Measurements of frequencies and spatial correlations of coherent structures in rod bundle flows

Cross-wire anemometry was used to identify and characterize coherent flow pulsations in isothermal air flow near the gap regions of a five-rod bundle with a design pitch-to-diameter ratio of 1.149 and contained in a quasi-trapezoidal duct. It was confirmed that such pulsations are quasi-periodic and contribute significantly to the velocity fluctuations across the gap. The frequency of pulsations was found to decrease with diminishing rod–wall gap size in the range between 0.015D and 0.250D, where D is the rod diameter. The pulsations in a rod–wall gap and an adjacent rod–rod gap were strongly coupled and occurred at the same frequency as one rod was displaced towards the duct wall.     

From practical methods to theoretical foundations

The year 2006 marks the ninetieth anniversary of the air navigation (later called navigation) service of the Air Forces of this country. The history of air navigation is investigated, and an opinion about its modern state and directions of further development is presented.     

Influence of phosphorus element on direct laser sintering of multicomponent Cu-based metal powder

This article presents a detailed investigation on the influence of the phosphorus element upon the laser sintering of a multicomponent Cu-based metal powder system consisting of Cu, Cu-10Sn, and Cu-8.4P. Powder systems containing 0, 10, 15, and 20 wt pct CuP were sintered in atmosphere at room temperature using the following optimal processing parameters: laser power of 350 W, scan speed of 0.04 m/s, scan line spacing of 0.15 mm, and layer thickness of 0.25 mm. It was found that the relative density of the sintered sample with 15 wt pct CuP increased by 24,4 pct as compared with the sample without phosphorus addition. A further increase in the CuP content (≥20 wt pct), however, resulted in a poor densification with a serious delamination. The exact metallurgical roles of the phosphorus element in the laser sintering process were addressed as follows. First, the phosphorus could prevent the sintering system from oxidation by forming CuPO₃, thereby improving the wetting characteristics and the sintering kinetics. Second, the phosphorus could decrease the surface tension of molten materials, leading to a successive transition from highly discontinuous sintered tracks to fairly coherent ones with increasing the phosphorus content. Third, the phosphorus could lower the melt viscosity, thereby improving the microstructural homogeneity of the laser-sintered samples.     

Recovering spectral data from natural scenes with an RGB digital camera and colored filters

Many spectral‐recovery methods using RGB digital cameras assume the underlying smoothness of illuminant and reflectance spectra, and apply low‐dimensional linear models. The aim of the present work was to test whether a direct‐mapping method could be used instead of a linear‐models approach to recover spectral radiances and reflectances from natural scenes with an RGB digital camera and colored filters. In computer simulations, a conventional RGB digital camera with up to three colored filters was used to image scenes drawn from a hyperspectral image database. Three measures were used to evaluate recovery with the direct‐mapping method: goodness‐of‐fit, root‐mean‐square error, and a color‐difference metric. It was found that with two and three filters both spectral radiances and reflectances could be recovered sufficiently accurately for many practical applications. With little increase in computational complexity, an RGB camera and a few colored filters can provide significantly better recovery of natural scenes than an RGB camera alone. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 32, 352–360, 2007