Cutting force estimation in sculptured surface milling

Cutting force milling models developed up to now are mostly used for planar milling using end-mills. Only a reduced number of models applying ball-end mills have been developed. Furthermore these models usually only consider horizontal surface machining, even though the main application of ball-end mills is sculptured surface machining. This article proposes a model that is able to estimate the cutting forces in inclined surfaces machined both up-milling and down-milling. For this purpose a semi-mechanistic model has been developed that calculates the cutting forces based on a set of coefficients which depend on the material, the tool, the cutting conditions, the machining direction and the slope of the surface.A coordinate transformation has been included in order to consider the slope milling case with different cutting directions.The model has been tested on two materials, an aluminum alloy Al7075-T6 and a 52 HRC tool steel AISI H13. Validation tests have been carried out on inclined planes using different slopes and different machining directions.The results provide errors below 10% in most of the cases and both the value and shape of the predicted forces adjust the measured cutting force.     

Fluorinated Polyphosphazenes: A Survey

A general survey of fluorinated phosphazene polymers starting from their synthesis in 1965 to recent times is presented. Various types of fluorinated phosphazenes are described depending on the way fluorine atoms are connected to the polyphosphazene skeleton. The characterization, properties and practical utilization of these compounds in different domains are critically discussed.     

A Simple Electronic Analog of the Squid Axon Membrane: The NEUROFET

A simple electronic circuit is proposed as an analog of the excitable membrane. It is based on the Hodgkin-Huxley model and their squid axon voltage clamp data. The simulated potassium and sodium conductances are reproduced satisfactorily and the electronic action potentials are very similar to the experimentally recorded ones. Since this analog contains only a few electronic elements, it is small and inexpensive to build. It could be very useful as a means of simulating a wide variety of membrane conductances and different types of action potentials. Also, the simplicity of the circuit makes it an ideal unit to build complex neuron networks.     

Zeolite based films, membranes and membrane reactors: Progress and prospects

The integration of reaction and separation in catalytic membrane reactors has received increasing attention during the past 30 years. The combination promises to deliver more compact and less capital-intensive processes with substantial savings in energy consumption. With the advent of new inorganic materials and processing techniques, there has been renewed interest in exploiting the benefits of membranes in many industrial applications. Zeolite membranes, however, have only recently been considered for catalytic membrane reactor applications. Despite the significant recent interest in these types of membranes there are relatively few reports of the application of such membranes in high-temperature catalytic membrane reactor applications. This can be attributed to a number of limitations that still need to be addressed such as the relatively high price of membrane units, the difficulty of controlling the membrane thickness, permeance, high-temperature sealing, reproducibility and the dilemma of upscaling. A number of research efforts, with some degree of success have been directed to finding solutions to the remaining challenges. This review makes a critical assessment of what has been achieved in the past few years in terms of hurdles that still stand in the way of the successful implementation of zeolite membrane reactors in industry.     

Studies on crystallization behaviors and crystal morphology of polyamide 66/clay nanocomposites

X‐ray diffraction methods, DSC thermal analysis, and polarized light microscopy (PLM) were used to investigate the structural changes of nylon 66/clay nanocomposites. PA 66/clay nanocomposites were prepared by the method of melt intercalation. The results indicate that the addition of the intercalated organo‐montmorillonite (OMMT) can induce generation of the β‐form crystal of PA 66 and substantially affect the arrangement of molecules in the α‐form crystal, although the crystallinity scarcely changes. Also, the DSC results indicate that the addition of OMMT in the PA 66 matrix leads to increases of crystallization temperatures and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the exothermic peaks. Moreover, the viscosity factor is the main influence on FWHM of the exothermic peaks of PA 66/clay nanocomposites. The results of nonisothermal crystallization kinetics show that OMMT has the effect of heterogeneous nucleation and leads to the decrease of the size of the spherocrystal. The heterogeneous nucleation effects of OMMTs influence the mechanism of crystallization and the growth mode of PA 66 crystals. PLM photographs verify that the size of spherocrystal is decreased and visually confirm the theory of crystallization kinetics. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 95: 756–763, 2005     

Strong dependence on pressure of the performance of a Co/SiO2 catalyst in Fischer–Tropsch slurry reactor synthesis

A 10 wt% Co/SiO₂ catalyst was prepared by the incipient wet-impregnation method and tested in Fischer–Tropsch synthesis in a slurry reactor under conditions approaching industrial practice. The catalyst precursor was investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), temperature-programmed reduction (TPR), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The XPS and XRD techniques revealed the presence of a crystalline Co₃O₄ spinel-type phase, while-in addition-TEM and XPS analyses pointed to the formation of another amorphous Co₃O₄ spinel phase, both species interacting weakly with the silica substrate. The influence of total pressure on the conversion, selectivity and stability of the catalyst was studied. Upon increasing the overall pressure from 20 to 40 bar, not only activity increased but also the catalyst are not deactivating. These results are explained in terms of an increase of gases solubility in the solvent, this increment of CO concentration in the liquid phase favours carbonyl species formation and the cobalt particles segregation that implies an increase in the metal surface area.     

