Control of calcium hexaluminate grain morphology in in-situ toughened ceramic composites

The influence of processing conditions on the morphology of calcium hexaluminate (CA₆) grains in Al₂O₃: 30 vol% CaO·6Al₂O₃ (CA₆) ceramic composites was investigated. Specimens were prepared by in-situ reaction sintering using precursor powders of alumina, and either calcium carbonate or calcium oxide. In some samples, 1 vol% anorthite glass was added as a sintering aid. X-ray diffraction was used to study the phase development in the as-calcined and sintered states. The resultant microstructures were characterized using both scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and imaging secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). It was found that the CA₆ grains developed a platelike morphology when CaCO₃ was used as the starting calcium-rich powder. In contrast, samples prepared using CaO resulted in equiaxed CA₆ grains. This result was observed to be independent of the anorthite glass addition. The findings are rationalized in terms of distinct CA₆ reaction mechanisms, resulting from differences in the reactivity of the powders during the early stages of calcining.Cement Nomenclature C CaO - A Al₂O₃     

An eight‐node hybrid‐stress solid‐shell element for geometric non‐linear analysis of elastic shells

This paper presents eight‐node solid‐shell elements for geometric non‐linear analysis of elastic shells. To subdue shear, trapezoidal and thickness locking, the assumed natural strain method and an ad hoc modified generalized laminate stiffness matrix are employed. A selectively reduced integrated element is formulated with its membrane and bending shear strain components taken to be constant and equal to the ones evaluated at the element centroid. With the generalized stresses arising from the modified generalized laminate stiffness matrix assumed to be independent from the ones obtained from the displacement, an extended Hellinger–Reissner functional can be derived. By choosing the assumed generalized stresses similar to the assumed stresses of a previous solid element, a hybrid‐stress solid‐shell element is formulated. Commonly employed geometric non‐linear homogeneous and laminated shell problems are attempted and our results are close to those of other state‐of‐the‐art elements. Moreover, the hybrid‐stress element converges more readily than the selectively reduced integrated element in all benchmark problems. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of adaptive routing schemes in multirate loss networks

As technology evolves, it is now feasible to implement sophisticated adaptive routing schemes on networks which support different kinds of services with heterogeneous bandwidth characteristics. Adaptive routing can increase the network throughput by routing calls to less congested paths. It can also be used to bypass transmission facility failures. In this paper, we analyze and compare two adaptive routing schemes. The first is called theMaximum mean time to blocking (MTB) routing which is based on themean time to blocking measure of a link. This measure captures the traffic rates, bandwidth characteristic and link capacity information and reflects more accurately the congestion status of different paths. The second is theM ² routing, which is a modification of the least loaded routing (LLR). Aggregation of link status information can significantly reduce signalling traffic. We show in this paper that with properly designed aggregation, the aggregatedM ² and MTB routings can have performance that approach that of the non-aggregated schemes. The use of complete sharing and restricted access policies together with trunk reservation control in multirate loss networks are also studied.     

Optical gain of interdiffused InGaAs-As and AlGaAs-GaAs quantumwells

We have analyzed theoretically the effects of interdiffusion on the gain, differential gain, linewidth enhancement factor, and the injection current density of In_0.2Ga_0.8As-GaAs and Al_0.3Ga_0.7As-GaAs quantum-well (QW) lasers. We have calculated the electron and hole subband structures including the effects of valence band mixing and strains. The optical gain is then calculated using the density matrix approach. Our results show that the gain spectrum can be blue-shifted without an enormous increase in the injected current density. Imposing an upper limit (416 A·cm^-2) on the injection current density for a typical laser structure, we find that the InGaAs-GaAs and AlGaAs-GaAs QW lasers can be blue-shifted by 24 and 54 mn, respectively. Our theoretical results compare well with the tuning ranges of 53 and 66 meV found for AlGaAs-GaAs QWs in some experiments. This indicates that the interdiffusion technique is useful for the tuning of laser operation wavelength for multiwavelength applications     

Triangular ray-tube analysis of dielectric lens antennas

A new method of analysis for the radiation characteristics of dielectric lens antennas with arbitrary inner and outer surfaces is presented. The analysis is based on representing the feed illumination by a contiguous set of ray tubes and including the effects of surface reflections and ray divergence. Radiation patterns and the antenna gain are then computed by evaluating the closed-form expressions developed for the Kirchhoff's integral of the aperture fields. The validity of the analysis method has been demonstrated by comparing the computations with measured results of two different spherical lenses and a shaped lens configurations. The analysis method presented takes into account some of the practical aspects associated with lens design such as surface zoning to reduce the mass and surface matching to minimize the reflection loss     

Feasibility study on the use of polyallyldiglycol-carbonate cell dishes in TUNEL assay for alpha particle radiobiological experiments

In the present work, we have studied the feasibility of a method based on polyallyldiglycol-carbonate (PADC) films to investigate the effects of alpha particles on HeLa cervix cancer cells. Thin PADC films with thickness of about 20 μm were prepared from commercially available CR-39 films by chemical etching to fabricate custom-made petri dishes for cell culture, which could accurately record alpha particle hit positions. A special method involving “base tracks” for aligning the images of cell nuclei and alpha particle hits has been proposed, so that alpha particle transversals of cell nuclei can be visually counted. Radiobiological experiments were carried out to induce DNA damages, with the TdT-mediated dUTP Nick-End Labeling (TUNEL) fluorescence method employed to detect DNA strand breaks. The staining results were investigated by flow cytometer. The preliminary results showed that more strand breaks occurred in cells hit by alpha particles with lower energies. Moreover, large TUNEL positive signals were obtained even with small percentages of cells irradiated and TUNEL signals were also obtained from non-targeted cells. These provided evidence for the bystander effect.     

Data mining of resilience indicators

In recent years, the Asia-Pacific region has experienced several financial setbacks, including speculative attacks in 1998 and the SARS outbreak in 2003. Financial stresses of this nature are unanticipated, and not all of the dangers can be predicted by the examination of market information and macroeconomic indicators. The Early Warning System (EWS) that has been adopted by the International Monetary Fund may not be able to predict future financial crises for all possible scenarios, because shocks come in many different forms. To supplement the EWS, this paper proposes a data mining framework to measure the resilience of an economy. The resilience framework does not predict a crisis, but rather assesses the current state of health of an economy and its ability to withstand a financial shock should one occur. The framework is based on a feedback system consisting of two stages. The first stage assigns a resilience score to each economy based on a fuzzy logic scoring scheme that is built on the ambiguous reasoning of experts. The second stage uses the classification tree approach to estimate thresholds for each economic indicator, and examines the quality of the fuzzy score. The result from the second stage is then passed back to the first stage as feedback. The final result is obtained when the feedback system reaches its equilibrium state. The proposed resilience framework is applied to the external-sector and the public-sector economies of several countries to illustrate its applicability.