A database system with methodology providing "live" views of a database is described. In response to a user request (e.g., query) to display information from the database according to user-specified criteria, the system registers and displays a view (e.g., user-designed form and/or report); multiple views may be opened in this manner. In response to receiving one or more modifications to information stored in the database, the system employs incremental queries to maintain the "liveness" of the views. In particular, each registered view is notified of the modification (i.e., specific modified data records) and undertakes to apply the user-specified criteria for the particular view only against the modification. Here, the system determines for each view whether the modified data records should be added to the view (if such records now meet the user-supplied criteria for that particular view) or removed from the view (if such records no longer meet the user-supplied criteria for that particular view), without testing whether other records meet the user-specified criteria (i.e., without having to re-execute the query). In this fashion, the system maintains "live" views of the data so that all views reflects at all times the state of the underlying information or data, but without having to re-execute entire queries that initially gave rise to the views.

The present invention relates generally to information processing environments and, more particularly, to end-user data processing systems, such as a PC Database Management System (PC DBMS).
Computers are a powerful tool for the acquisition and processing of information. Computerized databases can be regarded as a kind of electronic filing cabinet or repository for collecting computerized data files; they are particularly adept at processing vast amounts of information quickly. As such, these systems serve to maintain information in database files or tables and make that information available on demand.
In 1970, Dr. E. F. Codd invented the "relational model", a prescription for how a DBMS should operate. The relational model provides a foundation for representing and manipulating data, that is, a way of looking at data. The model includes three basic components: structure, integrity, and manipulation. Each will be briefly described.
The first of these, structure, is how data should be presented to users. A database management system is defined as "relational" when it is able to support a relational view of data. This means that data which a user can access and the operators which the user can use to operate upon that data are themselves relational. Data are organized as relations in a mathematical sense, with operators existing to accept relations as input and produce relations as output. Relations are perhaps best interpreted by users as tables, composed of rows (tuples) and columns (attributes).
Ideally, data in a relational system is perceived by users as tables and nothing but tables. This precludes the user from seeing explicit connections or links between tables, or having to traverse between tables on the basis of such links. It also precludes user-visible indexes on fields and, in fact, precludes users from seeing anything that smacks of the physical storage implementation. Thus, tables are a logical abstraction of what is physically stored.
The integrity aspect, on the other hand, dictates that every relation (i.e., table) should have a unique, primary key to identify table entries or rows. The integrity of the data for the user is of course crucial. If accuracy and consistency of the data cannot be achieved, then the data may not be relied upon for decision-making purposes.
Data manipulation, the last component, may be thought of as cut-and-paste operators for tables. Data manipulation is of course the purpose for which databases exist in the first place. The superiority of manipulating tables relationally (i.e., as a whole, or sets of rows) is substantial. Users can combine data in various tables logically by matching values in common columns, without having to specify any internal details or the order in which tables are accessed; this provides users with a conceptual view of the database that is removed from the hardware level. Non-relational DBMSs, in contrast, require complex programming skills that form an inherently unreliable means to interact with databases.
The general construction and operation of a database management system is known in the art. See e.g., Date, C., An Introduction to Database Systems, Volume I and II, Addison Wesley, 1990; the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Today, relational systems are everywhere--commonly seen operating in corporate, government, academic settings, and other shared environments. A typical installation will employ one of the popular UNIX-based RDBMS running on a minicomputer. By submitting queries to the DBMS from a remote terminal (e.g., using a SQL "query editor"), users are often able to handle many of their own data processing needs directly. Thus, relational technology is not only just another way to build a database system, but it also offers a set of underlying principles that provide very direct practical benefits to the user.
The strong theoretical underpinnings of relational systems which account for their superior design over prior non-relational systems have also created some unexpected problems. With the ever-increasing trend towards "down-sizing," more and more data processing tasks are being moved off mainframes and minicomputers and onto desktop PCs, often operating in a Local Area Network (LAN). Although relational systems are easier for database-savvy users to use (e.g., for querying), they are by no means easy for untrained users. And with the movement of data processing chores to desktop PCs, ordinary PC users are nevertheless often faced with the responsibility of designing and implementing a database system, one having the reliability and integrity typically associated with a relational system.
