Fabrication and characterization of SiC-AIN alloys

SiC-AIN alloys were prepared by the carbothermal reduction of silica and alumina, derived from an intimate mixture of silica, aluminium chloride and starch. The resulting single-phase SiC-AIN powder was hot-pressed without additives to a high density. The dense bodies had a fine-grained uniform microstructure. The Young's elastic modulus, microhardness, fracture toughness, thermal expansion and thermal conductivity were measured as functions of composition. The creep behaviour of the SiC-AIN alloy was compared with that of silicon carbide.     

Two-mode Gaussian product states in a lossy interferometer

The quantum Fisher information for a two-mode, Gaussian product state in an interferometer subject to photon loss is studied. We obtain the quantum Cramer–Rao bound on the achievable precision in phase estimation using such states. The scaling of the measurement precision with the mean photon number is compared to the shot noise-limited scaling for dual squeezed vacuum states and dual squeezed, displaced vacuum states.     

Spin-wave excitations in amorphous ferromagnets

Mössbauer measurements have been performed on a number of metallic glasses. The temperature dependence of average hyperfine or internal magnetic fieldH _eff(T) arises from long wavelength spin wave excitations in these glasses. Values ofB _3/2 andC _5/2 are in general much higher than those observed for crystalline ferromagnets indicating higher density of states for spin waves in amorphous ferromagnets.     

Case study of safe lowering of an in service gas pipeline

This paper describes an experimental investigation carried out involving instrumentation, measurement and monitoring of stresses in a large diameter gas pipeline during its lowering operations. It also highlights the ingenious techniques developed and adopted to overcome the difficulties pertaining to long leadwires, measurement of existing strains on the curved surface of a pipeline and protection of strain gauge installations. These novel methods were used to ensure smooth and proper functioning of strain gauge instrumentation even under the severe field conditions at site for more than two weeks, till the lowering operations and pipeline monitoring was successfully completed.     

‘Green’ composites Part 1: Characterization of flax fabric and glutaraldehyde modified soy protein concentrate composites

Fully biodegradable, environment friendly ‘green’ composites were prepared using glutaraldehyde (GA) modified soy protein concentrate (MSPC-G) and flax fabric. Soy protein concentrate (SPC) polymer has low tensile properties, poor moisture resistance and is brittle. SPC polymer with 15% glycerin, as an external plasticizer, exhibited fracture stress and Young's modulus of 17 and 368 MPa, respectively. SPC polymer was cross-linked with GA to increase its tensile properties and improve its processability as a resin to manufacture flax fabric-reinforced composites. GA reacts with the free amine groups in SPC to form crosslinks. MSPC-G showed 20% increase in fracture stress and 35% increase in Young's modulus as well as improved moisture resistance compared to SPC. Besides the mechanical properties, MSPC-G was also characterized for its thermal stability and dynamic mechanical properties.Composite laminates, approximately 1 mm thick, were made using flax fabric and MSPC-G polymer. Composite specimens were prepared with two different orientations, namely, 0° or 90°. The laminates exhibited a Young's modulus of 1.01 and 1.26 GPa in the longitudinal and transverse directions, respectively. The experimental values were compared with the theoretical predictions using pcGINA^© software and showed good agreement. The composite specimens also showed good adhesion between flax fabric and MSPC-G resin.     

The Tetragonal-Monoclinic Transformation in Zirconia: Lessons Learned and Future Trends

Zirconia ceramics have found broad applications in a variety of energy and biomedical applications because of their unusual combination of strength, fracture toughness, ionic conductivity, and low thermal conductivity. These attractive characteristics are largely associated with the stabilization of the tetragonal and cubic phases through alloying with aliovalent ions. The large concentration of vacancies introduced to charge compensate of the aliovalent alloying is responsible for both the exceptionally high ionic conductivity and the unusually low, and temperature independent, thermal conductivity. The high fracture toughness exhibited by many of zirconia ceramics is attributed to the constraint of the tetragonal-to-monoclinic phase transformation and its release during crack propagation. In other zirconia ceramics containing the tetragonal phase, the high fracture toughness is associated with ferroelastic domain switching. However, many of these attractive features of zirconia, especially fracture toughness and strength, are compromised after prolonged exposure to water vapor at intermediate temperatures (∼30°–300°C) in a process referred to as low-temperature degradation (LTD), and initially identified over two decades ago. This is particularly so for zirconia in biomedical applications, such as hip implants and dental restorations. Less well substantiated is the possibility that the same process can also occur in zirconia used in other applications, for instance, zirconia thermal barrier coatings after long exposure at high temperature. Based on experience with the failure of zirconia femoral heads, as well as studies of LTD, it is shown that many of the problems of LTD can be mitigated by the appropriate choice of alloying and/or process control.     

