Wear and Life Characteristics of Microwave-Sintered Copper-Graphite Composite

Copper-graphite composite is an important tribological material used in electrical sliding contact applications like electrical brushes in motors and generators. The electrical sliding contact experiences multiple stresses such as mechanical pressure and temperature. Traditional life tests under normal operating condition would be a time-consuming process due to the longer expected life of the composite. Accelerated wear testing was carried out to evaluate the life characteristics of the composite. This work focuses on evaluation of tribological performance of microwave-sintered copper-graphite composite using accelerated wear testing methodology using high temperature pin-on-disc tribometer. Microstructural studies of worn out surfaces were carried out using SEM with EDAX. Reliability and analysis on life characteristics were performed on the time-to-failure data using temperature-nonthermal-accelerated life-stress model. The obtained times-to-failure data from the accelerated wear testing was extrapolated to normal usage condition. Temperature and pressure are significantly affecting the wear performance. Self-lubricating action of graphite and improvement in wear resistance is helpful in extending the life of copper graphite composite. The life of the composite obtained through testing at mean and 99% reliability are 18,725 and 16,950 h, respectively.     

Sintering mechanism of CoCrFeMnNi high-entropy alloy powders

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) have emerged as a new alloy system, with many attractive properties. Among the fabrication routes, mechanical alloying followed by sintering, have been widely used. However, sintering mechanisms of HEA powders have not yet been fully understood. This work attempts to understand the sintering kinetics of CoCrFeNiMn HEA powders. A comparative study has been done on CoCrFeNiMn alloy powders on as-milled and annealed conditions, which revealed different sintering behaviours. Decreasing densification rates with increasing activation energies were observed through dilatometry after the annealing treatment. Combined diffusion coefficients and activation energies analysed through the sintering models indicate that during sintering of the as-milled powder, mass transport occurred through several modes. On the other hand, the annealed CoCrFeNiMn alloy powder (which was nearly single phase) clearly reveals volume diffusion as the controlling mechanism during sintering. It was characterised with large activation energy.

Special theme block on high entropy alloys, guest edited by Paula Alvaredo Olmos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and Sheng Guo, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden.     

A framework for cost evaluation in product service system configuration

Configuration systems are increasingly used as a means for efficient design of customised product service systems (PSS) to satisfy diverse customer needs. Cost evaluation is thereby important to assist the configuration engineers in making decisions on feasible configuration solutions. However, little research attention has been received until recently. To fill this gap, this paper contributes in developing a framework for cost evaluation in PSS configuration. A holistic view of PSS configuration, the three-dimensional PSS cost element, and a life cycle-oriented cost evaluation approach are successively proposed. The framework is thereby established with a number of parts, including the preparatory stage, the evaluation stage and the configuration stage. A pump PSS is illustrated to validate the developed framework. Four feasible configuration solutions in one configuration activity are evaluated and compared. The configuration engineers are thus assisted with the decision on selecting the one with the least cost.     

Analysis of EEG signals and its application to neuromarketing

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Marketing and promotions of various consumer products through advertisement campaign is a well known practice to increase the sales and awareness amongst the...     

Semiconductor applications of plasma immersion ion implantation technology

Many semiconductor integrated circuit manufacturing processes require high dose of implantation at very low energies. Conventional beam line ion implantation system suffers from low beam current at low energies, therefore, cannot be used economically for high dose applications. Plasma immersion ion implantation (PIII) is emerging as a potential technique for such implantations. This method offers high dose rate irrespective of implantation energy. In the present study nitrogen ions were implanted using PIII in order to modify the properties of silicon and some refractory metal films. Oxidation behaviour of silicon was observed for different implantation doses. Diffusion barrier properties of refractory barrier metals were studied for copper metallization.     

Effect of dietary fat on colonic protein kinase C and induction of aberrant crypt foci