Consider the following issues attendant to setting up a relational database management system (RDBMS). Tables in a relational system are not just any tables but are, instead, special "disciplined" tables. Relational systems require, for instance, that tables not store duplicates (so that each row may be uniquely identified by one or more column values). Thus, relations or "R-tables" are subject to particular constraints, such as "first normal form." As another example, to preserve simplicity and take advantage of relational operations, database tables should not contain "repeating groups"--that is, multi-valued columns. Such multi-valued columns remove table resemblance to relations and thus prevent tables from taking advantage of the latter's mathematical properties. Instead, relational tables should contain only single-value cells or "atomic" data values. Thus while relational tables are simple and flexible in theory, they nevertheless entail rigorous constraints which must be obeyed to implement them in practice.
While trained database administrators have the expertise to tackle such issues, ordinary PC users for the most part have received no formal data processing education. They cannot be expected to be familiar with such seemingly esoteric concepts as "joins," "one-to-many relations," "foreign keys," or any of the other myriad of issues which must be considered when applying the relational approach to database management.
All told, relational database products have over time become more and more advanced. And technical advances have been largely in the area of adding advanced features, thus making these products more and more complicated. In essence, advances in the art have resulted in these products becoming more-advanced developer tools which are increasingly difficult for ordinary end-users to use. At the same time, there exists a large market of users who are not database developers yet have problems which cannot be solved using low-end, flat-file database programs (e.g., Approach.RTM. and FilePro.RTM.).
The previously-described relational model in particular poses a problem with lowering the learning curve for users. Although the relational model undoubtedly simplifies numerous design considerations, the model is not particularly easy to grasp by ordinary users. Users typically start out with an intuition about what they want as a general database design. Then, however, users must go through a tedious process of figuring out what the underlying tables are that comprise the application, determining key fields and linking them, and making sure that database normalization rules are not violated.
What users really want is not to deal with a set of disciplined tables but, instead, the ultimate forms and reports that users have envisioned in their minds. Moreover, the forms and reports desired by users often contain nested structures (e.g., multi-table reports), yet users do not want to be concerned with the nested structures themselves, such as how to link a Customer table to an Orders table. And, in fact, forms and reports often have several levels of nesting and summary information.
If a user employs the relational approach to build applications, he or she is faced with tearing the problem apart--doing normalizations and figuring out a set of tables--and then resynthesizing his or her intuition, for producing queries, designing multi-table forms and reports, and the like. For reports, for example, users are forced to use a very complicated abstraction called "bands." Bands in a report generator are supposed to represent, in some sense, the nested structure of the desired report. But the approach is artificial: the user cannot instantly see what he or she is getting (i.e., it is not "live" or WYSIWYG--"what you see is what you get"). Expectedly, users often have a difficult time obtaining satisfactory results with banded report writers.
What is needed is a new approach for a user to develop an application. In particular, the user should not be required to understand or to even know about low level details, such as normalizing a database, linking tables via foreign keys, defining key fields, and the like. Since a user already has in his or her mind a good idea what the desired forms and reports should look like, such a system should provide an intuitive, visual paradigm for creating the application. In this manner, the user may focus on objects which are very visual in nature and easy to understand at the top level, thereby providing a better match with the user's understanding of what he or she is doing. The present invention fulfills this and other needs.

Non-modal database system with methods for incremental maintenance


According to the present invention, methods and apparatus for performing efficient inverse transform operations are provided. Zero patterns are identified in a block of transform coefficients to derive zero pattern information. Using the zero pattern information, inverse transform operations are performed on a subset of the columns of the block of transform coefficients. Zero patterns can optionally be identified in the resulting block. One-dimensional inverse transform operations are then performed on the rows of the resulting block to complete the inverse transform. In another example, one-dimensional inverse transform operations can be performed first on the rows and then on the columns.

