture and remains close to the overexposed region. If the image is under and overexposed, the whole dynamic range of the camera is therefore used, and a default value of the Ef that does not overexpose the capture is selected. This decision follows the idea that to get underexposed images is better than to get overexposed ones, because the noise produced in the lower regions of the histogram can be removed in a post-processing step while the saturated pixels of the higher regions cannot be recovered. The proposed algorithm was tested in a video surveillance camera placed at an outdoor parking lot surrounded by buildings and trees which produce moving shadows in the ground. During the daytime of seven days, the algorithm was running alternatively together with a representative auto-exposure algorithm in the recent literature. Besides the sunrises and the nightfalls, multiple weather conditions occurred which produced light changes in the scene: sunny hours that produced sharpen shadows and highlights; cloud coverages that softened the shadows; and cloudy and rainy hours that dimmed the scene. Several indicators were used to measure the performance of the algorithms. They provided the objective quality as regards: the time that the algorithms recover from an under or over exposure, the brightness stability, and the change related to the optimal exposure. The results demonstrated that our algorithm reacts faster to all the light changes than the selected state-of-the-art algorithm. It is also capable of acquiring well exposed images and maintaining the brightness stable during more time. Summing up the results, we concluded that the proposed algorithm provides a fast and stable auto-exposure method that maintains an optimal exposure for video surveillance applications. Future work will involve the evaluation of this algorithm in robotics.

Temporal electrical response of chiral smectic liquid crystal displays with V/W-shaped electrooptical characteristic

Chiral smectic liquid crystal cells showing V-shaped electrooptical switching have been reported as one of the most promising technologies for high-end display applications. In this work, time-resolved electrical behaviour of these devices has been obtained through a set of systematic measurements. The electrical equivalent circuit has been derived, a number of simulations at different frequencies have been performed using commercial software for analogue circuits. Performance of this electrical model to account for time domain variations of switching currents in chiral smectic LC displays with V/W-shaped electrooptical response has been analyzed as well.

Optoelectronic multiplexer for digital data processing based on lipid crystal pixels and optical fiber elements

In this work, we present an optoelectronic digital multiplexer 4:1 based on a multipixel nematic liquid crystal cell. This device uses two optical control signals to select one among four possible optical data inputs. These data signals are generated by four red LEDs, which are guided through plastic optical fiber towards liquid crystal pixels. For our purpose, only four pixels of the cell will be used to modulate the optical signal across them. Each pixel will be addressed by a square waveform coming from the conditioning circuit managed by a microcontroller system. The electronic control allows the multiplexer to work as as simple two input logical gates such as AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR and XNOR. The operation time of the device is limited by the response time of LC cell that is in the millisecond range.