Formation and inhibition of free radicals in electrically stressed and aged insulating polymers

Previous work has shown that prebreakdown, electrical aging, and breakdown phenomena are directly associated with charge carriers injected from electrical contacts and their subsequent dissociative trapping and recombination. In addition, the energy released from each trapping or recombination event is dissipated in the breaking of the bonds of macromolecules, thus forming free radicals and new traps in the electrically stressed insulating polymers, as predicted by Kao's model. It is this gradual degradation process that leads to electrical aging and destructive breakdown. New experimental results are presented to confirm previous findings and a new approach to inhibit the degradation process by the incorporation of suitable dopants into the polymer. The concentration of free radicals in the polymer increases with an increasing electric field at a fixed stress time of 250 h and with increasing stress time at a fixed electric field of 833 kV cm^?1. The concentration of free radicals is directly related to the concentration of new traps created by stress. However, when suitable dopants are incorporated, the initiation voltage for the occurrence of electrical treeing and the breakdown strength are both increased. The dopants tend to create shallow traps and have little effect on the deep trap concentration. This implies that the dopants act as free‐radical scavengers that tend to satisfy the unpaired electrons of the broken bonds, which create new acceptor‐like electron traps and new shallow traps. By doing so, the shallow traps screen the deep traps, thereby reducing the energy released during trapping and recombination and the probability of breaking the macromolecular bonds and causing structural degradation. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 89: 3416–3425, 2003     

A decision support system for interactive decision making - Part II: analysis and output interpretation

For pt.I see ibid., p.42-55 (2003). The development of a comprehensive decision support system, GMCR II, for the systematic study of real-world interactive decision problems is presented. The companion paper (Part I), discusses how GMCR II elicits, stores, and manages conflict models; here (Part II), the focus is on GMCR IIs analysis and output interpretation subsystems. Specifically, this paper describes the powerful and efficient analysis engine contained in GMCR II, its informative output presentation and interpretation facilities, and a number of follow-up analyses. Furthermore, an illustrative case study is used to demonstrate how GMCR II can be conveniently applied in practice.     

Method for Preparation of Semiconductor Quantum‐Rod Lasers in a Cylindrical Microcavity

An efficient method for preparation of semiconductor quantum rod films for robust lasing in a cylindrical microcavity is reported. A capillary tube, serving as the laser cavity, is filled with a solution of nanocrystals and irradiated with a series of intense nanosecond laser pulses to produce a nanocrystal film on the capillary surface. The films exhibit intense room‐temperature lasing in whispering‐gallery modes that develop at the film–capillary interface as corroborated from the spacing detected for the lasing modes. Good lasing stability is observed at moderate pump powers. The method was applied successfully to several quantum‐rod samples of various sizes.     

Techniques for high-frequency integrated test and measurement

This paper describes techniques for the on-chip measurement of high-frequency and/or high-bandwidth electrical phenomena in ultra large-scale integration environments. The techniques rely on the integration of multiple compact and robust electronic test devices, or cores, at various locations within an integrated circuit. The cores consist primarily of signal generators that approximate the output of a sigma-delta modulator using finite repetitious bit patterns and a small set of highly robust analog components. They are capable of digitizing on-chip signals at gigahertz rates even using low-cost manufacturing processes. Simple communication between the multiple cores enables the migration of many "board-level" type measurements down to the chip level.     

Pack cementation process for the formation of refractory metal modified aluminide coatings on nickel-base superalloys

