Evaluation of hot hardness and creep of a 350 grade commercial maraging steel

The hardening response and the indentation creep of a 350 grade commercial maraging steel were evaluated using a hot hardness tester. The hardness versus temperature plot exhibited three distinct regions. Hardness response was noted between 500–800 K. The unusually high values of activation energy and stress exponent obtained during the creep experiment could be rationalized by a novel concept of introducing a back stress term in the indentation creep relation. The corrected value of the activation energy was found to be reasonably in agreement with the activation energy for diffusion of Ni in iron. Results are supplemented with microstructural observation.     

CMOS scaling into the nanometer regime

Starting with a brief review on 0.1-μm (100 nm) CMOS status, this paper addresses the key challenges in further scaling of CMOS technology into the nanometer (sub-100 nm) regime in light of fundamental physical effects and practical considerations. Among the issues discussed are: lithography, power supply and threshold voltage, short-channel effect, gate oxide, high-field effects, dopant number fluctuations and interconnect delays. The last part of the paper discusses several alternative or unconventional device structures, including silicon-on-insulator (SOI), SiGe MOSFET's, low-temperature CMOS, and double-gate MOSFET's, which may lead to the outermost limits of silicon scaling     

Evaluation of effect of hydrogen on toughness of Zircaloy-2 by instrumented drop weight impact testing

Hydride-assisted degradation in fracture toughness of Zircaloy-2 was evaluated by carrying out instrumented drop-weight tests on curved Charpy specimens fabricated from virgin pressure tube. Samples were charged to 60 ppm and 225 ppm hydrogen. Ductile-to-brittle-transition behaviour was exhibited by as-received and hydrided samples. The onset of ductile-to-brittle-transition was at about 130 °C for hydrided samples, irrespective of their hydrogen content. Dynamic fracture toughness (K_ID) was estimated based on linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) approach. For fractures occurring after general yielding, the fracture toughness was derived based on equivalent energy criterion. Results are supplemented with fractography. This simple procedure of impact testing appears to be promising for monitoring service-induced degradation in fracture toughness of pressure tubes.     

Optimal Path Problems with Second-Order Stochastic Dominance Constraints

This paper studies optimal path problems integrated with the concept of second order stochastic dominance. These problems arise from applications where travelers are concerned with the trade off between the risks associated with random travel time and other travel costs. Risk-averse behavior is embedded by requiring the random travel times on the optimal paths to stochastically dominate that on a benchmark path in the second order. A general linear operating cost is introduced to combine link- and path-based costs. The latter, which is the focus of the paper, is employed to address schedule costs pertinent to late and early arrival. An equivalent integer program to the problem is constructed by transforming the stochastic dominance constraint into a finite number of linear constraints. The problem is solved using both off-the-shelf solvers and specialized algorithms based on dynamic programming (DP). Although neither approach ensures satisfactory performance for general large-scale problems, the numerical experiments indicate that the DP-based approach provides a computationally feasible option to solve medium-size instances (networks with several thousand links) when correlations among random link travel times can be ignored.     

Energy-Efficient Thermal-Aware Autonomic Management of Virtualized HPC Cloud Infrastructure

Virtualized datacenters and clouds are being increasingly considered for traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads that have typically targeted Grids and conventional HPC platforms. However, maximizing energy efficiency and utilization of datacenter resources, and minimizing undesired thermal behavior while ensuring application performance and other Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for HPC applications requires careful consideration of important and extremely challenging tradeoffs. Virtual Machine (VM) migration is one of the most common techniques used to alleviate thermal anomalies (i.e., hotspots) in cloud datacenter servers as it reduces load and, hence, the server utilization. In this article, the benefits of using other techniques such as voltage scaling and pinning (traditionally used for reducing energy consumption) for thermal management over VM migrations are studied in detail. As no single technique is the most efficient to meet temperature/performance optimization goals in all situations, an autonomic approach that performs energy-efficient thermal management while ensuring the QoS delivered to the users is proposed. To address the problem of VM allocation that arises during VM migrations, an innovative application-centric energy-aware strategy for Virtual Machine (VM) allocation is proposed. The proposed strategy ensures high resource utilization and energy efficiency through VM consolidation while satisfying application QoS by exploiting knowledge obtained through application profiling along multiple dimensions (CPU, memory, and network bandwidth utilization). To support our arguments, we present the results obtained from an experimental evaluation on real hardware using HPC workloads under different scenarios.     

