Chemical Processing of Nanostructured Cemented Carbide

Chemical processing is becoming a vital component in the economic development of advanced engineering materials. Our research group on chemical processing has been focussed on the development of process to produce nanophase cemented carbide. It is a much more direct route for making WC/Co than traditional processing methods, and offers the potential for lower cost production of novel materials with homogeneous nanophase microstructures and improved properties. This paper addresses the scientific and technical issues relating to the chemical processing of nanophase WC/Co composite powder and their sintering.     

Characteristics and durability test of magnesium phosphate cement-based material for rapid repair of concrete

This paper presents some research results on characteristics and durability of magnesium phosphate cement-based material, such as strength, coefficient of thermal expansion, drying shrinkage, corrosion protection, deicer-frost resistance, abrasive resistance and strength loss while soaking in water or 3% NaCl solution. Experimental results indicate that MPB materials posses high deicer-frost resistance, high abrasion resistance and high corrosion protection for reinforcing steel. In addition, the MPB materials have good compatibility and bond with old concrete, and very low drying shrinkage. However, for the MPB materials soaked in water or 3% NaCl solution for a long time, the strengh loss occurs. Laboratory and field studies show that the MPB materials are suitable for rapid repair of concrete structures. especially pavements aiport runways, bridge decks and key municipal roads, etc.     

Consistency aspects of out-of-plane bending,torsion and shear in a quadratic curved beam element

Curved beams in civil engineering applications call for out-of-plane bending and torsion under the action of out-of-plane transverse shear loads. The design of a quadratic displacement curved beam element capable of representing shear deformation as in the Timoshenko beam theory requires special attention to the manner in which the shear strain is represented. Field-inconsistent representations of the out-of-plane transverse shear strain will result in a loss of efficiency and introduce spurious oscillations in the bending moment, torsional moment and shear force. The optimal field-consistent assumed strain interpolation for shear is derived and it is demonstrated to posses very high accuracy which is free from spurious force and moment oscillations.     

Minimum-Weight Design of Multipurpose Tie-Beam of Solid Cross-Section

The paper presents the minimum-weight design of an elastic, simply-supported member of solid cross-section that is to act as a tie for a part of its design life and as a beam for the rest, but not both at any given time. Upper bounds are prescribed on the longitudinal elongation under an axial tension and on the maximum deflection under a transverse concentrated load. The range of constraints is divided into regions of possible single-purpose minimum-weight designs. The effectiveness of optimization is judged against a prismatic bar having the same transverse stiffness.     

High-throughput detection and sizing of individual low-index nanoparticles and viruses for pathogen identification

Rapid, chip-scale, and cost-effective single particle detection of biological agents is of great importance to human health and national security. We report real-time, high-throughput detection and sizing of individual, low-index polystyrene nanoparticles and H1N1 virus. Our widefield, common path interferometer detects nanoparticles and viruses over a very large sensing area, orders of magnitude larger than competing techniques. We demonstrate nanoparticle detection and sizing down to 70 nm in diameter. We clearly size discriminate nanoparticles with diameters of 70, 100, 150, and 200 nm. We also demonstrate detection and size characterization of hundreds of individual H1N1 viruses in a single experiment.     

Numerical approach to hopping conduction

A numerical method for calculation of the polarization conductivity has been developed. This approach has been applied to the correlated barrier hopping (CBH) and quantum mechanical tunnelling (QMT) models in the case of monoelectronic hops. These calculations have been performed on well-known solids such as carbon (HTT 600° C) and badly organized molybdenum and tungsten sulphides. The agreement between theory and experimental results is more satisfying than in a previous approach. The parametersW _M andN ₀ are determined for the CBH model, andN(E _F) for the QMT model.     

A test object with a line width less than 10 nm for scanning electron microscopy

Data are given on the test object for scanning electron microscopy in which the components (ridges) are of trapezoidal profile and have large angles of inclination for the side walls. The width of the top surface of a projection is less than 10 nm. Methods have been developed for measuring such dimensions of test objects on standard scanning electron microscopes. __________ Translated from Izmeritel'naya Tekhnika, No. 8, pp. 20–23, August, 2008.     

Recovery of PTUIE handling from source codes through recognizing its probable properties

Automated recovery of system features and their designs from program source codes is important in reverse engineering and system comprehension. It also helps in the testing of software. An error that is made by users in an input to an execution of a transaction and discovered only after the completion of the execution is called a posttransaction user-input error (PTUIE) of the transaction. For a transaction in any database application, usually, it is essential to-provide transactions for correcting the effect that could result from any PTUIE of the transaction. We discover some probable properties that exist between the control flow graph of a transaction and the control flow graphs of transactions for correcting PTUIE of the former transaction. Through recognizing these properties, we present a novel approach for the automated approximate recovery of provisions and designs for transactions to correct PTUIE of transactions in a database application. The approach recognizes these properties through analyzing the source codes of transactions in the database application statically.     

A Recursive Orthogonal Least Squares Algorithm for Training RBF Networks

A recursive orthogonal least squares (ROLS) algorithm for multi-input, multi-output systems is developed in this paper and is applied to updating the weighting matrix of a radial basis function network. An illustrative example is given, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm for eliminating the effects of ill-conditioning in the training data, in an application of neural modelling of a multi-variable chemical process. Comparisons with results from using standard least squares algorithms, in batch and recursive form, show that the ROLS algorithm can significantly improve the neural modelling accuracy. The ROLS algorithm can also be applied to a large data set with much lower requirements on computer memory than the batch OLS algorithm.