The Farmer, the Fairies, and the Computers

Using a temporary substitution of format, the author offers a fairy tale to demonstrate that we can’t expect understanding when computers take the place of humans in our interactions with service providers.     

The Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Schism

Isolating applied mathematics from computer science harms the profession and those who depend on it.     

Improved homogenization of Ni in sintered steels through the use of Cr-containing prealloyed powders

The homogenization of Ni in powder metal (PM) steel compacts is usually difficult even after high-temperature sintering at 1250°C. An earlier study by the authors demonstrated that this problem can be alleviated through the addition of 0.5 wt pct Cr in the form of stainless steel powders. To further improve the microstructure and mechanical properties of Ni-containing PM steels and to understand the mechanisms, an attempt was made in this study using the Fe-3Cr-0.5Mo prealloyed powder as the base material. The results showed that the distribution of the Ni additives was significantly improved. As a result, the tensile strength of the Fe-3Cr-0.5Mo-4Ni-0.5C compact sintered at 1250°C reached 1323 MPa. The elongation was higher than 1 pct. These sinter-hardened properties, which were attained using a slow furnace cooling rate, were comparable to those of the sinter-hardened alloys reported in the literature using accelerated cooling and were equivalent to those of the best quenched-and-tempered alloys registered in the Metal Powder Industries Federation (MPIF) standards. These improvements were attributed to the positive effect of Cr addition on alloy homogenization due to the reduction of the repelling effect between Ni and C, as was demonstrated through the thermodynamic analysis using the Thermo-Calc program.     

The effect of grain size, strain rate, and temperature on the mechanical behavior of commercial purity aluminum

Commercial purity aluminum AA1050 was subjected to equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE) that resulted in an ultrafine-grained (UFG) microstructure with an as-received grain size of 0.35 μm. This UFG material was then annealed to obtain microstructures with grain sizes ranging from 0.47 to 20 μm. Specimens were compressed at quasi-static, intermediate, and dynamic strain rates at temperatures of 77 and 298 K. The mechanical properties were found to vary significantly with grain size, strain rate, and temperature. Yield stress was found to increase with decreasing grain size, decreasing temperature, and increasing strain rate. The work hardening rate was seen to increase with increasing grain size, decreasing temperature, and increasing strain rate. The influence of strain rate and temperature is most significant in the smallest grain size specimens. The rate of work hardening is also influenced by strain rate, temperature, and grain size with negative rates of work hardening observed at 298 K and quasi-static strain rates in the smallest grain sizes and increasing rates of work hardening with increasing loading rate and grain size. Work hardening behavior is correlated with the substructural evolution of these specimens.     

Interview mit Hans-Christian Boos zum Thema „Unternehmertum in der IT-Branche“

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Sensor guided handling and assembly of active micro-systems

Positioning accuracies in the range of a few micrometers and below are necessary for the assembly of active micro-systems. In order to reach these accuracies, an assembly system for sensor guided micro-assembly is developed in the Collaborative Research Centre 516 “Design and manufacturing of active micro-systems”. The combination of a parallel robot with an integrated 3D vision sensor and a micro-gripper enables to reach relative positioning accuracies below 1 μm.     

Scalable and Structured Scheduling

Scheduling a program (i.e. constructing a timetable for the execution of its operations) is one of the most powerful methods for automatic parallelization. A schedule gives a blueprint for constructing a synchronous program, suitable for an ASIC or VLIW processor. However, constructing a schedule entails solving a large linear program. Even if one accepts the (experimental) fact that the Simplex is almost always polynomial, the scheduling time is of the order of a large power of the program size. Hence, the method does not scale well. The present paper proposes two methods for improving the situation. First, a large program can be divided into smaller units (processes), which can be scheduled separately. This is structured scheduling. Second, one can use projection methods for solving linear programs incrementally. This is specially efficient if the dependence graph is sparse.     

Comprehensive heat exchange model for a semiconductor laser diode

By measuring the total energy flow from an optical device, we can develop new design strategies for thermal stabilization. Here we present a comprehensive model for heat exchange between a semiconductor laser diode and its environment that includes the mechanisms of conduction, convection, and radiation. We perform quantitative measurements of these processes for several devices, deriving parameters such as a laser's heat transfer coefficient, and then demonstrate the feasibility of thermal probing for the nondestructive wafer-scale characterization of optical devices.     

Growing of Tubes with a Small Inner Diameter from the Melt by the Stepanov Method

A mathematical model is suggested for describing the growth of a crystal tube with a small inner diameter from the melt by the modified Stepanov method with the tube being affected by temperature pulses. The behavior of the inner and outer radii of the tube as a function of the amplitude and duration of temperature jumps is studied.     

Pilot: probabilistic lightweight group communication system for ad hoc networks

Providing reliable group communication is an ever recurring topic in distributed settings. In mobile ad hoc networks, this problem is even more significant since all nodes act as peers, while it becomes more challenging due to highly dynamic and unpredictable topology changes. In order to overcome these difficulties, we deviate from the conventional point of view, i.e., we "fight fire with fire," by exploiting the nondeterministic nature of ad hoc networks. Inspired by the principles of gossip mechanisms and probabilistic quorum systems, we present in this paper PILOT (probabilistic lightweight group communication system) for ad hoc networks, a two-layer system consisting of a set of protocols for reliable multicasting and data sharing in mobile ad hoc networks. The performance of PILOT is predictable and controllable in terms of both reliability (fault tolerance) and efficiency (overhead). We present an analysis of PILOT's performance, which is used to fine-tune protocol parameters to obtain the desired trade off between reliability and efficiency. We confirm the predictability and tunability of PILOT through simulations with ns-2.