ENTOREL Database for electronic components under gamma radiation-adescription

The ENTOREL Database for radiation stressed electronic components and systems has been established to collate data on high doses (aiming at Mega Grays) which meet the requirements of advanced teleoperators working in hazardous or disordered nuclear environments within the frame of a European telerobotics programme for the nuclear industry. The ENTOREL Database holds data from 614 tests on total dose effects     

Mathematical modeling and computer simulation of the rotating impeller particle flotation process: Part II. Particle agglomeration and flotation

Effective removal of unwanted particles from a molten metal alloy by flotation relies on purging a gas into the melt through a rotating impeller. This device is commonly known as a rotary degasser. Unwanted particles in the melt attach to the rising gas bubbles and rise to the slag layer where they are removed from the metal bulk. In addition, the turbulence created by the rotating impeller causes the randomly distributed solid particles to agglomerate into relatively large clusters. These clusters float up or settle down due to the difference between their density and that of the melt. A mathematical model has been developed to describe the particle dynamics and particle agglomeration that occur during the rotary degassing of aluminum melts. While previous investigations addressed particle collisions in low intensity turbulent fields where the size of the colliding particles is smaller than the Kolmogorov length scale, this model is more encompassing as it considers both low intensity and high intensity turbulence. Consequently, this model is more representative of a typical industrial rotary degassing operation.     

Mathematical modeling of falling liquid film evaporation process

A mathematical model of evaporation process from a laminar falling liquid film on a vertical plate of constant temperature is presented. The model is developed with and without interfacial shear stress due to the vapor flow at the liquid film surface. The vapor pressure drop, vapor exit velocity and cooling rate are calculated for different liquid mass flow values. It is shown that lower liquid mass flow produces higher cooling rate. The results also show that the interfacial shear stress has a considerable negative effect on the cooling rate. It is proved that there exists an optimum distance between the plates, which gives the maximum volumetric cooling rate.     

Makespan estimation and order acceptance in batch process industries when processing times are uncertain

Batch process industries are characterized by complex precedence relationships between operations, which renders the estimation of an acceptable workload very difficult. A detailed schedule based model can be used for this purpose, but for large problems this may require a prohibitive large amount of computation time. We propose a regression based model to estimate the makespan of a set of jobs. We extend earlier work based on deterministic processing times by considering Erlang-distributed processing times in our model. This regression-based model is used to support customer order acceptance. Three order acceptance policies are compared by means of simulation experiments: a scheduling policy, a workload policy and a regression policy. The results indicate that the performance of the regression policy can compete with the performance of the scheduling policy in situations with high variety in the job mix and high uncertainty in the processing times. Correspondence to: C.V. Ivanescu     

Tunneling spectroscopy of palladium-barium emitters

The surface of a palladium-barium cathode was studied using scanning probe microscopy techniques. Data from the tunneling spectroscopy showed the pattern of the electron work function distribution over a microscopic region on the emitter surface. This pattern is compared to the distribution of various phases in the palladium-barium alloy employed.