Microstructures and Properties of Laser-Glazed Plasma-Sprayed ZrO2-YO1.5/Ni-22Cr-10AI-1Y Thermal Barrier Coatings

Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) consisting of two layers with various yttria contents (ZrO ₂- YO_1.5/Ni-22Cr-10Al- lY) were plasma sprayed, and parts of the various specimens were glazed by using a pulsed CO₂ laser. All the specimens were then subjected to furnace thermal cycling tests at 1100 °C; the effect of laser glazing on the durability and failure mechanism of the TBCs was then evaluated. From these results, two models were developed to show the failure mechanism of as- sprayed and laser- glazed TBCs: model A, which is thermal-stress dominant, and model V, which is oxidation-stress dominant. For top coats containing cubic phase, cubic and monoclinic phases, or tetragonal and a relatively larger amount of monoclinic phases, whose degradation is thermal- stress dominant, laser glazing improved the durability of TBCs by a factor of about two to six. Segmented cracks that occurred during glazing proved beneficial for accommodating thermal stress and raising the tolerance to oxidation, which resulted in a higher durability. Thermal barrier coatings with top coats containing tetragonal phase had the highest durability. Degradation of such TBCs resulted mainly from oxidation of the bond coats. For top coats with a greater amount of monoclinic phase, thermal mismatch stress occurred during cooling and detrimentally affected durability.     

Examination of wire electrical discharge machining of Al2O3p/6061Al composites

Alumina particle reinforced 6061 aluminum matrix composites (Al₂O₃p/6061Al) have excellent physical and chemical properties than those of a traditional metal; however, their poor machinability lead to worse surface quality and serious cutting tool wear. In this study, wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM) is adopted in machining Al₂O₃p/6061Al composite. In the experiments, machining parameters of pulse-on time were changed to explore their effects on machining performance, including the cutting speed, the width of slit and surface roughness. Moreover, the wire electrode is easily broken during the machining Al₂O₃p/6061Al composite, so this work comprehensively investigates into the locations of the broken wire and the reason of wire breaking.The experimental results indicate that the cutting speed (material removal rate), the surface roughness and the width of the slit of cutting test material significantly depend on volume fraction of reinforcement (Al₂O₃ particles). Furthermore, bands on the machined surface for cutting 20 vol.% Al₂O₃p/6061Al composite are easily formed, basically due to some embedded reinforcing Al₂O₃ particles on the surface of 6061 aluminum matrix, interrupt the machining process. Test results reveal that in machining Al₂O₃p/6061Al composites a very low wire tension, a high flushing rate and a high wire speed are required to prevent wire breakage; an appropriate servo voltage, a short pulse-on time, and a short pulse-off time, which are normally associated with a high cutting speed, have little effect on the surface roughness.     

Simulation of ultrasonic-vibration drawing using the finite element method (FEM)

In ultrasonic-vibration drawing, wires are drawn while ultrasonic vibration is applied to a drawing die. Prior studies provide experimental proof that ultrasonic-vibration drawing reduces drawing resistance, improves lubrication and prevents wire breakage. In the future, ultrasonic-vibration drawing is expected to contribute to the drawing of difficult-to-draw materials and operations, such as shaped wires, ultrafine wires, and the wire drawing operation in semidry or dry condition. However, a detailed analysis and understanding of the mechanism of improvement is not possible on the basis of conventional experimental observations because the ultrasonic-vibration processing phenomenon occurs at high speed. Therefore, we attempted to understand the processing mechanism of ultrasonic-vibration drawing using the finite element method (FEM). ABAQUS was used for the FEM. Drawing force and stress–strain distributions in drawn wires were analyzed. From these studies, we quantitatively clarified the mechanism of improved drawing characteristics, such as decreased drawing force.     

Screen‐based color vision test for digital quantification of deutan color defects using a color‐calibrated monitor

Display technologies are used in various industries. However, few studies on color vision testing using self‐luminous displays are reported. In this study, a screen‐based color vision test, termed the digital color vision test (DCVT), is developed on a color‐calibrated monitor. A control bar is adjusted by the observer to build just noticeable chromatic difference ellipses in CIE u′v′ chromaticity diagram, which indicate the capabilities of subjects' color visions. Ten color‐normal observers and 13 deutan observers participated in the psychophysical experiments. The observers also performed the other two typical diagnostic tests (D‐15 and anomaloscope). Results from the experiment using the adjustment psychophysical method for digital quantification of deutan color vision defects are presented. It is found that the diagnosis accuracy of the DCVT is approximately equivalent to those of D‐15 and anomaloscope tests.     

