Compatibilization mechanisms of nanoclays with different surface modifiers in UCST blends: Opposing effects on phase miscibility

The effects of organically modified and pristine nanoclays on the kinetics of thermodynamic equilibrium state attainment for semicrystalline binary blends of polyethylene (PE)/ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) have been investigated. Due to the non-equilibrium compatibilization mechanism, intercalated organoclay results in a slower rate of phase miscibility change at lower annealing temperatures, thereby worsening the PE/EVA compatibility state. In contrast to poorly dispersed pristine nanoclay, the homogeneous state is obtained at higher or equal rates by adding organoclay at higher annealing temperatures because of the dominant role of nanofiller equilibrium compatibilization mechanism. Phase diagrams of these UCST blends determined by a dynamic method shifts to higher temperatures by the incorporation of nanofillers and the unexpected reduction in miscibility window area is much more noticeable for nanocomposites having highly restricted molecular movements. This can verify that dynamic methods lose their efficiency for measuring the equilibrium phase diagram of polymer blends containing nanoparticles.     

CHARACTERIZATION OF EFFECTIVE TIRE CONTACT AREA FOR VARIOUS TREAD PATTERNS

The effective tire-pavement contact area affects the relative damage of asphalt pavement and should be incorporated in both mechanistic and empirical response analyses of pavements. A new machine called ROTOCOM Wheel Tracker (RCWT) was designed and fabricated to capture the effective tire contact area apart from slab compacting, and conducting simulative laboratory wheel tracking tests. The main focus of this paper is laboratory measurement of effective tire contact areas for various tread patterns. Seven tire treads were selected for the footprint image analyses at five tire loads and four tire inflation pressures. An image processing MATLAB-based program was coded to calculate the contact areas of the 280 imprints obtained from both sides of the RCWT. Factorial analysis indicated significant effects of tire tread, tire load, and inflation pressure on the resulting contact area. Comparison between effective and traditional contact areas indicated that the current pavement design procedure with traditional circular contact area extremely overestimates the actual tire-pavement contact area up to 92%.     

Thermal Transport in Disordered Materials

ABSTRACT

We review the status of research on thermal/phonon transport in disordered materials. The term disordered materials is used here to encompass both structural and compositional disorder. It includes structural deviations ranging from an ideal crystal with disordered arrangements of defects all the way to fully amorphous materials, as well as crystals with impurities up through multi-component random alloys. Both types of disorder affect phonons by breaking the symmetry of an idealized crystal and changing their character/mode shapes. These effects have important implications with regard to phonon–phonon interactions, phonon transport and phonon interactions with other quantum particles, which are being actively investigated. Herein, we synthesize the current theoretical understanding, identify the aspects of the problem that require more work, and pose open questions. Abbreviations: BTE: Boltzmann transport equation; DFT: Density functional theory; EPP: Eigenvector periodicity parameter; FAFDTR: Fiber-aligned frequency domain thermoreflectance; GK: Green–Kubo; GKMA: Green–Kubo modal analysis; HCACF: Heat current autocorrelation function; IXS: Inelastic X-ray scattering; LD: Lattice dynamics; LJ: Lennard–Jones; MD: Molecular dynamics; MFP: Mean free path; NEMD: Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics; NMD: Normal-mode dynamics; PDL: Propagon, diffuson, locon; PGM: Phonon gas model; PR: Participation ratio; SCLD: Supercell lattice dynamics; SED: Spectral energy density; TDTR: Time-domain thermoreflectance; VCA: Virtual crystal approximation;     

BUILDING USER TASK SPACE BY MINING TEMPORALLY PROXIMATE DESKTOP ACTIONS

Awareness of the user's current context, that is, the task the user resides in, can allow for various ways of supporting their work. In this article we present a novel approach for mining user's regular tasks on the basis of temporal proximity of users’ desktop actions without user intervention in a completely automatic, unobtrusive, and unsupervised manner. The proposed method is based on time-based clustering of a user's desktop actions and, in contrast to previous approaches, it does not enforce fixed time constraints on the mined actions, and typical transition times, when they exist, emerge from the logged activity data for that specific user. The performance of our technique was evaluated on a large data set of 724 days of desktop work by five knowledge workers. The results showed that our approach performed very well and was able to cluster those temporally proximate user actions that commonly used fix time window techniques fail to deal with. Notably, the main improvement is in the recall of the tasks, where our approach recalled 10.18% more actions than the predefined time window technique.     

Numerical simulation and optimization of steam-assisted gravity drainage with temperature,rate, and well distance control using an efficient hybrid optimization technique

Steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) is a thermal enhanced oil recovery technique through drilling of two horizontal wells. Effects of steam injection temperature, well rates, and their distance on oil recovery were analyzed and optimized. Steam temperature and well distances remarkably affect SAGD performance. Four metaheuristic algorithms (particle swarm optimization (PSO), imperialist competitive algorithm, cultural algorithm, and Bees algorithm) and pattern search optimization algorithm (PSA) are used for optimization. PSO performs better than other metaheuristics and PSA is the fastest one, while it is probable to be trapped in local optimums. Hybrid PSO-PS is proposed that starts with PSO and proceeds with PSA, and tested in an SAGD project and showed excellence over other techniques.