Oxidation-sulfidation behavior of Ni aluminide in oxygen-sulfur mixed-gas atmospheres

Oxidation-sulfidation studies were conducted on sheet samples of nickel aluminide, containing 23.5 at. % Al, 0.5 at. % Hf, and 0.2 at. % B in an annealed condition and after preoxidation treatments. Continuous weight-change measurements were made by a thermogravimetric technique in exposure atmospheres of air, a low- gas mixture, and low- gas mixtures with several levels of sulfur. Detailed scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray, and electron microprobe analyses of the corrosion product scale layers were performed. The air-exposed specimens developed predominantly nickel oxide; the specimen exposed to a low- .     

Oxidation and sulfidation behavior of Fe-20Cr-16Ni-4Al-1Y2O3 oxide-dispersion-strengthened alloy

High-temperature oxidation and sulfidation studies were conducted on an oxide-dispersion-strengthened alloy of composition Fe-20Cr-16Ni-4Al-1Y₂O₃. The oxidation studies were conducted in air and low-PO₂ environments over a temperature range of 650–1200°C. Results are also reported on the sulfidation resistance of preformed oxide scales and the influence of reoxidation of preformed sulfide scales. Detailed microstructural results and x-ray diffraction analysis data are presented to substantiate the corrosion behavior of the alloy over the wide range of conditions anticipated in fossil-energy systems. Data are also presented on the corrosion behavior of the alloy in oxygen/sulfur mixed gas atmospheres, and the results are used to compare the corrosion behavior of the present alloy with other chromia- and alumina-forming alloys.     

Mixing matrix estimation using discriminative clustering for blind source separation

Mixing matrix estimation in instantaneous blind source separation (BSS) can be performed by exploiting the sparsity and disjoint orthogonality of source signals. As a result, approaches for estimating the unknown mixing process typically employ clustering algorithms on the mixtures in a parametric domain, where the signals can be sparsely represented. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to perform discriminative clustering of the mixture signals for estimating the mixing matrix. For the case of overdetermined BSS, we develop an algorithm to perform linear discriminant analysis based on similarity measures and combine it with K-hyperline clustering. Furthermore, we propose to perform discriminative clustering in a high-dimensional feature space obtained by an implicit mapping, using the kernel trick, for the case of underdetermined source separation. Using simulations on synthetic data, we demonstrate the improvements in mixing matrix estimation performance obtained using the proposed algorithms in comparison to other clustering methods. Finally we perform mixing matrix estimation from speech mixtures, by clustering single source points in the time-frequency domain, and show that the proposed algorithms achieve higher signal to interference ratio when compared to other baseline algorithms.     

Parameter-uniform hybrid numerical scheme for time-dependent convection-dominated initial-boundary-value problems

In this paper, we propose a numerical scheme which is almost second-order spatial accurate for a one-dimensional singularly perturbed parabolic convection-diffusion problem exhibiting a regular boundary layer. The proposed numerical scheme consists of classical backward-Euler method for the time discretization and a hybrid finite difference scheme for the spatial discretization. We analyze the scheme on a piecewise-uniform Shishkin mesh for the spatial discretization to establish uniform convergence with respect to the perturbation parameter. Numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical results.     

Richardson extrapolation technique for singularly perturbed parabolic convection–diffusion problems

This paper deals with the study of a post-processing technique for one-dimensional singularly perturbed parabolic convection–diffusion problems exhibiting a regular boundary layer. For discretizing the time derivative, we use the classical backward-Euler method and for the spatial discretization the simple upwind scheme is used on a piecewise-uniform Shishkin mesh. We show that the use of Richardson extrapolation technique improves the ε-uniform accuracy of simple upwinding in the discrete supremum norm from O (N ⁻¹ ln N + Δt) to O (N ⁻² ln² N + Δt ²), where N is the number of mesh-intervals in the spatial direction and Δt is the step size in the temporal direction. The theoretical result is also verified computationally by applying the proposed technique on two test examples.     

Effect of Sn doping on the phase transformation properties of ferroelectric BaTiO3

Thermo-Raman and dielectric constant measurements were carried out on the samples Ba(Sn_xTi_1-x)O₃, p obtained from the DTRI thermogram was found to be equal to the ferroelectric transformation temperature T_m, obtained from the maximum of the dielectric constant. Both T_p and T_m decreased almost linearly with increasing Sn concentrations. The Curie temperature T_c, Curie–Weiss constant C_w, Curie–Weiss-like constant C and the critical exponent obtained from the analysis of dielectric constant data clearly suggest that the ferroelectric to paraelectric phase transformation undergoes a crossover from sharp to diffuse phase transformation for Sn concentrations in the range from 0.05 to 0.1. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers