A novel bio‐based phthalonitrile resin derived from catechin: synthesis and comparison of curing behavior with petroleum‐based counterpart

The development of bio‐based thermosetting resins with good thermal stability can potentially afford sustainable polymers as replacements for petroleum‐based polymers. We report a practical route to a novel catechin‐based phthalonitrile resin precursor (CA‐Ph), which contains free phenolic hydroxyl groups that result in ‘self‐curing’ at elevated temperatures to afford a thermostable polymer. Comparison of the performance of this CA‐Ph resin with that of a conventional petroleum‐based bisphenol A phthalonitrile resin (BPA‐Ph; containing 5 wt% of the curing agent 4,4′‐diaminodiphenylsulfone) revealed that CA‐Ph exhibits a lower melting point and curing temperature. Cured CA‐Ph resin retains 95% of its weight at 520 °C under a nitrogen atmosphere, which compares favorably with results obtained for BPA‐Ph resin that retains 95% of its weight at a lower temperature of 484 °C. Kinetic results indicated that the curing reactions of both CA‐Ph and BPA‐Ph systems follow an autocatalytic mechanism. These results suggest that catechin is a useful bio‐based feedstock for the preparation of self‐curing and thermally stable phthalonitrile resins for advanced technological applications. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry     

A scalable architecture for geometric correction of multi-projector display systems

Multi-projector displays allow the realization of large and immersive projection environments by allowing the tiling of projections from multiple projectors. Such tiled displays require real time geometrical warping of the content that is being projected from each projector. This geometrical warping is a computationally intensive operation and is typically applied using high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) that are able to process a defined number of projector channels. Furthermore, this limits the applicability of such multi-projector display systems only to the content that is being generated using desktop based systems. In this paper we propose a platform independent FPGA based scalable hardware architecture for geometric correction of projected content that allows addition of each projector channel at a fractional increase in logic area. The proposed scheme provides real time correction of HD quality video streams and thus enables the use of this technology for embedded and standalone devices.     

Producing fully-lamellar microstructure for wrought beta-gamma TiAl alloys without single α-phase field

Fine-grained fully-lamellar (FL) microstructure is desired for TiAl components to serve as compressor/turbine blades and turbocharger turbine wheels. This study deals with the process and phase transformation to produce FL microstructure for Mo stabilized beta-gamma TiAl alloys without single α-phase field. Unlike the α + γ two-phased TiAl or beta-gamma TiAl with single α-phase field, the wrought multi-phase TiAl–4/6Nb–2Mo–B/Y alloys exhibit special annealing process to obtain FL microstructure. Short-term annealing at temperatures slightly above β-transus is recommended to produce the desired FL microstructure. The related mechanism is to guarantee the sufficient diffusion homogenization of β stabilizers during single β-phase annealing, and further avoid α decomposition by α → γ + β when cooling through α + β + γ phase field. The colony boundary β phase contributes to fine-grained nearly FL microstructure, by retarding the coarsening of the α phase grains.     

Polymer derived ceramic materials from Si,B and MoSiB filler-loaded perhydropolysilazane precursor for oxidation protection

Silica-based coating systems were developed using polymer derived ceramics (PDCs) technology. Ceramic composites on the base of a SiO₂ and SiNO matrix and homogeneously distributed Mo₅SiB₂, SiB₆, Si and B fillers were manufactured. The coating systems have low porosity and provide a high oxidation resistance up to 100 h at 800 °C and 1100 °C in air. The influence of temperature and atmosphere of pyrolysis on the polymer precursor, the volume fraction of filler materials on the chemical composition of compacts as well as their high-temperature oxidation protection was investigated.     