The present invention relates to inverse transform operations. More specifically, the present invention relates to performing inverse transform operations more efficiently. Still more specifically, the present invention provides techniques for performing two-dimensional inverse transform operations on a block of transform coefficients by using one-dimensional inverse transform operations after identifying zero patterns in a block of transform coefficients.
Video data is one particularly relevant form of data that can benefit from improved techniques for resealing. Video resealing schemes allow digitized video frames to be represented digitally in an efficient manner. Rescaling digital video makes it practical to transmit the compressed signal by digital channels at a fraction of the bandwidth required to transmit the original signal without compression. Generally, compressing data or further compressing compressed data is referred to herein as rescaling data. International standards have been created on video compression schemes. The standards include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.261, H.262, H.263, H.263+, etc. The standardized compression schemes mostly rely on several key algorithm schemes: motion compensated transform coding (for example, DCT transforms or wavelet/sub-band transforms), quantization of the transform coefficients, and variable length coding (VLC).
The motion compensated encoding removes the temporally redundant information inherent in video sequences. The transform coding enables orthogonal spatial frequency representation of spatial domain video signals. Quantization of the transformed coefficients reduces the number of levels required to represent a given digitized video sample and reduces bit usage in the compression output stream. The other factor contributing to rescaling is variable length coding (VLC) that represents frequently used symbols using code words. In general, the number of bits used to represent a given image determines the quality of the decoded picture. The more bits used to represent a given image, the better the image quality. The system that is used to compress digitized video sequence using the above described schemes is called an encoder or encoding system.
More specifically, motion compensation performs differential encoding of frames. Certain frames, such as I-frames in MPEG-2, continue to store the entire image, and are independent of other frames. Differential frames, such as B-frames or P-frames in MPEG-2, store motion vectors associated with the difference and coordinates of particular objects in the frames. The pixel-wise difference between objects is called the error term. In MPEG-2, P-frames reference a single frame while B-frames reference two different frames. Although this allows fairly high reduction ratios, motion compensation is limited when significant changes occur between frames. When significant changes occur between frames in a video sequence, a large number of frames are encoded as reference frames. That is, entire images and not just motion vectors are maintained in a large number of frames. This precludes high reduction ratios. Furthermore, motion compensation can be computationally expensive.
Each frame can be converted to luminance and chrominance components. As will be appreciated by one of skill in the art, the human eye is more sensitive to the luminance than to the chrominance of an image. In MPEG-2, luminance and chrominance frames are divided into 8×8 pixel blocks. The 8×8 pixel blocks are transformed using a discrete cosine transform (DCT) and scanned to create a DCT coefficient vector. Quantization involves dividing the DCT coefficients by a scaling factor. The divided coefficients can be rounded to the nearest integer. After quantization, some of the quantized elements become zero. The many levels represented by the transform coefficients are reduced to a smaller number of levels after quantization. With fewer levels represented, more sequences of numbers are similar. For example, the sequence 4.9 4.1 2.2 1.9 after division by two and rounding becomes 2 2 1 1. As will be described below, a sequence with more similar numbers can more easily be encoded using either arithmetic or Huffman coding. However, quantization is an irreversible process and hence introduces significant loss of information associated with the original frame or image.
Huffman or arithmetic coding takes the most common long sequences of numbers of bits and replaces them with a shorter sequence of numbers or bits. Again, Huffman or arithmetic coding is limited by common sequences of numbers or bits. Sequences that contain many different numbers are more difficult to encode.
Currently available compression techniques for compressing video or image data use transform and inverse transform operations. However, transform and inverse transform operations are computationally expensive and introduce delay into time sensitive data streams. The transform and inverse transform operations are often used in transcoding systems for scaling a data stream associated with one set of bandwidth requirements to a modified data stream associated with another set of bandwidth requirements. Transform encoded data is often rescaled to meet bandwidth limitations. Transform and inverse transform operations are often a bottleneck transcoding systems. It is therefore desirable to provide techniques for efficiently performing inverse transform operations. Techniques for efficiently performing inverse transform operations could be particularly useful in transcoding systems.

