Industrial applications of computed tomography

The number of industrial applications of Computed Tomography (CT) is large and rapidly increasing. After a brief market overview, the paper gives a survey of state of the art and upcoming CT technologies, covering types of CT systems, scanning capabilities, and technological advances. The paper contains a survey of application examples from the manufacturing industry as well as from other industries, e.g., electrical and electronic devices, inhomogeneous materials, and from the food industry. Challenges as well as major national and international coordinated activities in the field of industrial CT are also presented.     

The implementation of an activity-based costing collaborative planning system for semiconductor backend production

While the market turns to an environment with low profit margins for semiconductor backend operations, it is hard for an independent firm to survive today. Forming strategic alliances or integrating an enterprise's internal firms by means of collaborative planning/operations to gain competitive advantage is inevitable. This paper presents the development of an activity-based costing collaborative production planning system (ABC/CPPS) to help production planners to estimate the manufacturing profit of semiconductor backend turnkey (combined IC assembly and testing) operational services at the early stage of order release to production line in a collaborative context. The estimation is under the real constraints of production resources. A predicate/transition net (Pr/Tr net) is used to simulate and implement the activity-based costing (ABC) model with the dynamic characteristics of a production line incorporated. A financial measure, profit, is used to supplement and indicate the consequence of the planning result and link the view to the enterprise's financial vision.     

Alloy Design,Combinatorial Synthesis,and Microstructure–Property Relations for Low-Density Fe-Mn-Al-C Austenitic Steels

We present recent developments in the field of austenitic steels with up to 18% reduced mass density. The alloys are based on the Fe-Mn-Al-C system. Here, two steel types are addressed. The first one is a class of low-density twinning-induced plasticity or single phase austenitic TWIP (SIMPLEX) steels with 25–30 wt.% Mn and <4–5 wt.% Al or even <8 wt.% Al when naturally aged. The second one is a class of κ-carbide strengthened austenitic steels with even higher Al content. Here, κ-carbides form either at 500–600°C or even during quenching for >10 wt.% Al. Three topics are addressed in more detail, namely, the combinatorial bulk high-throughput design of a wide range of corresponding alloy variants, the development of microstructure–property relations for such steels, and their susceptibility to hydrogen embrittlement.     

Disturbance attenuation of linear quadratic OL-Nash games on repetitive processes with smoothing on the gas dynamics

This article presents necessary and sufficient results for existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium of a N-player disturbed Nash game with quadratic performance criteria and an affine repetitive process with smoothing describing the two dimensional 2D-system dynamics, under open loop information pattern. The gas dynamics in a single pipeline is modelled in this theoretical framework, and an algorithm withdrawn from the exposed procedure to calculate the equilibrium point is applied to a simple network example.     

Influence of the Oxygen Partial Pressure on the Oxidation of Inconel 617 Alloy at High Temperature

Ni-based superalloy Inconel 617 (IN617) is one of the main candidate structural materials for high temperature components (heat exchanger) of the gas-cooled fast reactor (GFR), a possible candidate for generation IV nuclear reactor. The material in operating conditions will be exposed to impure He at a temperature of around 850 °C. The impurities are expected to be oxidizing (such as O₂, H₂O) but since no feedback experience is available for this type of reactor, the level of impurities is completely unknown. Hence, an attempt has been made to understand the influence of oxygen partial pressure on oxide composition and on the oxidation mechanisms of IN617 at 850 °C. To achieve this, oxidation tests were performed at 3 different range of partial pressure: 10^?5, 0.2 and 200 mbar. Tests were performed from 1 h to 28 days and the obtained oxide layers were characterized using MEB, EDX, XPS, XRD and GD-OES. The oxide layers were mainly composed of chromia containing TiO₂ and thickening with time. Aluminium oxide formed internally. Other oxides were detected in the scale, such as NiO, CoO, MoO₃ and MnO₂, except for the lowest oxygen partial pressure experiments, where a selective oxidation took place. The scale-growth mechanism was cationic for low and medium oxygen partial pressure conditions. A growth following a transient oxidation mechanism was observed for high oxygen partial pressure.     

Robust control design for precision positioning of a generic piezoelectric system with consideration of microscopic hysteresis effects

This study performs precision positioning of a generic piezoelectric structure against hysteresis effects by finite elements, microscopic hysteresis cancellation and robust H _?? compensation. The designed control algorithm is expected to be effective in enhancing servo performance of hard disk drives. The precision positioning is accomplished by adding a polarization term into the linear constitutive equations of piezoelectric materials. This polarization term is then described by the well-known Preisach model. Applying basic principles of finite elements and Hamilton??s thoery, the macroscopic governing equations of an arbitrary piezoelectric system in finite elements are obtained. Based on the macro-model, a controller consisting of two parts is designed to perform the precision positioning of a generic piezo-structure. The first part is responsible for direct hysteresis cancellation at the microscopic level, while the second one is a robust H _?? controller to overcome inevitable cancellation errors. In this way, the control effort is then more effective than the conventional PI and double-lead controller without microscopic hysteresis cancellation. A simple piezoelectric structure of a bender-bimorph cantilever beam is considered for designs and experimental validation. Based on experimental results, the proposed control design is found effective to suppress hysteresis effects as opposed to conventional controllers.     

Modeling the thermodynamics and kinetics of sulfuric acid-dimethylamine-water nanoparticle growth in the CLOUD chamber

Dimethylamine (DMA) has a stabilizing effect on sulfuric acid (SA) clusters, and the SA and DMA molecules and clusters likely play important roles in both aerosol particle formation and growth in the atmosphere. We use the monodisperse particle growth model for acid-base chemistry in nanoparticle growth (MABNAG) together with direct and indirect observations from the CLOUD4 and CLOUD7 experiments in the cosmics leaving outdoor droplets (CLOUD) chamber at CERN to investigate the size and composition evolution of freshly formed particles consisting of SA, DMA, and water as they grow to 20 nm in dry diameter. Hygroscopic growth factors are measured using a nano-hygroscopicity tandem differential mobility analyzer (nano-HTDMA), which combined with simulations of particle water uptake using the thermodynamic extended-aerosol inorganics model (E-AIM) constrain the chemical composition. MABNAG predicts a particle-phase ratio between DMA and SA molecules of 1.1–1.3 for a 2 nm particle and DMA gas-phase mixing ratios between 3.5 and 80 pptv. These ratios agree well with observations by an atmospheric-pressure interface time-of-flight (APi-TOF) mass spectrometer. Simulations with MABNAG, direct observations of the composition of clusters <2 nm, and indirect observations of the particle composition indicate that the acidity of the nucleated particles decreases as they grow from ～1 to 20 nm. However, MABNAG predicts less acidic particles than suggested by the indirect estimates at 10 nm diameter using the nano-HTDMA measurements, and less acidic particles than observed by a thermal desorption chemical ionization mass spectrometer (TDCIMS) at 10–30 nm. Possible explanations for these discrepancies are discussed.

Copyright © 2016 American Association for Aerosol Research     

THE COMPUTATION OF WAVELET-GALERKIN APPROXIMATION ON A BOUNDED INTERVAL

This paper describes exact evaluations of various finite integrals whose integrands involve products of Daubechies' compactly supported wavelets and their derivatives and/or integrals. These finite integrals play an essential role in the wavelet-Galerkin approximation of differential or integral equations on a bounded interval.