The creep behaviour of ultra-high modulus polypropylene

The creep and recovery behaviour of highly drawn polypropylene monofilaments has been studied over the temperature range 20 to 50° C. A range of samples was examined to identify the influence of draw ratio and molecular weight. It is concluded that the permanent flow creep arises from the presence of two thermally activated processes, one of which relates to the -relaxation process and is associated with the crystalline regions of the polymer, and the second with the molecular network.     

The structure and properties of drawn blends of polyethylene and polypropylene

A series of highly oriented tapes has been prepared from a blend consisting of equal proportions of polyethylene and polypropylene. The mechanical properties and the structure and morphology of the samples have been investigated using DSC, optical microscopy, and wide angle and small angle diffraction, including measurements of crystal strain on samples under stress. It has been confirmed that the blend is incompatible, and a structural model has been proposed which is consistent with the observation that the polyethylene and polypropylene components act essentially independently in their response to external macroscopic stress.     

Studies on the lipids of sheep red blood cells. II. The incorporation of phosphorus into phospholipids of HK and LK cells

The incorporation of inorganic phosphate (as NaH₂PO₄) into the phospholipids of sheep red blood cells was studied in vitro in blood samples from five highpotassium (HK) and five low-potassium (LK) sheep. The erythrocytes from HK sheep incorporated more activity in 4 hr than those from the LK sheep. However no activity was incorporated into the major phospholipids of the cells (phosphatidyl ethanolamine, phosphatidyl serine, and sphingomyelin) of either group. The phosphatidic acid fraction was labeled in both groups and to a significantly greater extent in the HK samples. However the highest activity in the phospholipid of sheep red-cells was located in three unknown compounds not previously detected. Their specific activities were the same in the HK and the LK samples although they were present in slightly larger amounts in the HK samples. In general, incorporation was at a rather low level, and from stoichiometric considerations it was concluded that the metabolism in the red-cell phospholipids could not be directly involved in the active transport of ions across the cell membrane. This work also confirmed a previous report that no quantitative differences exist among the major phospholipid classes in the two types of cells.     

Silver Bullet Talks with Jeremiah Grossman

Silver Bullet Security Podcast host Gary McGraw interviews Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security, who is well known for his work in Web application security.     

CLUSTEREASY: A program for lattice simulations of scalar fields in an expanding universe on parallel computing clusters

We describe an MPI C++ program that we have written and made available for calculating the evolution of interacting scalar fields in an expanding universe on parallel clusters. The program is a parallel programming extension of the simulation program LATTICEEASY. The ability to run these simulations on parallel clusters, however, greatly extends the range of scales and times that can be simulated. The program is particularly useful for the study of reheating and thermalization after inflation. The program and its full documentation are available on the Web at http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Physics/fstaff/gfelder/latticeeasy/. In this paper we provide a brief overview of what the program does and what it is useful for.

Program summary

Program title: CLUSTEREASYCatalogue identifier: AEBJ_v1_0Program summary URL:http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEBJ_v1_0.htmlProgram obtainable from: CPC Program Library, Queen's University, Belfast, N. IrelandLicensing provisions: Standard CPC licence, http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/licence/licence.htmlNo. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 7469No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 613 334Distribution format: tar.gzProgramming language: C++/MPIComputer: Cluster. Must have the library FFTW installedOperating system: AnyRAM: Typically 4 MB to 1 GB per processorClassification: 1.9External routines: A single-precision version of the FFTW library (http://www.fftw.org/) must be available on the target machine.Nature of problem: After inflation the universe consisted of interacting fields in a high energy, nonthermal state [1]. The evolution of these fields cannot be described with standard approximation techniques such as linearization, kinetic theory, or Hartree expansion, and must thus be simulated numerically. Fortunately, the fields rapidly acquire large occupation numbers over a range of frequencies, so their evolution can be accurately modeled with classical field theory [2]. The specific fields and interactions relevant at these high energies are not known, so different models must be tested phenomenologically. In many cases, e.g., those involving symmetry breaking, the wide range of physical time and length scales in the problem requires parallel computing.Solution method: CLUSTEREASY solves the equations of motion for interacting scalar fields in an expanding universe. The user describes a particular theory by entering the field potential and its derivatives in a model file and the program then uses a staggered leapfrog method to evolve the field equations and Friedmann equation for the fields and the expansion of the universe. Different processors compute the evolution on subgrids defined by block decomposition, and the processors exchange edge data after each time step to allow for calculation of spatial derivatives.Restrictions: In its current form CLUSTEREASY only includes scalar fields and does not include metric perturbations. For 2D and 3D simulations the cluster must already have the (free) libraries FFTW installed.Additional comments: CLUSTEREASY is the parallel form of the program LATTICEEASY (AEAW_v1_0), Comp. Phys. Comm. 178 (2008) 929.Note: The default installation type for FFTW is double-precision so care must be taken to specify single-precision when running the “configure” file associated with the FFTW software package installation.Running time: The running time can range from minutes to weeks.References:[1] A.D. Linde, Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology, Harwood, Chur, Switzerland, 1990.[2] S. Khlebnikov, I. Tkachev, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77 (1996) 219, hep-ph/9603378.     

