Modeling of laser keyhole welding: Part I. mathematical modeling,numerical methodology,role of recoil pressure,multiple reflections,and free surface evolution

A three-dimensional laser-keyhole welding model is developed, featuring the self-consistent evolution of the liquid/vapor (L/V) interface together with full simulation of fluid flow and heat transfer. Important interfacial phenomena, such as free surface evolution, evaporation, kinetic Knudsen layer, homogeneous boiling, and multiple reflections, are considered and applied to the model. The level set approach is adopted to incorporate the L/V interface boundary conditions in the Navier-Stokes equation and energy equation. Both thermocapillary force and recoil pressure, which are the major driving forces for the melt flow, are incorporated in the formulation. For melting and solidification processes at the solid/liquid (S/L) interface, the mixture continuum model has been employed. The article consists of two parts. This article (Part I) presents the model formulation and discusses the effects of evaporation, free surface evolution, and multiple reflections on a steady molten pool to demonstrate the relevance of these interfacial phenomena. The results of the full keyhole simulation and the experimental verification will be provided in the companion article (Part II).     

Vibration of clamped moderately thick general cross-ply plates using a generalized Navier approach

A hitherto unavailable analytical solution to the free vibration problem of general cross-ply laminated rigidly clamped rectangular plates, incorporating first-order shear deformation, and rotatory and in-plane inertias into the formulation, is presented. A recently developed boundary continuous displacement-based generalized Navier solution technique is used to solve the five highly coupled linear second-order partial differential equations with constant coefficients, and the associated geometric boundary conditions. The assumed solution functions are in the form of double Fourier series, which satisfy the rigidly clamped boundary conditions a priori in a manner similar to the conventional Navier method. Convergence characteristics of the natural frequencies of both symmetric and antisymmetric cross-ply plates are numerically established. Other numerical results presented herein include (i) comparison with the corresponding available first-order shear deformation theory-based Galerkin and classical lamination theory-based boundary-discontinuous analytical solutions, and (ii) study of the effects of thickness and aspect ratio on the natural frequencies.     

A novel discrete control strategy for independent stabilization of parallel three-phase boost converters by combining space-vector modulation with variable-structure control

We propose a discrete nonlinear controller, developed in a synchronous frame, for a parallel three-phase boost converter consisting of two modules. The basic idea, however, can be extended to a system with N modules. Each of the closed-loop power-converter modules operates asynchronously without any communication with the other modules. The controller stabilizes the currents on the dq-axes and limits the flow of the pure-zero sequence current. It combines the space-vector modulation scheme with a variable-structure control, thereby keeping the switching frequency constant and achieving satisfactory dynamic performance.     

Erosion rate correlations of a pipe protruded in an abrupt pipe contraction

Erosion is one of the most serious problems in various gas and liquid flow passages such as flow in pipes, pumps, turbines, compressors and many other devices. Sand presence causes loss of pipe wall thickness that can lead to pipe erosion, frequent failures and loss of expensive production time. The importance of this problem is mainly due to many related engineering applications, viz. heat exchangers. In order to reduce the frequency of such pipe erosions, caps in the form of replaceable pipes are protruded in the sudden contraction regions which are exposed to most of the serious erosion rates. In the present work, numerical investigation of the erosion of a pipe protruded in a sudden contraction is presented. The turbulent, steady, 2-D axi-symmetric flow inside an axi-symmetric abrupt contraction pipe with a pipe protrusion embedded in it was solved by steady-state time averaged conservation equations of mass and momentum along with two equation model for turbulence. Particles are tracked using Lagrangian particle tracking. An erosion model was employed to investigate the erosion phenomena for the given geometry. The influence of the different parameters such as the inlet flow velocity (3–10 m/s), the particle diameter (10–400 μm), the protruded pipe geometry (thickness T=1–5 mm and depth H=2–5 mm) and the pipe contraction ratio (Cr=0.25–0.5) on the erosion of pipe protrusion was investigated. Correlations for the influence of inlet flow velocity, depth and thickness of the protruded pipe on the erosion rate are presented.     