Methods and apparatus for performing efficient inverse transform operations


A method that pivotably mounts a display screen includes a housing and a display holder. A bearing is disposed between the housing and the display holder. The bearing may include a bearing protrusion or curved projection extending from a sidewall of the s display holder. The bearing includes a race in communication with the housing and has a concave surface portion, and a clamping member having a convex portion. The convex portion of the clamping member may be juxtaposed with the concave surface portion of the race to form an annular channel between the clamping member and the race. The curved protrusion may be slidingly secured in the annular channel to pivotally mount the display holder relative to the housing. A bearing may support each side of the display holder.

1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to a display holder. In particular, this disclosure relates to a display assembly for pivotally mounting a display in an environment subject to vibration and shock.
2. Related Art
Vehicles may be equipped with computer equipment to provide the driver and/or occupants with information. Such computer equipment necessarily includes a display screen for providing visual images to the driver or occupants of the vehicle. Some display devices are temporarily affixed to an inside portion of the windshield with suction-cup arrangements. Other display devices are mounted to the dashboard with fasteners. Such mounting provisions, however, do not provide an aesthetically pleasing appearance.
In some vehicles, computer systems and display devices may be subject to a high degree of vibration and shock. In such situations, the mounting fixtures do not maintain the position of the display screen or permit the display to be easily and quickly adjusted. A need exists for a system for mounting a display screen that permits the vehicle occupant to easily and quickly adjust the position of the display screen while maintaining the position of the display screen once adjusted.


An elongated flooring member includes an array of pyramid-shaped tread members to form an anti-skid tread surface. Longitudinally extending features of the flooring member are formed by an extrusion process which is followed by an embossing process to cut extruded flutes into the pyramid-shaped tread members. A first version of the flooring member includes a pair of channels extending downward from an upper web on which the tread is formed, for attachment to a substrate. A second version of the flooring member has an adhesive layer fastened under the upper web for attachment to a single plank.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to extruded plastic materials for covering wood or cement surfaces of boat docks and residential decks, and, more particularly, to providing such extruded plastic materials with surfaces preventing slip and fall accidents under wet conditions.
2. Background Information
Many boat docks and residential decks are comprised of a wooden floor, made of individual planks, nailed in place over a wooden framework. One problem with this type of construction arises from the fact that the upper surface of the floor is exposed to ambient conditions which cause relatively rapid deterioration of the wood. In particular, the ultraviolet rays of sunlight cause deterioration of the wood near its surface, and moisture from dew, rain, or in the case of a boat dock, from splashing, aids in the initiation of rotting. While chemical preservatives often lengthen the usefulness of the wood flooring the wood continues to deteriorate into a condition requiring replacement. During this process of deterioration, the appearance of the wood surfaces becomes aesthetically undesirable, and the flooring may become dangerous due to splintering and even collapsing.
What is needed is a structure for covering the flooring of wood boat docks and residential decks to prevent deterioration of the wood. Such a structure would be especially useful if it could be used to cover wood flooring which has already been damaged by ambient exposure.
Conventional extruded flooring products, which may be made of plastic, rubber, or aluminum, have, on their upper surfaces, longitudinally extending ridges or grooves without any such features extending transversely. While this type of surface configuration is understandable considering the extrusion process by which such products are made, the result is a flooring surface which provides good traction for walking in the transverse direction, but which is found to be very slippery when a person tries to walk in the longitudinal direction. While this difference in frictional properties can be enough to cause a fall even under dry conditions, under wet conditions such flooring products can become especially dangerous.
Many dock and deck surfaces become very dangerous from the standpoint of slipping and falling when they covered by a substantial thickness of water, as during a rainstorm. Once a person's foot begins to slip, a condition of hydroplaning occurs between his foot (or the sole of his shoe) and the surface of the flooring. Under this condition, the surfaces of his foot and of the flooring do not contact one another, being instead separated by a water layer. The friction force acting between the foot and the flooring, which normally must be relied upon to prevent a fall, is now independent of the coefficient of friction of the solid materials involved, reaching a low value dependent instead on the fluid shear occurring within the water. Under such conditions, the friction force can rapidly drop to about 1/100 of its value under dry conditions. In particular, serious knee injuries occur when one foot slips in a wet area while the other foot remains stuck to the floor in an adjacent dry area, so that the knee of the foot which is not slipping is severely twisted.
What is needed is a surface for boat docks, residential decks, and the like, in which the contact surface is broken up into small sectors, so that the pressure between the foot and the contact surface is increased, reducing the chance of hydroplaning, and so that the relatively large surface areas, which are associated with the initiation of hydroplaning, are avoided. While the use of grooves and ridges extending only in the longitudinal direction in extruded flooring products performs this function to an extent, the difference in the sliding properties of such products between longitudinal and transverse directions argues against the use of such products in areas likely to become soaked with water.

