Producing High-Quality Titanium Alloy by a Cost-Effective Route Combining Fast Heating and Hot Processing

Powder metallurgy is a very attractive method for producing titanium alloys, which can be near-net-shape formed and have freedom in composition selection. However, applications are still limited due to product affordability. In this paper, we will discuss a possible cost-effective route, combining fast heating and hot processing, to produce titanium alloys with similar or even better mechanical properties than that of ingot metallurgy titanium alloys. Two titanium alloys, Ti-5Al-5V-5Mo-3Cr (Ti-5553) and Ti-5Fe, were successfully produced from HDH titanium powder and other master alloy powders using the proposed processing route. The effect of the processing route on microstructural variation and mechanical properties have been discussed.     

Electrochemical corrosion characterization of Al-Ni alloys in a dilute sodium chloride solution

The aim of this study is to characterize the electrochemical corrosion resistance of Al-Ni alloy samples which were directionally solidified under upward unsteady state heat flow conditions. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and potentiodynamic polarization techniques were used to analyze the corrosion resistance in a dilute 0.05 M NaCl solution at 25 °C. Equivalent circuit analyses were also conducted. It was found that microstructural features such as the dendritic arrangement and the distribution of Al₃Ni intermetallic particles have important roles on both the resulting pitting potential and the general corrosion resistance of Al-Ni alloys.     

上海创意合金工厂1号楼2号楼中央空调工程设计

本文介绍了上海创意合金工厂的空调设计情况,简要介绍了格力数码多联空调的选型配置和管路连接的几个要点,以及新风的选择,最后探讨了数码涡旋中央空调的优越性。     

Microstructure and electrochemical corrosion behavior of a Pb-1 wt%Sn alloy for lead-acid battery components

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of solidification cooling rates on the as-cast microstructural morphologies of a Pb-1 wt%Sn alloy, and to correlate the resulting microstructure with the corresponding electrochemical corrosion resistance in a 0.5 M H₂SO₄ solution at 25 °C. Cylindrical low-carbon steel and insulating molds were employed permitting the two extremes of a significant range of solidification cooling rates to be experimentally examined. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) diagrams, potentiodynamic polarization curves and an equivalent circuit analysis were used to evaluate the electrochemical corrosion response of Pb-1 wt%Sn alloy samples. It was found that lower cooling rates are associated with coarse cellular arrays which result in better corrosion resistance than fine cells which are related to high cooling rates. The experimental results have shown that that the pre-programming of microstructure cell size of Pb-Sn alloys can be used as an alternative way to produce as-cast components of lead-acid batteries with higher corrosion resistance.     

BEM formulation for reinforced plates

This article presents a BEM formulation developed to analyse reinforced plate bending. The reinforcements are formulated using a simplified scheme based on applying an initial moment field adopted to locally correct the stiffness of the reinforcement regions. The domain integrals due to the presence of the reinforcements are then transformed to the reinforcement/plate interface. The increase in system stiffness due to the reinforcements can be taken into account independently for each coefficient. Thus, one can conveniently reduce the number of degrees of freedom required in considering the reinforcement. Only one degree-of-freedom is required at each internal node when taking into account only the flexural stiffness of beams. Examples are presented to confirm the accuracy of the formulation.     

沥青产品如何应对入世后的竞争——中国石油沥青生产及市场现状

通过对目前国内沥青市场分析和对国内外沥青生产，销售特点的讨论，指出我国石油沥青在产品质量，营销方式，价格体系方面存在的问题，提出了中国石油股份有限公司石油沥青产品增强市场竞争力的有效途径。     

On the Impact of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) on Macrocell Downlink of CDMA-PCS System

In this paper, we present an analytical model to quantify the effect of the Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) transmitters on the CDMA-PCS downlink range and normalized capacity. The effect is given for different configuration and environments. Our analysis shows that, for a single UWB transmitter, an UWB power density of −78dBm/MHz is the maximum permitted power density to have only PCS macrocell capacity reduction of 1% when the distance between the PCS mobile and the UWB transmitter is 1 m. For the multiple UWB transmitters case, a power density of −80dBm/MHz, is the maximum permitted power density to have only PCS macrocell capacity reduction of 1% when the distance between the PCS mobile and the UWB transmitter is 1 m.     

Cumulative impact assessment on air quality from multiple open pit mines

Both open pit mine and smelter projects can have significant impacts on a variety of environmental resources. Among these, air quality of the surroundings is a key issue. Additionally, the environmental assessment of projects demands integrated approach taking in account all pollution sources. Therefore, specific focus has been put on the methodology for assessing impacts on air quality. This paper proposes an integrated index of environmental impact aiming to quantify the air quality impact of industrial operations around an urban area, in case of scarcity of in situ acquired data. This proposed pollution index is demonstrated by a case study conducted in the municipality of Congonhas, Brazil, in which contributions of five open pit mines and two smelters were studied. To achieve the pollution index, the wind rose and distances from the centroids of effective areas to the urban nucleus itself were considered, taking into account the wind projection areas from windward impacting sources on the leeward impacted urban site. The proposed index also includes the squared wind speed (proportional to the kinetic energy transferred in uplifting dust from ground surface). The method proposed is considered suitable for impact assignment for each one of the air pollution sources in the neighborhood of studied area. Some fluid dynamic aspects of airborne particulate matter are also studied by proposing a new equation for threshold saltation speed.     

Modified imperialist competitive algorithm based on attraction and repulsion concepts for reliability-redundancy optimization

System reliability analysis and optimization are important to efficiently utilize available resources and to develop an optimal system design architecture. System reliability optimization has been solved by using optimization techniques including meta-heuristics. Meanwhile, the development of meta-heuristics has been an active research field of the reliability optimization wherein the redundancy, the component reliability, or both are to be determined. In recent years, a broad class of stochastic meta-heuristics, such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, tabu search, ant colony, and particle swarm optimization paradigms, has been developed for reliability-redundancy optimization of systems. Recently, a new kind of evolutionary algorithm called Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) was proposed. The ICA is based on imperialistic competition where the populations are represented by countries, which are classified as imperialists or colonies. However, the trade-off between the exploration (i.e. the global search) and the exploitation (i.e. the local search) of the search space is critical to the success of the classical ICA approach. An improvement in the ICA by implementing an attraction and repulsion concept during the search for better solutions, the AR-ICA approach, is proposed in this paper. Simulations results demonstrates the AR-ICA is an efficient optimization technique, since it obtained promising solutions for the reliability redundancy allocation problem when compared with the previously best-known results of four different benchmarks for the reliability-redundancy allocation problem presented in the literature.