The vapour phase compositions of a series of pack powder mixtures containing elemental Al and Hf or W powders as depositing sources and CrCl₃·6H₂O or AlF₃or CrF₃as activators were analysed in an attempt to further develop the pack cementation process to codeposit Al and Hf or W to form diffusion coatings on nickel base superalloys. The results suggested that Al could be codeposited with Hf, but not with W, from the vapour phase. Compared with both AlF₃and CrF₃, CrCl₃·6H₂O has been shown to be a more suitable activator for codepositing Al with Hf. The optimum coating temperature was identified to be in the range of 1050°C to 1150°C. Based on the thermochemical analysis, a series of coating deposition studies were undertaken, which confirmed that codeposition of Al and Hf could be achieved at a deposition temperature of 1100°C in the CrCl₃·6H₂O activated packs containing elemental Al and Hf powders. The coating obtained had a multilayer structure consisting of a Ni₇Hf₆Al₁₆top layer and a NiAl layer underneath, followed by a diffusion zone, which revealed that the coating was formed by the outward Ni diffusion. It is suggested that the compositions suitable for codeposition of Al and Hf could be effectively identified by comparing the vapour pressures of HfCl₄and HfCl₃with that of AlCl in the packs activated by chloride salts. It has also been experimentally demonstrated that, although W could not be deposited from the vapour phase, a high volume of fine W particles can be entrapped into the outer NiAl coating layer formed by the outward Ni diffusion using a modified pack configuration. This leads to the formation of a composite coating layer with W particles evenly distributed in a matrix of NiAl. It is suggested that this modified pack process could be similarly applied to develop nickel aluminide coatings containing other refractory metals that may not be codeposited with Al from the vapour phase.     

The extended quadratic residue code is the only (48,24,12) self-dual doubly-even code

An extremal self-dual doubly-even binary (n,k,d) code has a minimum weight d=4/spl lfloor/n/24/spl rfloor/+4. Of such codes with length divisible by 24, the Golay code is the only (24,12,8) code, the extended quadratic residue code is the only known (48,24,12) code, and there is no known (72,36,16) code. One may partition the search for a (48,24,12) self-dual doubly-even code into three cases. A previous search assuming one of the cases found only the extended quadratic residue code. We examine the remaining two cases. Separate searches assuming each of the remaining cases found no codes and thus the extended quadratic residue code is the only doubly-even self-dual (48,24,12) code.     

Analysis of the Scattering Characteristic of Several Waveguide Components Using Boundary Element Method

Several kinds of waveguide components such as curved waveguide bends, arbitrary angle waveguide bends and T-junctions have been analyzed with boundary element method in this paper. A new discretization method for the boundary element method to solve the waveguide discontinuities has been given. The numerical results obtained agree well with the experimental results and numerical results in other literature. Especially, the scattering characteristics of Forded E-, H-plane T-junctions in 3mm band have been analyzed using boundary element method and the calculation results are presented.     

On the effect of spatial variances in historical rainfall time series to CSO performance evaluation.

Historical, high-resolution rain series are the backbone of modern combined sewer overflow (CSO) structure design. These rain series are the input to the computational estimation of the performance of the measures with respect to CSO pollution abatement. However, those historical precipitation measurements are available at only a few locations. Frequently rain series have to be used from gauging stations at a significant distance. In order to judge and to compensate for this influence an estimate between rain characteristics and combined sewer outflow (CSO) performance indicators would be useful. In this paper such correlations have been sought for a collection of 37 rain series covering large areas of Europe. It was found that the mean annual rain volume can explain most of the variances for the performance indicators Number of overflows and CSO volume. For explaining the spatial differences in the efficiency of the CSO structure another rain characteristic, i.e. the maximum event with a return period of one year, is to be used.     

EBSP study of the annealing behavior of aluminum deformed by equal channel angular processing

Commercial purity aluminum (99.5%) was fabricated by equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) up to total accumulated strains of approx. 10. The annealing behavior of material deformed to total strains of approx. 1 and 10 was investigated, using heat treatments of 2 h at various temperatures from 100 to 500 °C. The microstructure of the annealed materials was characterized using the electron back-scatter pattern technique. A number of parameters were determined including the distribution and average values of both the boundary spacings and misorientations. For samples deformed to a total strain of 1, annealing resulted in discontinuous recrystallization. For samples deformed to a total strain of 10, annealing resulted in microstructures exhibiting characteristics of both uniform coarsening and, in a number of places, of discontinuous recrystallization. An attempt was made, based on the boundary spacing distributions, to separate these two components. The grain size after annealing was still however small, being just 6.4 μm after 2 h at 300 °C.