Floor covering for boat docks, residential decks, and the like


A cutting apparatus for ductile materials comprises a nozzle having a number of outlet openings separated from each other by separator webs. Next to the nozzle, a rotating cutting tool is provided, having a plurality of cutting knives for cutting off the strands of material discharged through the outlet openings of the nozzle. Each separator web is at least as wide as a cutting knife. For performing a cutting operation, the cutting tool is intermittently rotated. Between two cutting operations, the cutting tool is stopped, whereby its knives remain in a rest position behind the separator webs. For the next cutting operation, the cutting tool is rotated by such an amount that its cutting knives move from a position behind a first separator web to the next adjacent separator web.

The present invention refers to an apparatus for cutting ductile materials, particularly for chopping plastic materials processed in an extruder or in a mixing and kneading apparatus. The cutting apparatus comprises a nozzle having a plurality of outlet openings separated from each other by separator webs. A cutting tool is adapted to be driven to a rotational movement. It has a plurality of cutting knives for cutting off material strands discharged through the outlet openings of the nozzle, and a drive assembly is provided for driving the cutting tool.
Moreover, the present invention also refers to a method of operating such a cutting apparatus.
A cutting apparatus of this kind is primarily used for chopping plastic material processed in an extruder and discharged therefrom.

Apparatus for cutting ductile materials and a method of operating the apparatus


Systems and methods for a sale authorization include detecting vehicle information. A secondary authorization parameter is received and the sale is authorized in response to the secondary authorization parameter being associated with the vehicle information.

Purchasing fuel can be a relatively slow process for a consumer. They typically have to navigate a multi-step process in order to be authorized to purchase fuel. For example, the consumer needs to take out their form of payment (e.g., credit card, debit card) from a wallet or purse. The card is then swiped through a card reader. Some form of identity verification is then performed for the card, such as the consumer entering the postal zip code of the billing address assigned to that card. Depending on the fuel station, the consumer may also need to enter loyalty information for any loyalty program implemented by the station. The consumer then has to wait for the credit card approval before being allowed to activate the pump. For a consumer that is in a hurry or standing out in inclement weather, the extra time to go through all of these steps can be a burden for the consumer.


The starting material is conveyed in an extruder through zones of high and low pressure formed by different screw elements of opposing pitch. An extractant is fed in the high pressure zones located upstream of the screw elements of opposing pitch. The extractant then flows in a direction countercurrent to a direction of transport of the starting material and is discharged via a discharge opening located in or close to the low pressure zone, downstream of a screw element of opposing pitch.

