Use of the Retarded Solution-Reprecipitation Process to Attain a Higher Initial Permeability in MnZn Ferrites

We investigated the effect of various amounts of liquid phase on microstructure development during sintering and the resulting magnetic permeability of MnZn ferrite (MZF) samples. Our results revealed that the microstructure and the final magnetic permeability depend on the thickness of the liquid-phase film during sintering. The solution-reprecipitation (S-R) process, which is associated with an intensive microstructure development in MZF, starts when a continuous liquid-phase film of critical thickness δ_o, which wets the MZF grains, is formed. The solid-state sintering that takes place before the formation of the continuous liquid-phase film is essential for the final microstructure of MZF.     

Modeling of polypropylene degradation during reactive extrusion with implications for process control

This paper presents the development of a model for free radical initiated polypropylene degradation during reactive extrusion that combines a kinetic model of the polypropylene degradation reaction with a simplified model of the melting mechanism in the extruder. The free radical initiated degradation of polypropylene is characterized by a narrowing of the molecular weight distribution (MWD) and a decrease in the molecular weight averages. A high temperature SEC is used to determine MWD's for three different commercially available polypropylenes degraded at various initiator concentrations in a 1.5 inch single screw extruder (L/D = 24:1). The predictions of the kinetic model alone and the combined kinetic-melting model are compared with the experimentally determined MWD's and molecular weight averages for the degraded polypropylenes. The predictions of a modified kinetic model that includes the possibility of termination by combination are also examined. The kinetic-melting model is found to provide significantly improved predictions of the experimentally determined MWD's and molecular weight averages in comparison to the original kinetic model. A viscosity-molecular weight relationship is also developed, which is then used to determine the gain of the degradation process as a function of the initiator concentration from the molecular weight averages predicted by the kinetic-melting model. Earlier work has shown such prior knowledge of the process gain can be used to significantly improve the performance of process control schemes for the degradation process.     

Polymer reactors and molecular weight distribution. VIII. A method of interpreting skewed GPC chromatograms

A new-method of interpreting GPC chromatograms which accounts for skewing and symmetrical axial dispersion has been developed. General relationships for a symmetrical axial dispersion correction and for a skewing correction are derived. The method has been verified experimentally for unimodal chromatograms and linear calibration curves over a wide range of GPC operating conditions, polymer molecular weights and polydispersities. Measurements of h and skewing factors were obtained by a once-through technique. The need for performing reverse flow experiments has been eliminated. Artificial oscillations in the corrected chromatogram due to step size (Method of Pierce-Armonas), and to number of terms in a polynomial expansion (Method of Tung and Method of Smith) are eliminated. The method has yet to be evaluated for nonlinear calibration curves and multi-modal distributions. However, suggestions for its application in these circumstances are presented.     

The compatibility of linear low density polyethylene-polypropylene blends: Viscosity ratio plots

Blends of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) and polypropylene (PP) show diverse mechanical property behavior in the published literature. The main objectives of this work were: to investigate the effect of viscosity of the component phases on the mechanical properties of such blends and to use the results to obtain a method for compatibilizing diaper manufacturing waste. The significant result of the study was that although LLDPE/PP blends are often termed “incompatible,” when viscosity of the components was more closely matched to each other, increases of as much as 50% in tensile strength and modulus were observed over the “rule of mixtures” line. Also, scanning electron microscopy then showed a more diffuse interface between the component phases. Three dimensional views of plots of viscosity ratio of the blend components as a function of temperature and shear rate were used to demonstrate the closer matching of viscosities for the blend components of the higher performing blends. In processing diaper manufacturing waste, addition of a high molecular weight PP in a manufacturing scale single screw extruder, to provide a closer match of viscosities of the blend components, significantly improved mechanical properties.     

On minimum cost isolated failure immune networks

A telecommunications network is isolated failure immune (IFI) if and only if communication between operative sites can be completed as long as network failures are isolated. It is known that the class of minimal IFI networks is equivalent to the class of spanning 2-trees. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first computational study dealing with the construction of a minimum cost IFI network. The problem is known to be NP-complete. We develop a tabu search based heuristic for solving the minimum cost spanning 2-tree (MCS2T) problem. The complex structure of 2-trees makes the tabu search heuristic highly dependent on the starting solution. We develop four heuristic algorithms to obtain diversified good starting solutions. They are: completion of a 2-tree from a spanning tree, two greedy approaches, and a method based on the recursive definition of a 2-tree. We also formulate an integer programming problem (IP) whose objective function value is a lower bound to the MCS2T problem. We solve the IP by developing a constraint generation scheme. The algorithms were tested on complete random graphs with Euclidean distances and on two real data sets (Civil Aeronautics Board) with instances of 10, 15, 20 and 25 nodes. As a result of this research for small problems (10 and 15 nodes), the heuristic solutions are on average within 0.8% from the optimal solution and for large problems (20 and 25 nodes), the average error is less than 2.8%.     

A quantitative analysis of the unit verification perspective on fault distributions in complex software systems: an operational replication

Unit verification, including software inspections and unit tests, is usually the first code verification phase in the software development process. However, principles of unit verification are weakly explored, mostly due to the lack of data, since unit verification data are rarely systematically collected and only a few studies have been published with such data from industry. Therefore, we explore the theory of fault distributions, originating in the quantitative analysis by Fenton and Ohlsson, in the weakly explored context of unit verification in large-scale software development. We conduct a quantitative case study on a sequence of four development projects on consecutive releases of the same complex software product line system for telecommunication exchanges. We replicate the operationalization from earlier studies, analyzed hypotheses related to the Pareto principle of fault distribution, persistence of faults, effects of module size, and quality in terms of fault densities, however, now from the perspective of unit verification. The patterns in unit verification results resemble those of later verification phases, e.g., regarding the Pareto principle, and may thus be used for prediction and planning purposes. Using unit verification results as predictors may improve the quality and efficiency of software verification.