Review on testers for measuring flow properties of bulk solids

 The author was asked by the International Fine Particle Research Institue (IFPRI) to write a critical review on shear testers for IFPRI-members. The review was delivered to IFPRI in summer 1999. Following the contract with IFPRI it was not allowed to publish the review elsewhere for at least two years. Granular Matter invited the author to submit the review in the original form; during the refereeing process (besides other changes) it turned out that some remarks should be added here for clarification: - Since 1999, the author is not aware of a really new device for testing bulk solid properties, which could lead to a change of the general comments and conclusions provided in the review. It was argued, that the review is referring too much to the work of Jenike, while the works of Johanson and Peschl were not adequately cited. Both are excellent engineers with a lot of experience, but their basic ideas are not available in published form, and if, they are not set in relation to alternative approaches so that an objective comparison in detail would be a future research issue rather than a topic in this report. A discussion on the influence of electrostatic charges was missing. There hardly is an influence, since the particles are in continuous contact. Only with non-conducting plastic particles electrostatic charges could cause problems. But no relevant experiments and results are known. In closed systems, the effect of electric charges is thus mainly neglected, but it is clear that electrostatic forces are eminent in flows with a free surface – an issue not addressed in this review. Received: 1 November 2002     

Combined time and wavelength multiplexing technique of optical fiber grating sensor arrays using commercial OTDR equipment

The use of a commercial optical time domain reflectometry device for simultaneous wavelength and time domain multiplexing of fiber-optic Bragg grating sensors is proposed and demonstrated. The realization of such systems provides an inexpensive way of interrogating several hundreds of sensors in a single fiber. Strain resolution of 30 /spl mu/m/m over a strain measuring range of 0.5% was obtained.     

Effect of deformation route on microstructural development in aluminum processed by equal channel angular extrusion

Aluminum has been deformed by equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE) to obtain submicron-grained structures under different deformation routes. The deformation routes were varied by rotating billets through 0, 90, and 180 deg between each extrusion pass, and were designated as route A, B_C, and C, respectively. Based on quantitative microstructural analysis, the effectiveness of the deformation route is shown to depend upon the different definition used. The order of effectiveness is (a) A > B_C > C for both 90 and 120 deg dies, in terms of the generation of high-angle grain boundaries (HAGBs); (b) B_C > C > A for both 90 and 120 deg dies, in terms of the formation of equiaxed shape of grains; and (c) B_C > A > C for 90 deg die and B_C ∼ A > C for 120 die, in terms of reducing grain size. It is suggested that the generation of HAGBs can be related to the accumulation of nonredundant strain, while the shape and orientation of grains may be linked to the shearing patterns of the deformation route.     

Copper-zirconium tungstate composites exhibiting low and negative thermal expansion influenced by reinforcement phase transformations

A fully-dense Cu-75 vol pct ZrW₂O₈ metal matrix composite was fabricated by hot isostatic pressing of Cu-coated ZrW₂O₈ particles. A small amount of the high-pressure γ-ZrW₂O₈ phase was created during the cooldown and depressurization following densification; near complete transformation to γ-ZrW₂O₈ was achieved by subsequent cold isostatic pressing. The thermal expansion behavior of the composite between 25°C and 325°C was altered by the cold isostatic pressing treatment, and also depended on the length of time that had passed between thermal cycles. The measured thermal expansion coefficients within specific temperature ranges varied from −6·10⁻⁶ K⁻¹ to far above the thermal expansion coefficient of the copper matrix. The complex temperature-dependent expansion/contraction behavior could be justified by considering the evolution of phase transformations taking place in the ZrW₂O₈ phase, which were observed by in-situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction measurements.     

High-performance single-mode VCSELs in the 1310-nm waveband

High-performance vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) emitting in the 1310-nm waveband are fabricated by bonding AlGaAs-GaAs distributed Bragg reflectors on both sides of a InP-based cavity. A 2-in wafer bonding process is optimized to produce very good on-wafer device parameter uniformity. Carrier injection is implemented via double intracavity contact layers and a tunnel junction. A 1.2-mW single-mode output power is obtained in the temperature range of 20/spl deg/C-80/spl deg/C. Modulation capability at 3.2 Gb/s is demonstrated up to 70/spl deg/C. Overall VCSEL performance complies with the requirements of the 10 GBASE-LX4 IEEE.802.3ae standard, which opens the way for novel applications of VCSELs emitting in the 1310-nm band.     

Perturbation analysis and control of two-class stochastic fluid models for communication networks

This paper uses stochastic fluid models (SFMs) for the control and optimization (rather than performance analysis) of communication network nodes processing two classes of traffic: one is uncontrolled and the other is subject to threshold-based buffer control. We derive gradient estimators for packet loss and workload related performance metrics with respect to threshold parameters. These estimators are shown to be unbiased and directly observable from a sample path without any knowledge of underlying stochastic characteristics of the traffic processes. This renders them computable in online environments and easily implementable for network management and control. We further demonstrate their use in buffer control problems where our SFM-based estimators are evaluated based on data from an actual system.     

Anaerobic biodecolorization of textile reactive anthraquinone and phthalocyanine dyebaths under hypersaline conditions.

The biological decolorization of two industrial, spent textile reactive dyebaths was investigated using a suspended-growth, halophilic mixed culture fed with glucose. Dyebath I contained mainly Reactive Blue 19 (RB19), an anthraquinone dye, whereas dyebath II contained mainly Reactive Blue 21 (RB21), a phthalocyanine dye. Batch assays under anaerobic conditions with the two neutralized dyebaths resulted in 87 and 37% extent of decolorization for dyebaths I and II, respectively. The rate of glucose utilization and the extent of acetate production were impacted in the presence of each dyebath as compared to the control culture. However, dyebath decolorization occurred despite moderate culture inhibition. Reuse of a biologically renovated RB19-containing dyebath in the dyeing process resulted in reproducible but not identical cotton fabric shades as compared to a standard dyeing (i.e., control) using fresh water. This difference is attributed to a variable degree of RB19 aggregation during the dyeing process and is not related to the efficiency of the biodecolorization process. Further improvement of the redyeing efficiency will lead to the development of an in-plant, closed-loop decolorization system resulting in significant water conservation and minimization of textile pollutants such as salt and dyes.     

Parametric modeling of somatosensory evoked potentials

In this paper, we examine methods of characterizing somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP's) in both the time and frequency domains. We have found that the truncated impulse response (TIR) method produced an accurate time domain model of the SEP signals at model orders greatly reduced from the original state space matrix. The TIR method was valuable for smoothing signals that were slightly corrupted by noise. In this case, the simulated data sequence was close to the original data sequence in the mean squared error sense. For signals that were greatly corrupted by noise, the TIR method was not able to perform as well. Therefore, the TIR method was not a feature extraction method but was valuable for data simulation. In the frequency domain, we have used the autoregressive moving average model (ARMA) to parameterize the SEP signal. An overdetermined set of Yule-Walker equations was created to determine the autoregressive (AR) parameters of the original data with the model order established by the singular value decomposition. From these AR parameters, a residual time series was generated which was used to find the moving average parameters. The resulting ARMA model was used to produce a simulated data sequence. The frequency domain characteristics of the simulated sequence and the corresponding power spectral density of the ARMA filter were very close to the periodogram of the original data sequence. Accurate parameterization was achieved for the SEP waveforms at low filter lengths.