Microscale wear of vitrified abrasive materials

The study of bonding hard materials such as aluminium oxide and cubic boron nitride (cBN) and the nature of interfacial cohesion between these materials and glass is very important from the perspective of high precision grinding. Vitrified grinding wheels are typically used to remove large volumes of metal and to produce components with very high tolerances. It is expected that the same grinding wheel be used for both rough and finish machining operations. Therefore, the grinding wheel, and in particular its bonding system, is expected to react differently to a variety of machining operations. In order to maintain the integrity of the grinding wheel, the bonding system that is used to hold abrasive grains in place will react differently to forces that are placed on individual bonding bridges. This paper examines the role of vitrification heat treatment on the development of strength between abrasive grains and bonding bridges, and the nature of fracture and wear in vitrified grinding wheels that are used for precision grinding applications.     

High speed propulsion: Performance advantage of advanced materials

High-speed air breathing propulsion systems have many attractive military and civil applications. The high propulsive efficiency of these systems allows the exploitation of speed, distance, and bigger payloads, or any combination of the three. The severe operating conditions of these systems require particular attention to overall thermal management of the engine/air-frame. Fuel-cooling the engine structure is a viable way of maintaining thermal balance over a range of flight conditions. Air Force applications have focused on using endothermic hydrocarbon fuels to address this issue because of their compatibility with the military operations. Recent ground tests of scramjet engines have demonstrated adequate performance utilizing state-of-the-art technology in materials. This progress has paved the way for an expendable flight test vehicle in the near future. In order to take full advantage of the capabilities of this propulsion system, advances in fuel-cooled structures, high temperature un-cooled materials, and increased heat capacity of hydrocarbon fuels will be needed to enable expendable systems to reach higher Mach numbers. An additional benefit would be realized in future reusable systems.     

Atmospheric corrosion of reference metals in Antarctic sites

This paper presents the results obtained at three Antarctic test sites participating in the “Ibero-American Map of Atmospheric Corrosiveness” (MICAT), a project on atmospheric corrosion carried out during the period 1988–1994 at some 70 sites distributed across 12 countries of the Latin-American region, Spain and Portugal. The three Antarctic sites are located near the coastline.The singular climatic characteristics of Antarctic regions are related with the purity of the air, the absence of rainfall and the formation of ice on the metallic surface during an important part of the exposure time. However, electrochemical activity is possible below ice layers. This situation affects the structure and morphology of corrosion product films and the resulting corrosion rates of metallic surfaces.     

Understanding TES microcalorimeter noise and energy resolution

We have performed numerical calculations of the noise in voltage-biased superconducting transition edge-based X-ray microcalorimeters, using a finite-element model. Details of the model are discussed, as well as results for different absorber geometries. The results are in agreement with an analytical model and show that the amount of internal thermal fluctuation noise can be reduced by using a segmented absorber. The simulation also agrees well with experimental data, which, for our detectors, contain no major unidentified noise sources. Furthermore, the discrepancy between the (small-signal) theoretical and the measured energy resolutions for 5.9 keV X-rays, for our sensors typically a factor of 2, is explained by a more accurate modelling of the sensor responsivity, taking into account the large signal behaviour.     

Modeling and Analysis of a Long Thin Conducting Stripline

A long thin conducting stripline embedded in a dielectric and centered between two large conducting plates, i.e., the stripline environment, is considered. The stripline is modeled as infinitely long, infinitely thin, and perfectly conducting by first considering a stripline of finite length, thickness, and conductivity in a dielectric layer. Starting from Maxwell's equations and assuming that the current on the stripline is a propagating wave in length direction, asymptotic expressions for the fields inside and in the neighbourhood of the stripline are deduced. These expressions are used to model the stripline in the stripline environment, which leads to a boundary-value problem for the electric potential. This problem is solved by two different approaches, leading to integral equations for the current and for an auxiliary function describing the electric potential. A relation between the current and the auxiliary function is deduced, which is used to obtain asymptotic expressions for current and impedance. Results are compared with a numerical solution of the integral equation for the current and with results in literature.     

An asymptotic extraction technique for evaluating Sommerfeld-type integrals

An asymptotic extraction process is developed which leads to an efficient method for the evaluation of the electric field from a Hertzian dipole in a layered geometry. This technique allows for a rapidly converging expression for the electric field which remains well behaved as the source and observation heightsz', zcoincide. A useful application of this method is in the calculation of mutual impedance between printed dipoles.     

Strategies to improve the performance of very low bit rate speech coders and application to a variable rate 1.2 kb/s codec

This paper presents several strategies to improve the performance of very low bit rate speech coders and describes a speech codec that incorporates these strategies and operates at an average bit rate of 1.2 kb/s. The encoding algorithm is based on several improvements in a mixed multiband excitation (MMBE) linear predictive coding (LPC) structure. A switched-predictive vector quantiser technique that outperforms previously reported schemes is adopted to encode the LSF parameters. Spectral and sound specific low rate models are used in order to achieve high quality speech at low rates. An MMBE approach with three sub-bands is employed to encode voiced frames, while fricatives and stops modelling and synthesis techniques are used for unvoiced frames. This strategy is shown to provide good quality synthesised speech, at a bit rate of only 0.4 kb/s for unvoiced frames. To reduce coding noise and improve decoded speech, spectral envelope restoration combined with noise reduction (SERNR) postfilter is used. The contributions of the techniques described in this paper are separately assessed and then combined in the design of a low bit rate codec that is evaluated against the North American Mixed Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) coder. The performance assessment is carried out in terms of the spectral distortion of LSF quantisation, mean opinion score (MOS), A/B comparison tests and the ITU-T P.862 perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) standard. Assessment results show that the improved methods for LSF quantisation, sound specific modelling and synthesis and the new postfiltering approach can significantly outperform previously reported techniques. Further results also indicate that a system combining the proposed improvements and operating at 1.2 kb/s, is comparable (slightly outperforming) a MELP coder operating at 2.4 kb/s. For tandem connection situations, the proposed system is clearly superior to the MELP coder.     

Programmable analogue VLSI implementation for asymmetric sigmoid neural activation function and its derivative

A new CMOS VLSI implementation of an asymmetric programmable sigmoid neural activation function, as well as of its derivative, is presented. It consists of two coupled PMOS and NMOS differential pairs with different programmable bias currents that set the upper and lower limits of the sigmoid. The circuit works in the weak inversion region, for low power consumption and exponential envelope, or in strong inversion to achieve higher speeds. The results obtained from the theoretical transfer function, and from the simulations of the circuit implemented in AMI's 0.35 /spl mu/m technology, show a very good match.     

混凝土结构的质量通病——裂缝

从材料、结构构造、施工工艺、地基变形、温湿度变形等方面论述了混凝土裂缝产生的原因 ,提出只有真正了解裂缝产生的原因 ,才能有针对性地采取有效措施 ,确保工程质量