Synthesis and Properties of La2O3-Doped 8 mol% Yttria-Stabilized Cubic Zirconia

In this study, 8 mol% yttria-stabilized cubic zirconia (8YSZ) powder as a matrix material and 0-15 wt.% La₂O₃ powder as an additive were used to determine the effect of La₂O₃ addition and its amount on the phase stability, microstructure, sintering, and mechanical properties of 8YSZ. Colloidal processing was used to mix the powders uniformly and to obtain a homogenous microstructure. XRD results showed the existence of only a cubic crystal structure for 1 and 5 wt.% La₂O₃ addition amounts. However, La₂Zr₂O₇ with a hexagonal and cubic crystal structure was observed in 8YSZ specimens doped with 10 and 15 wt.% La₂O₃. Further, up to 5 wt.% La₂O₃ was completely dissolved in the crystal structure of the specimens; however, above 5 wt.%, La₂O₃ reacted with 8YSZ at high temperatures and formed pyrochloric La₂Zr₂O₇. Grain size measurements revealed that the grain size of 8YSZ increased up to 1 wt.% La₂O₃ addition, and then decreased beyond this amount. The hardness and fracture toughness of 8YSZ decreased and increased, respectively, with the increasing La₂O₃ amount.     

Prediction of Glass-Forming Compositions in Metallic Systems: Copper-Based Bulk Metallic Glasses in the Cu-Mg-Ca System

A novel methodology for predicting specific compositions for glass-forming alloys based on efficiently packed atomic cluster selection, liquidus lines, and ab initio calculations is presented. This model has shown applicable adaptation to many known metallic and ceramic oxide glass-forming systems and has led to the discovery of soon to be reported Ag- and Zn-based bulk metallic glasses (BMGs). As a model system, glass formation in the Cu-Mg-Ca ternary system has been assessed using this alloy design methodology, which has led to the discovery of a number of Cu-based BMGs with compositions ranging from Cu-33 to 55 at. pct, Mg-18 to 45 at. pct, and Ca-18 to 36 at. pct. Included in this work are the calculated values of associated cluster binding energies and correlations between physical and thermal properties of these glassy compositions, which show significant physical evidence to support the likely existence of such clusters.     

Data processing and communication strategies for lifetime optimization in wireless sensor networks

In this paper we introduced a novel Linear Programming framework to model sensor network lifetime when data reduction through compression is utilized. Comparative analysis of three data compression and forwarding strategies show that neither data compression nor flow balancing can achieve the maximal possible sensor network lifetime when optimized independently. The comparisons reveal that jointly optimizing data compression and load balancing results in up to an order of magnitude longer network lifetimes than non-optimized data compression and load balancing.     

On the use of radiance domain for burn scar detection under varying atmospheric illumination conditions and viewing geometry

Assessment of damages due to fire, drought, flood, land slide, etc., using hyperspectral images from Hyperion, AVIRIS or HyspIRI has challenging issues. The effects of different illumination, atmospheric conditions and varying sensor/target viewing geometries are some of these challenges. A common approach for target detection is to apply atmospheric correction algorithms to the radiance image data cube and then search within the atmospherically corrected image cube for the target reflectance signature of interest. One major issue with the above approach is that it is computationally demanding. In this paper, instead of applying atmospheric correction to the raw radiance data, we generate radiance profiles of burn scar for the observed atmospheric and illumination conditions at the time of the hyperspectral image data collection and form a radiance profile library using a nonlinear analytical model for radiative transfer and MODTRAN. The target detection has been performed by a spectral similarity technique which takes into consideration multiple radiance profile variants of the target of interest. The effectiveness of the radiance domain-based target detection approach on reducing the computation time has been demonstrated on burn scar detection using airborne AVIRIS image data.     

Broadcast capacity of wireless networks

We present an upper bound on the broadcast capacity of arbitrary ad hoc wireless networks. The throughput obtainable by each node for broadcasting to-all-of the other nodes in a network consisting of n nodes with- fixed transmission ranges and C bits per second channel capacity is bounded by O(C/n), which is equivalent to the upper bound for per node capacity of a fully connected single-hop network.