Analysis of deformation processes in glassy polycarbonate using internal friction measurements during a tensile test

Internal friction has been measured by torsion at 1 Hz during tensile tests performed on glassy polycarbonate at room-temperature. Steady-state flow and transient effects have been studied during continuous tensile tests and strain-rate changes. During steady-state, internal friction and flow-stress vary in a similar way with strain-rate. But during transients, internal friction varies continuously while flow-stress passes through a maximum (or a minimum). These results are interpreted assuming that non-elastic deformation of glassy polymers requires some microscopic discontinuous processes such as motion of defects. Two parameters are considered: the velocity v and the density ρ of mobile defects. Assuming that the former is directly related to the flow stress, it has been shown that internal friction is related to the density of mobile defects ρ. This feature is used to interpret the different stages of a tensile test curve. Activation volumes for both velocity and density of mobile defects are calculated from experimental data.     

Cure kinetics of high performance epoxy resin systems

Summary Isothermal cure kinetics ofEPON HPT 1071/DDS system have been performed by means of differential scanning calorimetry. The maximum cure rate and the extent of conversion at various DDS concentrations were studied as a function of cure temperature. Maximum cure rate increases with increasing cure temperature and DDS concentration. At various DDS concentrations, the maximum cure rate occured between 19–22% conversion. In order to evaluate the kinetic parameters, numerical calculations by means of a Newton-Raphson technique and experimental results obtained from the peak of reaction rate curve were undertaken.     

Interaction of CETP inhibitory peptide and lipoprotein substrates in cholesteryl ester transfer assay: relationship between association properties and inhibitory activities

In a previous study, CETP inhibitory peptide (3 kDa) was isolated from hog plasma. The peptide, synthesized chemically according to the amino acid sequence of the 3-kDa peptide (designated P₂₈), showed CETP inhibitory activity both in vitro and in vivo [Cho et al. (1998) Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1391, 133–144]. We report herein further unique features of P₂₈ when it was associated with the cholesteryl ester (CE)-donor and-acceptor lipoproteins. Lipoprotein substrates with P₂₈ present in both HDL (as a CE-donor) and LDL (as a CE-acceptor) served as poor substrates, with CE-transfer activity decreased up to 60% compared to normal substrates without P₂₈. P₂₈ was found to be located in HDL fractions of hog plasma and showed the same electromobility as that visualized by PAGE on 7% polyacrylamide gel under nondenaturing conditions. Addition of apolipoprotein A-1 (apoA-1) or apoB antibody to a normal CE-transfer mixture did not alter CE-transfer activity. However, addition of apoA-1 or −B antibody to a CETP-inhibition mixture decreased the inhibitory activity of P₂₈ by ca. 20%. Western blot analysis revealed that P₂₈ was associated only with human and hog HDL among several lipoproteins purified from human, hog, and rabbit. CFTP-inhibition assays with various lipoprotein substrates revealed that P₂₈ exhibited substrate-specific inhibitory activity. The inhibitory activity of P₂₈ was highly dependent on the type of lipoprotein substrate (whether CE-donor or-acceptor); P₂₈ inhibited CE transfer from HDL to LDL, but it did not inhibit CE transfer from HDL to HDL.     

The onset of Taylor-Görtler vortices in impulsively decelerating swirl flow

The onset of hydrodynamical instability induced by impulsive spin-down to rest in a cylinder containing a Newtonian fluid is analyzed by using propagation theory. It is well-known that the primary transient swirl flow is laminar, but with initial high velocities secondary motion sets in at a certain time. The dimensionless critical time Τ_c to mark the onset of instability is presented here as a function of the Reynolds number Re. Available experimental data indicate that for large Re deviation of the velocity profiles from their momentum diffusion occurs starting from a certain time Τ≈4Τ_c. This means that secondary motion is detected at this characteristic time. It seems evident that during Τ_c⪯Τ⪯4Τ_c, secondary motion is relatively very weak and the primary diffusive momentum transfer is dominant.     

