Significantly enhanced breakdown field in Ca1-xSrxCu3Ti4O12 ceramics by tailoring donor densities

Significantly enhanced breakdown field of 24.52 kV cm^?1 as well as noteworthy nonlinear coefficient of 8.11 and low dielectric loss of 0.077 were obtained in Ca_0.6Sr_0.4Cu₃Ti₄O₁₂ ceramic. It was proved from impedance spectra that improved breakdown field was attributed to enhanced grain boundary resistance and elevated Schottky barrier height, which was further found resulting from reduced donor densities in C-V measurements. In addition, it was found that the activation energy originated from oxygen vacancies was increased, indicating the generation of oxygen vacancies was suppressed. Since oxygen vacancies acted as donors in depletion layers, it is reasonable to deduce that the reduced donor density was mainly ascribed to the decreased oxygen vacancies. In conclusion, maximum integrated action of strong solid solution effect and weak Sr-stretching effect was achieved when Sr/Ca ratio is 40/60, leading to greatly elevated potential barrier height and enhanced breakdown field consequently.     

机械密封腔流场内粒子对密封腔壁面及波纹管冲蚀分析

为研究机械密封腔内混有固体颗粒的流体,在复杂工况下对密封腔壁面及波纹管表面冲蚀的影响,以CFD理论及方法,采用k-ε湍流模型和离散项DPM模型,对固液混合流场进行模拟分析,获得密封腔内流体中介质作用下密封腔壁面及波纹管外表面的压力场分布,分析不同工作状态下固体颗粒作用下密封腔内壁和波纹管外表面的冲蚀区域分布、固体颗粒在流场中的运动轨迹,以及机械密封工作过程中流场内固体颗粒的逃逸量、运动状态的变化。结果表明:粒子主要受颗粒阻力、浮重力、压力梯度力及波纹管和密封腔表面反作用力的影响;在旋转流场中,粒子作与旋转方向一致的螺旋方式前进;无转速时,冲蚀多发生在靠近入口处的波纹管外表面,旋转流场中,冲蚀多发生在密封腔靠后位置的壁面;随着转速增加,粒子逃逸率下降。研究结论为机械密封腔的设计布局及机械密封装置的优化提供理论依据。     

Evaluation of the intergranular corrosion in austenitic stainless steel using collinear wave mixing method

Failures due to intergranular corrosion in components of austenitic stainless steel have always been a tough problem in engineering practice. In this paper, the collinear wave mixing was investigated to evaluate the intergranular corrosion in austenitic stainless steel. An acoustic nonlinearity parameter related to the bispectrum, the propagation distance and the amplitudes of fundamental waves in measured signal is proposed. Nonlinear acoustic measurements were conducted on four tubes with different degree of intergranular corrosion. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed acoustic nonlinearity parameter is sensitive to intergranular corrosion in samples, and is well correlated with the degree of damage.     

绿色合成型混凝土的弹性恢复机制研究

研究了绿色合成型混凝土的弹性恢复性能,结果表明,在满足安全储备的情况下,可充分利用混凝土材料。     

The impact of inoculum source,inoculum to substrate ratio and sample preservation on methane potential from different substrates

Batch experiments were conducted to evaluate the impact of inoculum sources, inoculum to substrate (IS) ratio and storage conditions on the potential and production rate of methane (CH₄) from different substrates: wheat straw, whole crop maize, cattle manure, grass and cellulose.The results of the test with four inocula and four substrates indicated that inoculum source could have a significant impact on both CH₄ potential (BMP) and the kinetics parameters of different substrates. The two inocula showing the highest BMP and production rates in each period were those coming from a feeding with more than 70% of animal manure under thermophilic conditions. The impact of the IS ratio in the range 0.25–2.5, in terms of g volatile solids (VS) substrate/g VS inoculum, depended on substrate type. Maize silage was more affected to changes in the IS ratio than wheat straw. The optimal IS ratio range for maize was 1.0–1.5, however, a wider IS range can be used in wheat straw (0.5–2.5). The impact of freezing and drying depended on biomass type. Freezing, drying and ensiling of grass increased the CH₄ yield compared to fresh grass. Drying of maize had no impact while freezing reduced the CH₄ potential. Drying and freezing had no impact on straw.     

Difference angle quantization index modulation scheme for image watermarking

In this paper, we propose a new angle quantization index modulation (AQIM) method, called the difference AQIM (DAQIM) method. The proposed method aims to improve the watermarking performance against gain attacks. Unlike the original AQIM method (Ourique et al., Angle QIM: a novel watermark embedding scheme robust against amplitude scaling distortions, in: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, vol. 2, 2005, pp. 797–800), the DAQIM method quantizes the difference of the two angles instead of the angles themselves. The main advantage of the DAQIM method is to disperse the interference to the watermark signal from one angle to more angles. Thus, the watermark has a higher ability to resist attacks. We perform a theoretical analysis of the document-to-watermark ratio (DWR) based on our proposed method. We show that our proposed method can obtain a lower embedding distortion compared to the AQIM and the gradient direction watermarking (GDWM) (Nezhadarya et al., IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur., 6(4), 2011, 1200–1213), methods under the same robustness and payload conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms common existing methods in terms of the robustness against various attacks such as the JPEG quantization noise, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), cropping effect and mean filtering.     