Composite bending-dominated hollow nanolattices: A stiff,cyclable mechanical metamaterial

Manufacturing ultralight and mechanical reliable materials has been a long-time challenge. Ceramic-based mechanical metamaterials provide significant opportunities to reverse their brittle nature and unstable mechanical properties and have great potential as strong, ultralight, and ultrastiff materials. However, the failure of ceramics nanolattice and degradation of strength/modulus with decreasing density are caused by buckling of the struts and failure of the nodes within the nanolattices, especially during cyclic loading. Here, we explore a new class of 3D ceramic-based metamaterials with a high strength–density ratio, stiffness, recoverability, cyclability, and optimal scaling factor. Deformation mode of the fabricated nanolattices has been engineered through the unique material design and architecture tailoring. Bending-dominated hollow nanolattice (B-H-Lattice) structure is employed to take advantages of its flexibility, while a few nanometers of carbonized mussel-inspired bio-polymer (C-PDA) is coherently deposited on ceramics’ nanolayer to enable non-buckling struts and bendable nodes during deformation, resulting in reliable mechanical properties and outperforming the current bending-dominated lattices (B-Lattices) and carbon-based cellulose materials. Meanwhile, the structure has comparable stiffness to stretching-dominated lattices (S-Lattices) while with better cyclability and reliability. The B-H-Lattices exhibit high specific stiffness (>10⁶?Pa·kg^?1·m^?3), low-density (～30?kg/m³), buckling-free recovery at 55% strain, and stable cyclic loading behavior under up to 15% strain. As one of the B-Lattices, the modulus scaling factor reaches 1.27, which is lowest among current B-Lattices. This study suggests that non-buckling behavior and reliable nodes are the key factors that contribute to the outstanding mechanical performance of nanolattice materials. A new concept of engineering the internal deformation behavior of mechanical metamaterial is provided to optimize their mechanical properties in real service conditions.     

Optimization of silicon solar cell fabrication based on neural network and genetic programming modeling

This study describes techniques for the cascade modeling and the optimization that are required to conduct the simulator-based process optimization of solar cell fabrication. Two modeling approaches, neural networks and genetic programming, are employed to model the crucial relation for the consecutively connected two processes in solar cell fabrication. One model (Model 1) is used to map the five inputs (time, amount of nitrogen and DI water in surface texturing and temperature and time in emitter diffusion) to the two outputs (reflectance and sheet resistance) of the first process. The other model (Model 2) is used to connect the two inputs (reflectance and sheet resistance) to the one output (efficiency) of the second process. After modeling of the two processes, genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization were applied to search for the optimal recipe. In the first optimization stage, we searched for the optimal reflectance and sheet resistance that can provide the best efficiency in the fabrication process. The optimized reflectance and sheet resistance found by the particle swarm optimization were better than those found by the genetic algorithm. In the second optimization stage, the five input parameters were searched by using the reflectance and sheet resistance values obtained in the first stage. The found five variables such as the texturing time, amount of nitrogen, DI water, diffusion time, and temperature are used as a recipe for the solar cell fabrication. The amount of nitrogen, DI water, and diffusion time in the optimized recipes showed considerable differences according to the modeling approaches. More importantly, repeated applications of particle swarm optimization yielded process conditions with smaller variations, implying greater consistency in recipe generation.     

Distribution-preserving statistical disclosure limitation

One approach to limiting disclosure risk in public-use microdata is to release multiply-imputed, partially synthetic data sets. These are data on actual respondents, but with confidential data replaced by multiply-imputed synthetic values. A mis-specified imputation model can invalidate inferences based on the partially synthetic data, because the imputation model determines the distribution of synthetic values. We present a practical method to generate synthetic values when the imputer has only limited information about the true data generating process. We combine a simple imputation model (such as regression) with density-based transformations that preserve the distribution of the confidential data, up to sampling error, on specified subdomains. We demonstrate through simulations and a large scale application that our approach preserves important statistical properties of the confidential data, including higher moments, with low disclosure risk.     

Silver Bullet Talks with Ed Amoroso

Gary McGraw interviews Ed Amoroso, AT&T's chief information security officer. Their conversation ranged widely, from system design to privacy.