Microstructural effects on ductile fracture in heterogeneous materials. Part I: Sensitivity analysis with LE-VCFEM

Ductile failure of heterogeneous materials, such as cast aluminum alloys and discretely reinforced aluminums or DRA’s, initiates with cracking, fragmentation or interface separation of inclusions, that is followed by propagation in the matrix by a ductile mechanism of void nucleation and growth. Damage localizes in bands of intense plastic deformation between inclusions and coalesces into a macroscopic crack leading to overall failure. Ductile fracture is very sensitive to the local variations of the microstructure morphology. This is the first of a two part paper on the effect of microstructural morphology and properties on the ductile fracture in heterogeneous ductile materials. In this paper the locally enhanced Voronoi cell finite element method (LE-VCFEM) for rate-dependent porous elastic–viscoplastic materials is used to investigate the sensitivity of strain to failure to loading rates, microstructural morphology and material properties. A model is also proposed for strain to failure, incorporating the effects of important morphological parameters.     

Preparation of dehydroxylated and delaminated talc: Meta-talc

The roentgen-amorphous delaminated and dehydroxylated phase was prepared applying intensive milling procedure and subsequent thermal treatment of talc. Due to the similarity in properties and in thermal behavior of this material with roentgen-amorphous delaminated and dehydroxylated kaolinite phase, i.e. meta-kaolinite, the name meta-talc was suggested for this material. The properties and the behavior during thermal treatment were investigated using thermal analysis, x-ray diffraction analysis, infrared spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The suggested procedure changes the activation energy of dehydroxylation, the behavior during thermal treatment and the phase composition of the product. The kinetics and thermodynamics of the thermal transition were evaluated using Kissinger equation and Eyering law.     

Intensification of biodiesel production from vegetable oils using ultrasonic-assisted process: Optimization and kinetic

Intensification of biodiesel production process using low frequency ultrasonic irradiation (20 kHz, 200 W) is elucidated in this study. Effects of five process variables in an ultrasonic-assisted reactor catalyzed by SrO through transesterification of vegetable oils are investigated. RSM was employed and the optimum conditions were at an ultrasonic pulse on of 9 s followed by 2 s of pulse off within a reaction time of 30.7 min. The optimum ultrasonic power was found to be 130 W using an oil amount of 52 g (R² = 0.97). The model was applicable to different types of oil with errors less than 10%. FFA content was responsible for the different yields obtained with different oils. Three steps of the transesterification process were measured to obtain the kinetic study. The results revealed that the reaction followed a second-order kinetic. The activation energies varied between 70.63 kJ/mol and 136.93 kJ/mol showing relatively high coefficient of determinations.     

THERMOELASTICITY AND HEAT CONDUCTION WITH MEMORY EFFECTS

The thermodynamical foundations of generalized thermoelasticity formulated by Lord and Shulman are reviewed and memory effects on the heat flux are generalized. An existence and uniqueness theorem for the evolution integro-differential equations is obtained using semi-group theory.     

Photocatalytic performance of S doped TiO2 in relation to processing conditions: calcination temperature and heating rate

Abstract

The effect of different heating profiles on the photocatalytic performance of sulphur doped TiO₂ photocatalysts is reported. The photocatalysts were synthesised by a sol–gel method using thiourea as the dopant precursor and characterised using X-ray diffraction, elemental analysis and reflection measurements. The degradation of dichloroacetic acid, under indirect sunlight and visible light irradiation, was used to determine the photocatalytic performance of the synthesised materials. A number of different commercial photocatalysts were used as comparative standards. In all the studied specimens, anatase TiO₂ was the dominant crystalline type. Additionally, compared with undoped TiO₂ and commercial standards, significant absorption into the visible region (400–470 nm) was observed for the modified TiO₂.     

Defining and controlling the heterogeneity of a cluster: The Wrekavoc tool

The experimental validation and the testing of solutions that are designed for heterogeneous environments are challenging. We introduce Wrekavoc as an accurate tool for this purpose: it runs unmodified applications on emulated multi-site heterogeneous platforms. Its principal technique consists in downgrading the performance of the platform characteristics in a prescribed way. The platform characteristics include the compute nodes themselves (CPU and memory) and the interconnection network for which a controlled overlay network above the homogeneous cluster is built. In this article we describe the tool, its performance, its accuracy and its scalability. Results show that Wrekavoc is a very versatile tool that is useful to perform high-quality experiments (in terms of reproducibility, realism, control, etc.).     

