A comparison between isoparametric Lagrangian elements in 2D BEM

A comparison between a family of isoparametric C°-continucus elements in the context of two-dimensional elastostatics using the direct boundary element method is presented. The elements studied use Lagrangian shape functions of orders quadratic, cubic and quartic. The relative efficiencies of these elements from the viewpoint of accuracy of solution as well as cost effectiveness are examined through certain selected problems. It emerges from the present study that the quartic element is more reliable in accuracy than the lower members of the family without being necessarily more expensive.     

A Model for Flooding Prediction in Circular Tubes

Flooding phenomenon limits the stability and the flow of a liquid film falling along the walls of a channel in which a gas is flowing upwards.As known, the entrainment effect can completely prevent the liquid to fall from its natural flow. The present work proposes a new mechanistic model for the prediction of the onset of flooding in vertical and inclined pipes in the presence of obstructions, as well as taking into account the viscosity effect. The good performance of the model in the different geometrical conditions and for variable viscosities of the liquid component assesses the validity of the hypothesis that the instability of a wavelike disturbance limits the countercurrent flow in a channel.     

Studies on jute–asphalt composites

The tensile properties of jute make it a suitable raw material for asphalt overlay (A/O) fabric. In this study, the thermal stability of jute under conditions of asphalt overlaying process was investigated and the compatibility of jute with asphalt was assessed through experimentation on jute–asphalt composites under mechanical and hygral loads. Fourier transform infra red (FTIR) spectroscopic study revealed probable chemical bonding between jute and asphalt. The test for ascertaining the capability of asphalt encasement for protecting jute against biodegradation under enzymatic attack was found positive. A 6‐month hygral treatment, of the jute–asphalt composite, showed significant increase in modulus of the material. The results indicate that although the strength of jute deteriorates by about 10% under asphalt overlaying condition, the overall tensile behavior of jute fabric–asphalt composite material is considerably superior to that of the pure jute fabric, even under biological and extended hygral loading conditions. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 2008     

Group technology based adaptive cell formation using predator-prey genetic algorithm

In recent years, there has been a considerable growth of application of group technology in cellular manufacturing. This has led to investigation of the primary cell formation problem (CFP), both in classical and soft-computing domain. Compared to more well-known and analytical techniques like mathematical programming which have been used rigorously to solve CFPs, heuristic approaches have yet gained the same level of acceptance. In the last decade we have seen some fruitful attempts to use evolutionary techniques like genetic algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization to find solutions of the CFP. The primary aim of this study is to investigate the applicability of a fine grain variant of the predator-prey GA (PPGA) in CFPs. The algorithm has been adapted to emphasize local selection strategy and to maintain a reasonable balance between prey and predator population, while avoiding premature convergence. The results show that the algorithm is competitive in identifying machine-part clusters from the initial CFP matrix with significantly less number of iterations. The algorithm scaled efficiently for large size problems with competitive performance. Optimal cluster identification is then followed by removal of the bottleneck elements to give a final solution with minimum inter-cluster transition cost. The results give considerable impetus to study similar NP-complete combinatorial problems using fine-grain GAs in future.     

Abrasion Resistance of Field-Assisted Ion-Exchanged Glass

The fracture strength of HF-etched samples was measured as a function of field-assisted K-Na ion exchange depth, as well as the severity of abrasion. As expected, the more severe the abrasion, the greater the depth required to make the strength insensitive to abrasion. An abrasion-independent weakening mechanism that increased with exchange depth was also found to be operative.     

Efficient mining of discriminative co-clusters from gene expression data

Discriminative models are used to analyze the differences between two classes and to identify class-specific patterns. Most of the existing discriminative models depend on using the entire feature space to compute the discriminative patterns for each class. Co-clustering has been proposed to capture the patterns that are correlated in a subset of features, but it cannot handle discriminative patterns in labeled datasets. In certain biological applications such as gene expression analysis, it is critical to consider the discriminative patterns that are correlated only in a subset of the feature space. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, it presents an algorithm to efficiently find arbitrarily positioned co-clusters from complex data. Second, it extends this co-clustering algorithm to discover discriminative co-clusters by incorporating the class information into the co-cluster search process. In addition, we also characterize the discriminative co-clusters and propose three novel measures that can be used to evaluate the performance of any discriminative subspace pattern-mining algorithm. We evaluated the proposed algorithms on several synthetic and real gene expression datasets, and our experimental results showed that the proposed algorithms outperformed several existing algorithms available in the literature.     

Elevated temperature instrumented Charpy impact of a sintered silicon carbide

A commercially available, densely sintered alpha silicon carbide was tested in air from room temperature to 1700°C using a modified instrumented pendulum unit and standard Charpy size test specimens. The resistance heated silicon carbide specimens exhibited only elastic behavior, even at 1700°C. A compliance analysis of the test revealed a linear elastic decrease of the absorbed impact energy and also a decrease of the fracture stress of the silicon carbide with increasing temperature.