On a novel press system with six links for precision deep drawing

The objective of this paper is to propose a novel press system with six links for precision deep drawing, and verify its feasibility. First, the system is presented and its advantages are discussed. Then, the kinematic analysis of the system is obtained by examining the geometry of the design. Moreover, kinematic dimensions of the variable coupling are found by using optimization method. Furthermore, the proposed approach is illustrated by a design example, its solid model for the proposed design is established, and then kinematic simulation is performed by ADAMS software. Finally, a prototype and an experimental setup are established, and the experiment is conducted. The results show that the proposed new mechanism is feasible and of reasonable accuracy. In addition, it has the advantages of easy manufacture, lower cost, higher precision, and easy adjustability.     

Empirical evaluation of computational fear contagion models in crowd dispersions

In social psychology, emotional contagion describes the widely observed phenomenon of one person’s emotions being influenced by surrounding people’s emotions. While the overall effect is agreed upon, the underlying mechanism of the spread of emotions has seen little quantification and application to computational agents despite extensive evidence of its impacts in everyday life. In this paper, we examine computational models of emotional contagion by implementing two models (Bosse et al., European council on modeling and simulation, pp. 212–218, 2009) and Durupinar, From audiences to mobs: Crowd simulation with psychological factors, PhD dissertation, Bilkent University, 2010) that draw from two separate lines of contagion research: thermodynamics-based and epidemiological-based. We first perform sensitivity tests on each model in an evacuation simulation, ESCAPES, showing both models to be reasonably robust to parameter variations with certain exceptions. We then compare their ability to reproduce a real crowd panic scene in simulation, showing that the thermodynamics-style model (Bosse et al., European council on modeling and simulation, pp. 212–218, 2009) produces superior results due to the ill-suited contagion mechanism at the core of epidemiological models. We also identify that a graduated effect of fear and proximity-based contagion effects are key to producing the superior results. We then reproduce the methodology on a second video, showing that the same results hold, implying generality of the conclusions reached in the first scene.     

PREACO: A fast ant colony optimization for codebook generation

This paper presents an effective and efficient method for speeding up ant colony optimization (ACO) in solving the codebook generation problem. The proposed method is inspired by the fact that many computations during the convergence process of ant-based algorithms are essentially redundant and thus can be eliminated to boost their convergence speed, especially for large and complex problems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we compare it with several state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the computation time of ACO-based algorithms evaluated in this paper while at the same time providing results that match or outperform those ACO by itself can provide.     

HOM4PS-2.0: a software package for solving polynomial systems by the polyhedral homotopy continuation method

HOM4PS-2.0 is a software package in FORTRAN 90 which implements the polyhedral homotopy continuation method for solving polynomial systems. It updates its original version HOM4PS in three key aspects: (1) new method for finding mixed cells, (2) combining the polyhedral and linear homotopies in one step, (3) new way of dealing with curve jumping. Numerical results show that this revision leads to a spectacular speed-up, ranging up to 1950s, over its original version on all benchmark systems, especially for large ones. It surpasses the existing packages in finding isolated zeros, such as PHCpack (Verschelde in ACM Trans Math Softw 25:251–276, 1999), PHoM (Gunji et al. in Computing 73:57–77, 2004), and Bertini (Bates et al. in Software for numerical algebraic geometry. Available at http://www.nd.edu/~sommese/bertini), in speed by big margins.     

Robust fuzzy stabilization of dithered chaotic systems using island-based random optimization algorithm

Applying dither to highly nonlinear systems may suppress chaotic phenomena, but dynamic performance, such as convergence rate and disturbance attenuation, is usually not guaranteed. This paper presents a dithered H_∞ robust fuzzy control scheme to stabilize chaotic systems that ensures disturbance attenuation bounds. In the proposed scheme, Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy linear models are used to describe the relaxed models of the dithered chaotic system, and fuzzy controllers are designed based on an extension to the concept of parallel distributed compensation (PDC). Sufficient condition for the existence of the H_∞ robust fuzzy controllers is presented in terms of a novel linear matrix inequalities (LMI) form which takes full consideration of modeling error and disturbances, but cannot be solved by the standard procedures. In order to solve the LMI problem and to identify the chaotic systems as T-S fuzzy modes, we propose a compound optimization strategy called the island-based random-walk algorithm (IRA). The algorithm is composed of a set of communicating random-walk optimization procedures concatenated with the down-hill simplex method. The design procedure and validity of the proposed scheme is demonstrated via numerical simulation of the dithered fuzzy control of a chaotic system.