The invention relates to a method for the extraction of a substance from a starting material, wherein the starting material is brought together with an extraction fluid in an extruder. The starting material is moved along an extrusion channel in a conveyor device. The extruder contains at least two pressure-raising elements which are spaced apart, with a low pressure zone between the elements and a high pressure zone located downstream thereof.
In the foodstuffs industry, organic waste streams and specific product streams frequently contain high value components. These components are usually extracted from the product streams batchwise. Since the starting material is usually pressed, followed by precipitation, washing out by means of boiling of by means of a belt press, large quantities of extraction fluid are used.
It is also known to produce bleached chemical-mechanical wood pulp from wood chips by feeding the wood chips through a twin screw extruder such as that manufactured by Clextra under the trade name BIVIS. In this process a number of screw elements with opposing pitch (reverse screw elements) are used in the casing of the extruder to form high pressure zones for intensive kneading of the product. Chemicals such as NaOH and NaHSO3 as well as steam are injected into the casing of the extruder and discharged from the extruder in a direction concurrent with the direction of transport of the starting material.
A process of this type has the disadvantage that it is not optimum for extraction and that the starting material can be forced out of the casing of the extruder under pressure at the tapping points. As a result, the pressures which can be used are limited and the concentrations of substances which can be extracted in an extraction process are usually relatively low.
FR 2 619 514 describes an extraction process using a twin screw extruder, wherein extraction takes place at relatively low pressures in a number of concurrent processes connected in series.
WO 90/10484 discloses an extraction method in which the starting material is moved by means of a single screw extruder in a direction countercurrent to a solvent. With the known apparatus having a single screw, expression of the starting material with extractant in the compression zone is possible only to a limited extent since if too much fluid is used no further solid is transported. Extraction under high pressure is also not possible in the known apparatus, while the flow of the starting material and the extractant are highly integrated, so that the extraction is relatively inefficient.
It is therefore an aim of the present invention to provide an extraction process in which relatively high pressures can be used, very good mixing of the starting material and the extraction fluid occurs, a high yield is achieved and the risk of the starting material being forced out of the casing through the discharge openings is reduced.
A further aim of the present invention is to provide an extraction process which can be operated continuously and various substances can be extracted from a starting material with high selectivity.
To this end the method according to the present invention is characterized in that the extraction fluid is fed to the extruder via a feed opening in or close to the high pressure zone, is then brought to the low pressure zone in a direction countercurrent to the direction of transport of the starting material and is discharged from the extruder via a discharge opening in or close to the low pressure zone. The starting material is continually supplied to the low pressure zone in the direction of transport and continuously discharged from the high pressure zone in the direction of transport.
According to the invention, the extraction fluid is supplied to the extruder and fed in a countercurrent direction over a continuous supply of the starting material through the extrusion channel. Surprisingly, it has been found that the material to be extracted is highly comminuted in the high pressure zones, so that a very high surface area/volume ratio is obtained and very good mixing with the extraction fluid (solvent) occurs. Efficient extraction is possible by means of the countercurrent flow, with a very high extraction yield. By placing the discharge openings for the extraction fluid in or close to the low pressure zones, the pressure in the extraction apparatus is raised to relatively high levels, such as, for example, higher than 10 bar, without the starting material being forced out through the discharge openings. At these high pressures the solubility of the material to be extracted in the extraction fluid is high and extraction can take place efficiently. At the high pressures, the substance to be extracted can be dissolved more rapidly by passing through an arbitrary solvent such as, for example, water or a salt solution in a countercurrent direction. By separate discharge of the extraction fluid from the extruder, while the starting material is transported further along the extrusion channel, a high grade substance, such as an oligomer or polymer condensate, can be obtained efficiently and continuously from a low grade residual stream or waste stream. The extracted, insoluble comminuted residual fraction can be further transported to a second low pressure zone and a second high pressure zone. An extraction fluid once again is supplied, which extraction fluid is discharged close to the second low pressure zone and a further substance can be extracted from thee starting material, with a relatively high selectivity. The properties of the extracted product can be controlled by the selection of the extraction fluid used, the specific pressures and temperatures in the extruder, the starting material/extraction fluid ratio, contact time and the like.
Examples of extracted substances include secondary metabolites, such as odor substances, colorants and flavorings, for example carvone and limonene from caraway seeds, vanilla from vanilla beans, pentosans from wheat waste, pectin from the skins of citrus fruits and inulin from chicory. Furthermore, the method according to the invention can also be used for non-organic materials,- such as the extraction of catalyst residues from polymers. With the method according to the present invention it is also possible advantageously to use an extraction fluid in the supercritical state, such as CO2 at 75 bar and 35xc2x0 C. The supercritical state can be maintained over the entire extraction length.
In one embodiment of the method according to the invention, after the extrusion step the extruded starting material is fed to drying or press means to produce, for example, fiberboard, cattle feed pellets and covering for a stall floor.
The extraction apparatus according to the invention comprises an extruder, for example a multi-screw extruder, with a discharge opening in the wall of the extrusion channel in or close to the low pressure zone for discharging the extraction fluid. The discharge opening is provided with screening means. M A feed opening is made in the wall of the extrusion channel in or close to the high pressure zone located downstream of the low pressure zone.
Preferably, the pitch of the screw in the extruder is relatively large in the low pressure zones and is relatively small in the high pressure zones. In this way the pressure in the extruder can be controlled in a simple manner by adjusting the pitch of the screw. High pressure zones and low pressure zones can also be achieved by locally reversing the pitch of the screw with respect to the pitch of the transport part of the screw.
The extraction apparatus according to the invention is of modular construction and is made up of modules which can be coupled to one another. The modules can be coupled to one another by coupling elements such as external flanges which can be connected to one another. By adjusting the number of modules, various substances can be extracted from the starting material as required with the aid of a number of different extraction fluids. The strength of the dynamic seals which are formed by the screw elements with opposing pitch and the pressure which these seals are able to withstand depend on the geometry of the screw element and on the Theological properties (the way in which the material deforms under the influence of a force) of the material with which the extruder is filled. The Theological properties can be adjusted b mixing the starting material with a plasticizer or lubricant. For example, with caraway seeds as the starting material, the addition of a small amount of water has a substantial influence on the properties in the seals.