Valency of copper in 123 oxides

The valency of copper in freshly prepared as well asin situ high-temperature oxygen-treated 123 oxides was analysed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The results suggest the presence of Cu²⁺ and Cu³⁺ along with Cu⁺. This observation is supported by cyclic voltammograms of 123 oxides recorded in a formamide medium. The valence band of 1 23 oxides was probed using X-ray (MgK ) and ultraviolet (He-I) sources. It was observed that the Cu-O hybridized orbital in YBa₂Cu₃O_7–x responsible for conduction decreases with time in an ultrahigh vacuum and increases with oxygen treatment temperature.     

Surface properties of ZSM-5 modified by phosphorus

Phosphorus modification of ZSM-5 leads to extra framework P⁵⁺ and probably incorporation of +3 valence state of P in the framework. The resulting system has increased Brønsted acidity. Theoretical calculations also favour the postulate that phosphorus in +3 valence state can be incorporated into the lattice.     

Formation of Zinc–Antimony-Based Spinel Phases

Formation of spinel phases in ZnO–Sb₂O₃and ZnO–Sb₂O₃–Bi₂O₃systems is studied by the use of X-ray diffraction. The formation of nonstoichiometric Zn_2.33Sb_0.67O₄phase is observed in both the systems at ∼900°C. However, in these systems, at higher temperatures ( T ≥ 1100°C), formation of the inverse spinel phase Zn₇Sb₂O₁₂is observed. The study has been extended to understand the effect of CrO₃doping on the stability of the different spinel phases in the previously mentioned systems. Interestingly, in both the systems, samples doped with CrO₃, displayed the presence of Zn_2.33Sb_0.67O₄phase <1200°C, indicating the stabilization of the spinel phase by CrO₃.     

Disorder in cellulosic fibers

Ruland's concept of an isotropic disorder function is applied to estimate the disorder parameter and the degree of crystallinity in a few cellulosic fibers: two cottons, native ramie, and a high-tenacity rayon. The results indicate an increase in disorder without any change in crystallinity on mercerization of native celluloses. On hydrolysis, with or without a pretreatment of mercerization, the samples exhibit a higher crystallinity, disorder remaining the same as for native celluloses. A ball-milled sample of “amorphous” cellulose is still found to be fairly crystalline with the lowest disorder. On being wetted in water and oven-dried, a distorted form of cellulose II with higher crystallinity and disorder was obtained. The polynosic fiber, Tufcel, has low values for the degree of crystallinity, disorder parameter, as well as crystallite dimension. A strong dependence of the degree of crystallinity on the crystallite size, particularly the lateral, is observed.     

INVISCID LIQUID CIRCULATION IN BUBBLE COLUMNS

For circulation in axi-symmetric (cylindrical) bubble columns, the recently developed mathematical model^25,26 has been used along with the criterion of minimum circulation strength to determine the height of each circulation cell in a tall column. This is then used to derive a theoretical expression, first of its kind, for gas hold-up inside a bubble column. The predictions of this equation as well as the equation derived here for axial liquid velocity at column axis have been compared with available data and the comparison is found to be excellent for both the variables. An explicit relation is derived for the average liquid circulation velocity. The model is also used to derive an expression for liquid axial dispersion coefficient which compares almost exactly with Deckwer et al.'s⁴ correlation.

For circulation in two-dimensional bubble columns a new mathematical model is developed. The predictions of bubble envelope shape and bubble envelope area compare well with published data. The predictions of number of circulation cells in the horizontal direction also compare well with published data.