Transient behaviour of encapsulated enzyme reactor systems

Mathematical models are developed for the transient behaviour of encapsulated enzyme reactor systems such as the continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) and the packed bed tubular reactor. The rate processes taking place in the encapsulated enzyme bed are approximated by using a combined rate control model of enzyme reaction and membrane diffusion. The change in transient substrate concentration is obtained by using the developed rate expression in the material balance over the substrate as a function of time for the CSTR and as a function of time and position for the packed bed tubular reactor. The effects of various parameters such as the enzymic reaction rate constant, Michaelis constant, diffusional resistance of membranes, and Peclet number on the substrate concentration distribution, which varies with respect to operating time, are investigated. This study affords insight into the transient operating characteristics of the encapsulated enzyme reactor system. The results should be useful in understanding the start-up performance of the reactor systems and to control such reactor systems at desired operating conditions.     

High Temperature Oxidation of Steels in Air and CO2–O2 Atmosphere

Three kinds of hot rolled steel slabs, viz. high strength steel, bake hardened steel and low carbon steel, were oxidized isothermally between 1100 and 1250 °C for up to 2 hr in 1 atm of air and an 85%N₂–10%CO₂–5%O₂ gas mixture. The steels were oxidized in a similar fashion in both the atmospheres. The oxidation process followed an initial linear rate law, which then gradually transformed to a nearly parabolic rate law. Thick, porous and nonadherent scales formed rapidly, due to the high oxidation temperature. The scales formed consisted of Fe₂O₃,(Fe₂O₃+Fe₃O₄), (Fe₃O₄+Fe₂O₃ +FeO) and (FeO+Fe₃O₄) from the outer surface. The presence of supersaturated oxygen beneath the scale resulted in grain boundary oxidation and the formation of internal oxide precipitates.     

Intermetallic phase formation in directionally solidified Al−Si−Fe alloy

The present study has been undertaken to better understand the solidification behavior of Al−Si−Fe alloys containing 7wt.% Si and 0.9wt.% Fe, with particular regard to the formation of phase during controlled solidification and influence of growth rates on intermetallic phase selection. The alloys studied were Al-7Si-0.9Fe alloys, which were produced by a modified Bridgman solidification arrangement. These alloys were solidified unidirectionally with different growth rates (1–30mm/min). The solidified microstructure of these alloys consists of the growth of primary aluminum and multiple second phase reactions.     

A novel part-based approach to mean-shift algorithm for visual tracking

Visual tracking is one of the most important problems considered in computer vision. To improve the performance of the visual tracking, a part-based approach will be a good solution. In this paper, a novel method of visual tracking algorithm named part-based mean-shift (PBMS) algorithm is presented. In the proposed PBMS, unlike the standard mean-shift (MS), the target object is divided into multiple parts and the target is tracked by tracking each individual part and combining the results. For the part-based visual tracking, the objective function in the MS is modified such that the target object is represented as a combination of the parts and iterative optimization solution is presented. Further, the proposed PBMS provides a systematic and analytic way to determine the scale of the bounding box for the target from the perspective of the objective function optimization. Simulation is conducted with several benchmark problems and the result shows that the proposed PBMS outperforms the standard MS.

     

A high performance parallel DCT with OpenCL on heterogeneous computing environment

A noteworthy thing in desktop PCs is that they can provide a great opportunity to increase the performance of processing multimedia data by exploiting task- and data-parallelism with multi-core CPU and many-core GPU. This paper presents a high performance parallel implementation of 2D DCT on this heterogeneous computing environment. For this purpose, Intel TBB (threading building blocks) and OpenCL (Open Compute Language) are utilized for task- and data-parallelism, respectively. The simulation result shows that the parallel DCT implementations far the serial ones in processing speed. Especially, OpenCL implementation shows a linear speedup, a typical SIMD characteristic as the increase of 2D data sets.     

Polar-Cartesian Hybrid Transforms: A novel 2D range scan registration algorithm

Registration of range scans is commonly required in many localization and mapping algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Polar-Cartesian Hybrid Transforms for pair-wise registration of range scans. The proposed algorithm iteratively establishes correspondences by searching the points with closest polar angles in the polar coordinate frame. An angular look-up table is constructed based on the properties of the laser range finder to accelerate the searching procedure. In order to speed up the convergence, we compute the difference of polar range of every matched point pair to select the most contributing correspondences. After the correspondences are determined, the transformation is computed in Cartesian coordinate frame using a point-to-line metric. Combining the advantages of the polar and Cartesian coordinate frames, both robustness and efficiency are greatly improved compared with an up-to-date ICP algorithm.