Direct strain evaluation method for laboratory-based pillar performance

Pillar stability is one of important aspects for underground mines.Generally,the stability of the pillars is evaluated empirically based on case studies and site-specific rock mass conditions in mines.Nevertheless the empirical approach applicability can sometimes be constrained.The numerical-based approaches are potentially more useful as parametric studies can be undertaken and,if calibrated,can be more representative.Both empirical and numerical approaches are dependent on the strength evaluation of the pillars while the strain developing in the pillars is seldom taken into consideration.In this paper,gypsum and sandstone samples were tested in laboratory with different width-to-height ratios(W/H)to adapt the strain evaluation method to the laboratory-based pillars.A correlation was then developed between the strain and the width-to-height ratio for pillar monitoring purposes.Based on the results,a flowchart was created to conduct back analysis for the existing pillars to evaluate their stability and design new pillars,considering the strain analysis of the existing pillars with the W/H ratios modelled.     

Investigation on material mixing during FSW of AA7475 to AISI304

AA7xxx and AISI304 stainless steel (SS) are employed in promising applications. Al alloy-to-SS dissimilar joining is difficult and challenging. Major challenge in the joining of these alloys is the difficulty in mixing of these materials which possess exotic and widely distant properties. AA7475-T761 is a high strength aluminum alloy which is used in key aircraft components. Maiden AA7475-T761 and AISI304 dissimilar joints were fabricated using friction stir welding. Welding was performed with tool having pin diameter of 4 mm and offset of 1.25 mm on Aluminum side. Tool rotational speed, traverse speed and shoulder diameter were varied in the range of 450–560 rpm, 50–63 mm/min, and 12–14 mm, respectively. Mechanical tests showed that joint formed with 14 mm diameter, 560 rpm and 50 mm/min gave the best joint efficiency of 71% of Al-alloy at 7.31% elongation. The materials mixing issues during processing were analyzed with SEM mircrostructure and fractography. Metallography also revealed that offset is critical to the success of joint as it controlled effective mixing of SS and Al in 15 and 85 vol.%, respectively. SS fragments from thermo-mechanically affected zone of SS were found to be partially sheared forming layer of thickness equal to tool traverse/revolution ratio.     

Improving the homogeneity and properties of ferrous powder mixes by a novel powder mixing process

Fe-2Cu-0.8C powder mixes were prepared by a wet mixing and spray-drying process using iron, copper, graphite and zinc stearate as main raw materials, and stearic acid, alcohol wax and amide wax as binders. The properties of the as-prepared binder treated powder mixes were investigated. The bonding efficiency of the binders was tested by measure the retention of graphite and copper in the powder mixes after dusting resistance test. The test results show that the wet mixing and spray-drying process can realise the bonding of different particles and improve processing properties of the powder mixes. A flow rate of 30.6?s/50?g and an apparent density of 3.18?g/cm³ were obtained for powder mixes with alcohol wax as binder. The results of dusting resistance test demonstrated that alcohol wax and amide wax have better bonding effect for Cu and graphite powders, respectively, which was reflected by the difference value of electronegativity between Fe, Cu, C elements and functional groups. Compared with mechanically mixing powder mixes, using binder treated powder mixes can also reduce the friction coefficient during compaction by 0.012–0.026. The addition of different binders also has a great influence on the properties of sintered parts.     

Adaptive GLR-, Rao- and Wald-based CFAR detectors for a subspace signal embedded in structured Gaussian interference

The problem of detecting a subspace signal embedded in subspace Gaussian interference and thermal noise is studied in this paper. In this problem, both the signal-independent and signal-dependent interferences are assumed to be present, therefore the overall interference subspace covers the signal subspace. The approach of this paper extends previous works involving either of those two kinds of interferences. A set of secondary data containing only interference plus noise is employed to estimate the interference covariance matrix and the noise power. Three new detectors are designed via the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR), Rao and Wald tests, respectively. Their probabilities of false alarms (PFAs) and detections are analytically derived. The PFAs show that the new detectors have the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) property against the interference and noise. Numerical results show that the new detectors outperform their counterparts for the studied problem. Furthermore, the new detectors are less sensitive to the secondary data size and to the mismatched subspace signal than some other detectors, such as the GLR detector (GLRD), the adaptive matched filter (AMF), the adaptive subspace detector (ASD), etc.