Effect of aging on the abrasive wear properties of AlMgSi1 alloy

In this paper, the wear performance of the aged AlMgSi1 alloy was investigated. Great improvements in mechanical properties of Al alloys can be achieved by suitable solution treatment and aging operations. A pin-on-disk wear machine was designed and developed for abrasive wear tests. The wear resistance was evaluated using a pin-on-disk wear testing method with a SiC abrasive paper counterface. The variation of wear volume is presented as a function of applied normal load, abrasive grit size and sliding distance for running speed. Mass losses were measured within a load range of 6.45–11 N, a sliding velocity range of 0.078–0.338 m/s and abrasive grit size of 5–30 μm. The effects of different sliding speeds and loads on wear resistance and surface roughness were also examined. It was measured amounts of mass loss and examined worn surfaces. Metal microscope was used to study the microstructures of the wear scars. Natural aged specimen observed maximum wear resistance.     

FT-IR spectroscopic analysis of rainbow trout liver exposed to nonylphenol

Nonylphenol (NP) is a biodegradation product of nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs) belonging to the alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs) group. APEs are widely used nonionic surfactants in detergents, herbicides, pesticides, paints, and cosmetics. The present work investigates the effects of NP on rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) livers at the molecular level using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The FT-IR spectra revealed dramatic differences between the NP-treated and control tissues, which mainly indicated that the level of triglycerides increased, the lipid order increased, and the protein concentration decreased in the treated samples. Moreover, it was also found that glycogen levels significantly decreased and the relative content of nucleic acids increased in NP-treated fish. The 17beta-Estradiol-treated fish liver spectra were found to be quite similar to those of NP-treated fish. All these results implied that rainbow trout may offer considerable promise to be used as a bioindicator for NP in the future.     

Heuristics for scheduling file-sharing tasks on heterogeneous systems with distributed repositories

We consider the problem of scheduling an application on a computing system consisting of heterogeneous processors and data repositories. The application consists of a large number of file-sharing otherwise independent tasks. The files initially reside on the repositories. The processors and the repositories are connected through a heterogeneous interconnection network. Our aim is to assign the tasks to the processors, to schedule the file transfers from the repositories, and to schedule the executions of tasks on each processor in such a way that the turnaround time is minimized. We propose a heuristic composed of three phases: initial task assignment, task assignment refinement, and execution ordering. We experimentally compare the proposed heuristics with three well-known heuristics on a large number of problem instances. The proposed heuristic runs considerably faster than the existing heuristics and obtains 10–14% better turnaround times than the best of the three existing heuristics.     

Nonlinear buckling finite element analysis of stiffened B–Al plates

Nonlinear buckling behavior of stiffened composite B–Al plates was analyzed by means of finite element analysis (FEA) method. In the method, the composite material was taken as B matrix into which Al fibers were embedded in different configurations. The laminated B–Al material in the form of rectangular plates was subjected to lateral compressive loading. It is observed that stiffeners have significant effect on the buckling behavior of plates under compressive loading and for various geometrical configurations. The stiffeners used in the modeling are one-sided and have rectangular cross-sections. It is found that there are physically important loading intervals and the critical buckling modes make transitions back and forth between stable and unstable states. Bifurcation buckling regions resulting from various configurations of fiber orientations and different plate aspect ratios are determined. The whole analysis is performed by using ANSYS finite element computations. Only the buckling patterns of stiffened plate configurations under simply supported boundary conditions are studied. Distributions of compressive stresses (σ_x) vs in-plane contractions (u) and compressive stresses (σ_x) vs out-of plane deflections (δ) are obtained. Nonlinear analysis of the C2 fiber configuration yields the safest critical buckling stress amongst C1, C2, C3 and C4 configurations. It is concluded that FEA method for the nonlinear buckling analysis generates accurate results.     

Multilevel segmentation of histopathological images using cooccurrence of tissue objects

This paper presents a new approach for unsupervised segmentation of histopathological tissue images. This approach has two main contributions. First, it introduces a new set of high-level texture features to represent the prior knowledge of spatial organization of the tissue components. These texture features are defined on the tissue components, which are approximately represented by tissue objects, and quantify the frequency of two component types being cooccurred in a particular spatial relationship. As they are defined on components, rather than on image pixels, these object cooccurrence features are expected to be less vulnerable to noise and variations that are typically observed at the pixel level of tissue images. Second, it proposes to obtain multiple segmentations by multilevel partitioning of a graph constructed on the tissue objects and combine them by an ensemble function. This multilevel graph partitioning algorithm introduces randomization in graph construction and refinements in its multilevel scheme to increase diversity of individual segmentations, and thus, improve the final result. The experiments on 200 colon tissue images reveal that the proposed approach--the object cooccurrence features together with the multilevel segmentation algorithm--is effective to obtain high-quality results. The experiments also show that it improves the segmentation results compared to the previous approaches.     

An improvement in the calculation of the magnetic field for an arbitrary geometry coil with rectangular cross section

Hong Lei, Lian‐Ze Wang and Zi‐Niu Wu presented new simple and convenient solutions of the magnetic field for an arbitrary geometry coil with rectangular cross section. They treated two types of basic forms: the trapezoidal prism segment and curved prism segment. The curved prism segment has been divided into a series of small trapezoidal prism segments with the same cross section and its magnetic field is a vector sum of the individual fields created by each small trapezoidal prism conductor. For one trapezoidal prism conductor the magnetic field is obtained by 1‐D integrals using Romberg numerical integration. In this paper, we give a completely analytical solution of these 1‐D integrals that considerably saves the computational time especially in the computation of the magnetic field nearby the conductor surface, at the conductor surface and inside the conductor. From obtained analytical expressions the treatment of singularities can be easily done. Also, we tested four types of numerical integration (Gaussian, Romberg, Simpson and Lobatto) to find the most convenient singularity treatment of 1‐D integrals. These obtained results are compared with those obtained analytically so that one can understand the advantage of the proposed approach. The paper points out on the accuracy and the computational cost. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.