Simulation of an integrated age replacement and spare provisioning policy using SLAM

This paper presents a SLAM simulation model for determining a jointly optimal age replacement and spare part provisioning policy. The policy, referred to as a stocking policy, is formulated by combining age replacement policy with a continuous review (s, S) type inventory policy, where s is the stock reorder level and S is the maximum stock level. The optimal values of the decision variables are obtained by minimizing the total cost of replacement and inventory. The simulation procedure outlined in the paper can be used to model any operating situation having either a single item or a number of identical items. Results from a number of case problems specifically constructed by 5-factor second order rotatory design have been presented and the effects of different cost elements, item failure characteristics and lead time characteristics have been highlighted. For all case problems, optimal (s, S) policies to support the Barlow-Proschan age policy have also been determined. Simulation results clearly indicate the separate optimizations of replacement and spare provisioning policies do not ensure global optimality when total system cost has to be minimized.     

Coprocessor design for multilayer surface-mounted PCB routing

The authors present the issues involved in the design of a special-purpose processing array system, called HAM, which accelerates computationally intensive wire routing tasks. It is especially suited for double-sided surface-mounted boards, which require complex three-dimensional search operations over multiple wiring planes. The novel features of the design include a hexagonal interconnection scheme to improve workload distributions during multilayer concurrent search operations and the VLSI custom design of the processors. Particular emphasis has been placed on the demands of maze routing. A cell-address propagation scheme, which is quite different from the traditional grid-coordinate approach, is discussed. It provides rapid lookup of pertinent routing information and can be extended to any distributed memory multiprocessor system. A global pipelining scheme of cell updates and expands is discussed. Experimental results are presented relating the speedup to various criteria for two different modes of parallel wave propagation     

NN-based Prediction Interval for Nonlinear Processes Controller

Neural networks (NNs) are extensively used in modelling, optimization, and control of nonlinear plants. NN-based inverse type point prediction models are commonly used for nonlinear process control. However, prediction errors (root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) etc.) significantly increase in the presence of disturbances and uncertainties. In contrast to point forecast, prediction interval (PI)-based forecast bears extra information such as the prediction accuracy. The PI provides tighter upper and lower bounds with considering uncertainties due to the model mismatch and time dependent or time independent noises for a given confidence level. The use of PIs in the NN controller (NNC) as additional inputs can improve the controller performance. In the present work, the PIs are utilized in control applications, in particular PIs are integrated in the NN internal model-based control framework. A PI-based model that developed using lower upper bound estimation method (LUBE) is used as an online estimator of PIs for the proposed PI-based controller (PIC). PIs along with other inputs for a traditional NN are used to train the PIC to predict the control signal. The proposed controller is tested for two case studies. These include, a chemical reactor, which is a continuous stirred tank reactor (case 1) and a numerical nonlinear plant model (case 2). Simulation results reveal that the tracking performance of the proposed controller is superior to the traditional NNC in terms of setpoint tracking and disturbance rejections. More precisely, 36% and 15% improvements can be achieved using the proposed PIC over the NNC in terms of IAE for case 1 and case 2, respectively for setpoint tracking with step changes.

     

UV-shielding by a polyurethane/f-Oil fly ash-CeO2 protective coating

A waste material called oil fly ash (OFA) was acid-functionalized, yielding f-OFA-COOH, which was then reacted with cerium oxide (CeO₂) to make CeO₂-functionalized OFA, or f-OFA-CeO₂. Pristine OFA and f-OFA-CeO₂ were used to make waterborne polyurethane (WBPU) dispersions, referred to as WBPU/OFA and WBPU/f-OFA-CeO₂, respectively, with defined OFA and f-OFA-CeO₂ content. All the dispersions were applied to mild steel as organic coatings to evaluate their protective properties, such as their hydrophobicity, adhesive strength and UV-shielding resistance. These protective properties varied based on the OFA and f-OFA-CeO₂ content. The highest water contact angle, minimum water swelling and maximum adhesive strength were found using WBPU/f-OFA-CeO₂-20 coating (using 2.00 wt% f-OFA-CeO₂), which also showed the maximum ultraviolet (UV) absorption via UV–vis spectroscopy analysis. This UV shielding result also matched field test results, as that coating was found to exhibit the lowest UV degradation near a marine atmosphere, as shown by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis. The least affected hydrophobicity was also recorded for the sample with the WBPU/f-OFA-CeO₂-20 coating.