Thermal Decomposition Of Carbonyl Sulfide At Temperatures Encountered In The Front End Of Modified Claus Plants

Understanding the kinetics of the formation and consumption of COS and CS₂ in the front end of the modified Claus process will be a significant step towards reducing the environmental impact of these plants. Specifically, homogeneous intrinsic rate expressions are needed for engineering design and simulation, which will lead to new, optimized ways of operating these plants. Hence, a high-temperature kinetic study of the COS decomposition reaction was carried out. Experiments were performed with inlet COS compositions in the range of 0.20-2.33 mol%, with pressures at 101-150 kPa and temperatures at 800-1100°C; these conditions cover the conditions typically encountered in the front end of the modified Claus process. The experimental results showed that COS conversion is dependent on the inlet concentration of COS, which contrasts with previously reported higher temperature studies. Finally, the COS decomposition kinetics were modeled as the sum of two reactions, which provided a satisfactory representation of experimental data.     

Solution of free radical polymerization

The steady state approximation in free radical polymerization is known to break down during the operation of commercial reactors, in which case the unsteady mole balance of polymer radicals have to be solved numerically. We observed that the differential equations governing the zeroth, first, and second moments of polymer radicals in free radical polymerization are nonlinear in nature. The numerical solution of these is “stiff” because the concentration of polymer radicals is very small. Assuming an isothermal reactor, in the absence of the gel effect, these differential equations can be transformed in a suitable new domain where they are linear and can be solved analytically. We have subsequently developed a computer program for nonisothermal reactors in the presence of the gel effect using the analytical solution between any time increment. The results have been compared with those obtained from the fourth order Runge-Kutta technique. We show that when the temperature changes are fast, the Runge-Kutta technique cannot handle the stiffness, and the results begin to deviate from the exact solution. We find that our computer program is computationally efficient in handling this stiffness, takes considerably less time, and can be adapted to any personal computer.     

Address block location on envelopes using Gabor filters

The large volume of mail and the increased cost of handling it has made postal automation an important domain for pattern recognition and computer vision research. A substantial amount of work is being done to design an automatic mail sorting system which can read and interpret the destination address on a mail piece and direct it to the appropriate bin. Robust optical character recognition (OCR) systems are now available which can read printed characters with great accuracy (> 99%). But, in order to read the destination address, the region in the image containing the address must first be located. Even though several approaches to address block location have been proposed in the literature, it remains a difficult problem. A simple method is presented for automatically identifying regions in envelope images which are candidates for being the destination address. The envelope image is considered to contain different textured regions, one of which corresponds to the text-content in the image. Thus, a texture-based segmentation method is used to identify the regions of text in the image. The method for texture discrimination is based on Gabor filters which have been successfully used earlier for a variety of texture classification and segmentation tasks. It is shown that only a small number of even-symmetric Gabor filters are needed in this application. The success of the texture-based segmentation algorithm for identifying address blocks is demonstrated on a number of test images. These results also demonstrate the invariance of the method to the orientation of text in the envelope image and the variations in the size and font of the text.     

Photomechanical degradation of thermoplastic elastomers

The photodegradation of thermoplastic elastomers designed for outdoor applications was studied with laboratory ultraviolet (UV) exposure in the unstrained state and under tensile strain (25 and 50%). Strained exposure caused a reduction of the strain to failure in subsequent tensile tests. For some combinations of material and exposure conditions, some recovery of extensibility occurred between 2 and 4 weeks. Microscopic examination revealed that this was probably due to embrittlement of the surface region that was sufficiently severe that surface cracks did not propagate into the interior and that the observed recovery did not correspond to repair or improvement of the material. Shielding the sample surface from UV irradiation reduced the formation of surface cracking very significantly, and it was deduced that the principal cause of degradation was photooxidation rather than ozone attack. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 99: 150–161, 2006