Verlauf der Hydrierung pflanzlicher Öle - Makrokinetische Einflüsse

Course of Hydrogenation of Vegetable Oils-Macrokinetic Influence. Hydrogenation of vegetable oils is a complicated process whose course is not only influenced by the nature and properties of the catalyst and of the oil, which is to be hardened, of the temperature and pressure, but also by physical-chemical processes as adsorption, desorption and diffusion. During exploration of microkinetic phenomena, especially the way of formation of hydrogen dispersion in the reaction mixture and its influence on the curse of hydrogenation were investigated. Tne velocity and the character of hydrogenation were investigated. The velocity and the character of hydrogenation are significantly influenced by material transfer whose data are essentially changed by the shape of the stirrer, the rotation velocity and the way of the hydrogen supply. By increase of the efficiency of the flushing of Ni-catalyst particles with hydrogen the reaction velocity increases nearly in one scale of magnitude. Simultaneously the selectivity in dependence on the way of stirring of the reaction mixture and the hydrogen distribution was expressed.     

Critical transistors nexus based circuit-level aging assessment and prediction

Accurate age modeling, and fast, yet robust reliability sign-off emerged as mandatory constraints in Integrated Circuits (ICs) design for advanced process technology nodes. In this paper we introduce a novel method to assess and predict the circuit reliability at design time as well as at run-time. The main goal of our proposal is to allow for: (i) design time reliability optimization; (ii) fine tuning of the run-time reliability assessment infrastructure, and (iii) run-time aging assessment. To this end, we propose to select a minimum-size kernel of critical transistors and based on them to assess and predict an IC End-Of-Life (EOL) via two methods: (i) as the sum of the critical transistors end-of-life values, weighted by fixed topology-dependent coefficients, and (ii) by a Markovian framework applied to the critical transistors, which takes into account the joint effects of process, environmental, and temporal variations. The former model exploits the aging dependence on the circuit topology to enable fast run-time reliability assessment with minimum aging sensors requirements. By allowing the performance boundary to vary in time such that both remnant and nonremnant variations are encompassed, and imposing a Markovian evolution, the probabilistic model can be better fitted to various real conditions, thus enabling at design-time appropriate guardbands selection and effective aging mitigation/compensation techniques. The proposed framework has been validated for different stress conditions, under process variations and aging effects, for the ISCAS-85 c499 circuit, in PTM 45 nm technology. From the total of 1526 transistors, we obtained a kernel of 15 critical transistors, for which the set of topology dependent weights were derived. Our simulation results for 15 critical transistors kernel indicate a small approximation error (i.e., mean smaller than 15% and standard deviation smaller than 6%) for the considered circuit estimated end-of-life (EOL), when comparing to the end-of-life values obtained from Cadence simulation, which quantitatively confirm the accuracy of the IC lifetime evaluation. Moreover, as the number of critical transistors determines the area overhead, we also investigated the implications of reducing their number on the reliability assessment accuracy. When only 5 transistors are included into the critical set instead of 15, which results in a 66% area overhead reduction, the EOL estimation accuracy diminished with 18%. This indicates that area vs. accuracy trade-offs are possible, while maintaining the aging prediction accuracy within reasonable bounds.     

Analysis of pentasodium triphosphate hydration kinetics

The present work analyzes the effect of various factors on the hydration of pentasodium triphosphate. The experimental method is based on application of the hydration test. Technical-quality products with different proportions of phase I and phase II have been used. The variables studied are phase I/phase II ratio, initial temperature, particle size, stirring rate and composition of the slurry (presence of hexahydrate crystals and water hardness). The results have been discussed according to a kinetics model that includes a series of stages of a physical nature (dissolution of anhydrous salt and the crystallization of the hexahydrate), as well as of a chemical nature (solvation of the ions in solution). Crystallization of the hexahydrate may be the controlling stage in the process.     

Pulse height defect in pCVD and scCVD diamond based detectors

Polycrystalline (pCVD) and single crystal (scCVD) diamond films grown from Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD), if sufficiently pure at Raman analysis, are very good materials for beam or flux monitors inside accelerators or nuclear reactors. This is because they are very hard to damage in high radiation fields and very resistant to high temperatures. Films of pCVD diamond are, however, not so good as spectroscopy detectors due to inhomogeneities induced by their growth in grains with the consequent presence of grain boundaries which worsen their energy resolution. The latter can be significantly improved by growing scCVD diamond films onto HPHT synthetic diamond substrates. We have shown that it is possible to measure the density of defects inside diamond specimens using as probes suitable penetrating nuclear radiations. With the preliminary results reported here we'll show that, bombarding CVD diamond films grown at Roma ȁc;Tor Vergata” with energetic protons and ⁴He, ⁶Li and ¹²C ions produced in the accelerators of Catania laboratories, the pulse height defects are higher than those in silicon detectors and likewise well described by a power law in the deposited energy. Furthermore, we'll show that pulse heights for the same particles seem to depend on the duration of the measurement, thus exhibiting a sort of depolarization of the insulator when exposed to the electric voltage which makes it a particle detector.