Survey on Passivity Based Control of Induction Machine

Induction machines (IM) constitute a theoretically interesting and practically important class of nonlinear systems. They are frequently used as wind generators for their power/cost ratio. They are described by a fifth‐order nonlinear differential equation with two inputs and only three state variables available for measurement. The control task is further complicated by the fact that IM are subject to unknown (load) disturbances and the parameters can be of great uncertainty. One is then faced with the challenging problem of controlling a highly nonlinear system, with unknown time‐varying parameters, where the regulated output, besides being unmeasurable, is perturbed by an unknown additive signal. Passivity‐based control (PBC) is a well‐established structure‐preserving design methodology which has shown to be very powerful to design robust controllers for physical systems described by Euler‐Lagrange equations of motion. PBCs provide a natural procedure to "shape" the potential energy yielding controllers with a clear physical interpretation in terms of interconnection of the system with its environment and are robust vis á vis to unmodeled dissipative effects. One recent approach of PBC is the Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity‐Based Control (IDA‐PBC) which is a very useful technique to control nonlinear systems assigning a desired (Port‐Controlled Hamiltonian) structure to the closed‐loop. The aim of this paper is to give a survey on different PBC of IM. The originality of this work is that the author proves that the well known field oriented control of IM is a particular case of the IDA‐PBC with disturbance.     

Physics‐based spectral sharpening through filter‐chart calibration

The spectral overlap of color‐sampling filters increases errors when using a diagonal matrix transform, for color correction and reduces color distinction. Spectral sharpening is a transformation of colors that was introduced to reduce color‐constancy errors when the colors are collected through spectrally overlapping filters. The earlier color‐constancy methods improved color precision when the illuminant color is changed, but they overlooked the color distinction. In this article, we introduce a new spectral sharpening technique that has a good compromise of color precision and distinction, based on real physical constraints. The spectral overlap is measured through observing a gray reference chart with a set of real and spectrally disjoint filters selected by the user. The new sharpening method enables to sharpen colors obtained by a sensor without knowing the camera response functions. Experiments with real images showed that the colors sharpened by the new method have good levels of color precision and distinction as well. The color‐constancy performance is compared with the data‐based sharpening method in terms of both precision and distinction. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 564–576, 2015     

Reducing numerical dissipation in smoke simulation

Numerical dissipation acts as artificial viscosity to make smoke viscous. Reducing numerical dissipation is able to recover visual details smeared out by the numerical dissipation. Great efforts have been devoted to suppress the numerical dissipation in smoke simulation in the past few years. In this paper we investigate methods of combating the numerical dissipation. We describe visual consequences of the numerical dissipation and explore sources that introduce the numerical dissipation into course of smoke simulation. Methods are investigated from various aspects including grid variation, high-order advection, sub-grid compensation, invariant conservation, and particle-based improvement, followed by discussion and comparison in terms of visual quality, computational overhead, ease of implementation, adaptivity, and scalability, which leads to their different applicability to various application scenarios.     

Behaviour of Surface Defects in Wire Rod Rolling

Defects are often present in rolled products, such as wire rod. The market demand for wire rod without any defects has increased. In the final wire rod products, defects originating from steel making, casting, pre‐rolling of billets and during wire rod rolling can appear. In this work, artificial V‐shaped longitudinal surface cracks have been analysed experimentally and by means of FEM. The results indicate that the experiments and FEM calculations show the same tendency except in two cases, where instability due to fairly “round” false round bars disturbed the experiment. FE studies in combination with practical experiments are necessary in order to understand the behaviour of the material flows in the groove and to explain whether the crack will open up as a V‐shape or if it will be closed as an I‐shape.     

铌和钨对γ-TiAl基合金热稳定性的影响

采用光学显微镜(OM)，扫描电镜(SEM)，X射线衍射研究了TiAl—5Nb，TiAl—14．3Nb，TiAl—8Nb—1W，TiAl—12．3Nb-2W四种合金片层组织在1000℃的热稳定性。结果表明，TiAl—12．3Nb-2W合金热稳定性最好，但合金元素对TiAl基合金热稳定性的影响机理还有待进一步的研究。