A major objective of the present study was to determine whether a high-fat diet affects early events during colon carcinogenesis. Female Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with saline or azoxymethane (20 mg/kg) and fed either a normal (5% corn oil w/w) or a high (5% corn oil and 15% beef tallow w/w) fat diet. To assess the effect of a known tumor-promoting diet on the early events of neoplastic transformation, Study 1 examined the induction and growth of aberrant crypt foci (ACF) as well as of proliferative indices. The total number of ACF were similar in both groups even after 8 wk of dietary treatment; however, ACF with accelerated growth characteristics (≥4 crypts/focal lesions) were more prevalent (P≤0.05) in the colons of animals fed the high-fat diet. Metaphase arrest cells and 5′-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine labelled cells showed no appreciable response to dietary changes. To determine whether changes in colonic signal transduction pathways represent an early response to dietary modification, Study 2 evaluated the activity of protein kinase C (PKC), proliferative indices and changes in phospholipid fatty acid profiles. In comparison to the normal fat group, the colons of high-fat fed animals exhibited higher (P≤0.05) membranes and lower soluble PKC activity; however, proliferation patterns of these colons were not altered. Changes in the membrane lipid composition were minor; however, an increase in the phosphatidylcholine/phosphatidylethanolamine ratio and in 20∶4n−6 was noted. Our results demonstrate that in comparison to a normal-fat diet, a high-fat diet stimulated the growth of a population of ACF, i.e., preneoplastic lesions leading to advanced growth characteristics. In addition, a high-fat diet exerted a marked influence on total, cytosolic and membrane associated PKC activities. The findings suggest that modulation of PKC may play a critical role at the early stages of colon carcinogenesis. This work was presented by L.M.Z. Lafave as a recipient of the Honored Student Award at the American Oil Chemists' Society annual meeting, Anaheim, California, 1993. L.M.Z. Lafave is the recipient of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship.     

Predicting RF coverage in large environments using ray-beam tracing and partitioning tree represented geometry

We present a system for efficient prediction of RF power distribution in site specific environments using a variation of ray tracing, which we calledray-beam tracing. The simulation results were validated against measured data for a number of large environments with good statistical correlation between the two. We represent geometric environments in full 3D which facilitates rooftop deployment along with any other 3D locations. We use broadcast mode of propagation, whose cost increases more slowly with an increase in the number of receiving bins. The scheme works well both for indoor and outdoor environments. Simple ray tracing has a major disadvantage in that adjacent rays from a transmitter diverge greatly after large path lengths due to multiple reflections, such that arbitrarily large geometric entities could fall in between these rays. This results in asampling error problem. The error increases arbitrarily as the incident angle approaches 90°. The problem is addressed by introducing the notion of beams while retaining the simplicity of rays for intersection calculations. A beam is adaptively split into child beams to limit the error. A major challenge for computational efficiency is to quickly determine the closest ray-surface intersection. We achieve this by using partitioning trees which allows representation of arbitrarily oriented polygonal environments. We also use partitioning trees for our full 3D interactive visualization along with interactive placement of transmitters, receiving bins, and querying of power.     

Failure-aware resource provisioning for hybrid Cloud infrastructure

Hybrid Cloud computing is receiving increasing attention in recent days. In order to realize the full potential of the hybrid Cloud platform, an architectural framework for efficiently coupling public and private Clouds is necessary. As resource failures due to the increasing functionality and complexity of hybrid Cloud computing are inevitable, a failure-aware resource provisioning algorithm that is capable of attending to the end-users quality of service (QoS) requirements is paramount. In this paper, we propose a scalable hybrid Cloud infrastructure as well as resource provisioning policies to assure QoS targets of the users. The proposed policies take into account the workload model and the failure correlations to redirect users’ requests to the appropriate Cloud providers. Using real failure traces and a workload model, we evaluate the proposed resource provisioning policies to demonstrate their performance, cost as well as performance–cost efficiency. Simulation results reveal that in a realistic working condition while adopting user estimates for the requests in the provisioning policies, we are able to improve the users’ QoS about 32% in terms of deadline violation rate and 57% in terms of slowdown with a limited cost on a public Cloud.     

Secure Data Sharing with Confidentiality,Integrity and Access Control in Cloud Environment

Cloud storage is an incipient technology in today’s world. Lack of security in cloud environment is one of the primary challenges faced these days. This scenario poses new security issues and it forms the crux of the current work. The current study proposes Secure Interactional Proof System (SIPS) to address this challenge. This methodology has a few key essential components listed herewith to strengthen the security such as authentication, confidentiality, access control, integrity and the group of components such as AVK Scheme (Access List, Verifier and Key Generator). It is challenging for every user to prove their identity to the verifier who maintains the access list. Verification is conducted by following Gulliou-Quisquater protocol which determines the security level of the user in multi-step authentication process. Here, RSA algorithm performs the key generation process while the proposed methodology provides data integrity as well as confidentiality using asymmetric encryption. Various methodological operations such as time consumption have been used as performance evaluators in the proposed SIPS protocol. The proposed solution provides a secure system for firm data sharing in cloud environment with confidentiality, authentication and access control. Stochastic Timed Petri (STPN) Net evaluation tool was used to verify and prove the formal analysis of SIPS methodology. This evidence established the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in secure data sharing in cloud environment.