Selectivity enhancement in the catalytic heterogeneous hydrogenation of limonene in supercritical carbon dioxide by an ionic liquid

Ionic liquids as coated catalysts or additives tremendously alter the selectivity pattern of the heterogeneous solid catalyst in the selective hydrogenation of limonene. The conventional monometallic ruthenium over alumina catalyst combined with an ionic liquid enables the one-pot synthesis of the intermediate p-menthene through limonene hydrogenation in supercritical carbon dioxide. Among eight screened imidazolium ILs, [C₁₀mim]NTf₂ was employed as additive, or as the coating agent of ruthenium catalyst in the reaction under supercritical conditions.The coating of the heterogeneous catalyst allows the selective production of p-menthene and increases the conversion level of limonene (>99%) compared to the conversion of limonene in the reaction carried out in the presence of an ionic liquid as an additive. Results of the catalyst recycling indicate that there is no depletion of catalyst reactivity even after four successive cycles of operation under the studied reaction conditions. Further hydrogenation of p-menthene is strongly inhibited by employing an ionic liquid. The solubility of limonene or p-menthene in an ionic liquid governs the selective hydrogenation of limonene towards p-menthene.     

Clutter suppression method for heterogeneous environment

Clutter suppression is a key process in ground moving target indication (GMTI). Adaptive filtering is an effective method for clutter suppression but the performance degrades severely in heterogeneous clutter environment. To solve this problem, a new clutter suppression method is proposed. The approach uses subspace tracking technique to update clutter subspace of different clutter patches which may mitigating the heterogeneous effects. Simulation results illustrate that the method performs well when lacking of the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples.     

Kinetic parameter estimation and simulation of trickle-bed reactor for hydrodesulfurization of crude oil

Hydrodesulfurization (HDS) of crude oil has not been reported widely in the literature and it is one of the most challenging tasks in the petroleum refining industry. In order to obtain useful models for HDS process that can be confidently applied to reactor design, operation and control, the accurate estimation of kinetic parameters of the relevant reaction scheme are required. In this work, an optimization technique is used in order to obtain the best values of kinetic parameters in trickle-bed reactor (TBR) process used for hydrodesulfurization (HDS) of crude oil based on pilot plant experiment. The optimization technique is based on minimization of the sum of the square errors (SSE) between the experimental and predicted concentrations of sulfur compound in the products using two approaches (linear (LN) and non-linear (NLN) regressions).A set of experiments were carried out in a continuous flow isothermal trickle-bed reactor using crude oil as a feedstock and the commercial cobalt–molybdenum on alumina (Co–Mo/γ-Al₂O₃) as a catalyst. The reactor temperature was varied from 335 to 400 °C, the hydrogen pressure from 4 to 10 MPa and the liquid hourly space velocity (LHSV) from 0.5 to 1.5 h⁻¹, keeping constant hydrogen to oil ratio (H₂/oil) at 250 L/L.A steady-state heterogeneous model is developed based on two-film theory, which includes mass transfer phenomena in addition to many correlations for estimating physiochemical properties of the compounds. The hydrodesulfurization reaction is described by Langmuir–Hinshelwood kinetics. gPROMS software is employed for modelling, parameter estimation and simulation of hydrodesulfurization of crude oil in this work. The model simulations results were found to agree well with the experiments carried out in a wide range of the studied operating conditions. Following the parameter estimation, the model is used to predict the concentration profiles of hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide and sulfur along the catalyst bed length in gas, liquid and solid phase, which provides further insight of the process.     

Untersuchungen zur heterogenen Kondensation von Wasserdampf in Membrankontaktoren

Heterogeneous condensation can contribute to improve the separation efficiency of airborne particles. Submicron particles can be separated due to inertial impaction when particle mass is previously enlarged sufficiently by water vapor condensation. This paper presents a novel, membrane‐based process for creating the requisite supersaturation for condensation. The increase of the particle size based on vapor condensation is detected by a new inline measuring technique.