Method for the extraction of a substance from a starting material

Institut voor Agrotechnologisch Onderzoek (ATO-DLO)


A housing concept for integrated control electronics, comprising a housing bottom, a circuit carrier populated with electronic components of the central control electronics, and a signal and current distribution component as the electric connection between the central control electronics and peripheral components. The housing bottom is configured in the shape of a basin, the circuit carrier for the electronic components of the central control electronics being disposed therein such that the same can be electrically connected on at least one upwardly curved edge region to the signal and current distribution component disposed above the same via contact points, and wherein the housing bottom may also be connected circumferentially to the signal and current distribution component.

1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a module for integrated control electronics, that is, to a housing concept for integrated control electronics, comprising a housing base, an interconnection substrate populated with electronic components of the central control electronics and a signal and current distribution component as the electrical connection between the central control electronics and peripheral components, and to a method for manufacturing such a module, particularly for transmission or engine control systems in the automotive industry.
2. Prior Art
In automotive engineering, components such as transmission, engine or braking systems are increasingly mainly electronically controlled. The trend here is toward integrated mechatronic control systems, i.e. to the integration of control electronics and the associated electronic components such as sensors or valves into the transmission, the engine or the braking system. Control devices therefore generally have a large number of electronic components which are connected to other components outside the control device. In the case of "peripheral electronics" of this kind, these control systems are no longer accommodated in a separate protected electronics compartment and therefore have to withstand corresponding environmental effects as well as mechanical, thermal and chemical stresses.
For this purpose, they are normally installed in special housings which also perform an important shielding function. In order to provide a reliable connection to components outside the housing, an electrical connection from the inside to the outside of the housing is necessary.
The usual structure for such integrated mechatronic applications consists of a ceramic substrate containing the different electronic components of the central control unit. Said ceramic substrate is bonded to rigid or flexible circuit boards in order to enable the peripheral components to be connected to the central unit. As already described, transmission control modules, for example, are accommodated in the transmission oil sump and therefore completely surrounded by oil and the conducting contamination contained therein. This can be, for example, contaminations from gear tooth abrasion, machining residues from production processes or inadequate washing and cleaning of the transmission housing and/or the installed components. To provide the necessary protection against such contamination, damage and conductor track or bond shorts, a form of lidding, usually as a metallic, non-metallic or metalized housing cover, is placed onto the housing base plate and hermetically sealed. This composite structure comprising ceramic substrate, circuit boards and their links to the electronic connection of the peripherals as well as the hermetically sealed housing is a significant cost driver. In particular the LTCCs (low temperature cofired ceramics) preferably used as interconnection substrates which are mounted on a base plate to provide mechanical stability and thermal connection, constitute a major cost factor for the component as a whole. Their electronic connection via flexible circuit boards or leadframes to the components outside the sealed housing is also complex and therefore costly.

Module for integrated control electronics having simplified design