Compressive strength and wear properties of SiC/Al6061 composites reinforced with high contents of SiC fabricated by pressure-assisted infiltration

Pressure-assisted infiltration was used to synthesize SiC/Al 6061 composites containing high weight percentages of SiC. A combination of PEG and glass water was used to fabricate SiC preforms and the effect of the presence of glass water on the microstructure and mechanical properties of the preforms was evaluated by performing compression tests on the preforms. Also, the compressive strength and the hardness of the SiC/Al composites were investigated. The results revealed that the glass water improved the compressive strength of the preforms by about five times. The microstructural characterization of the composites showed that the penetration of the aluminum melt into the preforms was completed and almost no porosity could be seen in the microstructures of the composites. Moreover, the composite containing 75 wt% SiC exhibited the highest compressive strength as well as the maximum hardness. The results of the wear tests showed that increasing the SiC content reduces the wear rate so that the Al-75 wt% SiC composite has a lower wear rate and a lower coefficient of friction than those of Al-67 wt% SiC composite. This indicated higher wear resistance in these composites than the Al alloy due to the formation of a tribological layer on the surface of the composites.     

Al2O3 Colloidal Nanocrystals with Strong UV Emission

A facile sol–gel procedure has been developed for the synthesis of colloidal alumina nanocrystals. For the first time, optical characterization procedures were employed to study the quantum confinement effects in optical properties of the prepared Al₂O₃ sol. Accordingly, the hyperbolic band model was used to determine the optical band gap of colloidal alumina nanocrystals. X‐Ray diffraction pattern was used to study the crystallographic phase of the dried gel. Morphological characterization was performed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) emission spectroscopy was used to determination purity of the Al₂O₃ powder. High‐resolution TEM showed that the diameter of colloidal nanocrystals is about 10 nm. Photoluminescence spectroscopy demonstrated that quantum yields for colloidal nanocrystals are 68% with 300 nm excitation wavelength. The experimental observations confirm that highly stable alumina sol with strong UV emission was synthesized. The mentioned optical properties have not been reported before.     

In vitro antimicrobial effects of Myristica fragrans essential oil on foodborne pathogens and its influence on beef quality during refrigerated storage

Nutmeg (Myristica fragrans) seed was subjected to the hydro-distillation method to extract its essential oil (NEO). Its main constituents were α-pinene (20.16%), sabinene (14.45%), and β-pinene (13.26%) with great antimicrobial and antioxidant actions. A novel edible coating was then fabricated based on the sage seed mucilage (SSM) and NEO, to ameliorate the quality and shelf-life of beef slices. The NEO-loaded SSM coating was able to significantly decrease the population of total viable count, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, psychrotrophic bacteria, and fungi. Moreover, lipid oxidation of beef slices was remarkably suppressed upon the application of bioactive NEO-loaded SSM edible coating, as compared with the control by Day 6. The coated beef sample, especially NEO-rich SSM coated ones perceived a higher consumer acceptance and firmness than the SSM coated and noncoated samples. The SSM edible coating containing NEO could therefore have the potential to control the growth of pathogenic microorganisms and lipid oxidation, and to improve the color stability and sensory properties of meat and meat products.     

Evaporation and Evolution of Suspended Solution Droplets at Atmospheric and Reduced Pressures

Thermal history and solute precipitation behavior of suspended solution droplets of sodium chloride (NaCl), magnesium sulphate (MgSO₄), and zirconium hydroxychloride (ZrO(OH)Cl) evaporating at atmospheric and reduced pressures are studied. Experimental measurements on the variation of droplet diameter, solution concentration, and temperature during the evaporation period are presented and discussed. The results of solute precipitation behavior in solution droplets observed under an optical microscope are displayed and discussed. Results indicate that reducing the pressure (∼ 33 kPa) results in a change in the solution droplet evaporation rate, but the thermal histories of a particular solution droplet are similar at the atmospheric and reduced pressures. At atmospheric and reduced pressures used in this study, the d² law for solution droplets is valid at early stages of the evaporation and before the solute precipitation initiates. Drying of MgSO₄ and ZrO(OH)Cl solution droplets results in the formation of spherical particles, whereas drying of spherical NaCl solution droplets results in the formation of cubic particles.     

A novel open-loop high-speed CMOS sample-and-hold

A new open-loop high-speed CMOS sample-and-hold is presented. Based on new method for further reduction of voltage-dependent charge injection, a new CMOS sample-and-hold was designed. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of this method. Over 10 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio, compared to the signal-to-noise ratio of conventional bottom plate sampling S/Hs was achieved with this method. A comparison between newly designed S/H and the bottom-plate sampling S/H is presented.     

An experimental study of a cross-flow type plate heat exchanger for dehumidification/cooling

The thermal and dehumidification behaviour of a standard cross-flow type plate heat exchanger, intended for use as a dehumidifier/cooler, has been investigated both experimentally and numerically. Three sets of experiments have been carried out where air is blown into the primary and secondary sides of the exchanger, while water and liquid desiccant were being sprayed in a counter flow arrangement. The first set represents the indirect evaporative cooling of the primary stream by the secondary air stream. The second set is with liquid desiccant only and no indirect evaporative cooling. In the third set of experiments the primary air stream is indirectly evaporatively cooled by the secondary air stream and dehumidified by the liquid desiccant sprayed into the primary side of the exchanger. The above experiments indicate that the heat exchanger performs well when used with liquid desiccant. Furthermore, for an exchanger angle of 45°, there is an optimum value of air mass flow rate at which the effectiveness and dehumidification efficiency of the plate heat exchanger are maxima. To investigate the effect of the ambient air conditions on the PHE performance, further experiments were carried out using a heater element and a humidifier. The results show that under laboratory conditions the exchanger effectiveness and dehumidification efficiency increase with increasing primary air inlet temperature and humidity ratio. The experimental results were used to validate a computer model developed for the cross-flow type plate heat exchanger/dehumidifier. Comparison indicates that the numerical results are in good agreement with the experiments.     

Effect of Reactor Ambient Pressure on the Morphology of Spray Dried Magnesium Sulphate Powders

The effect of reducing the reactor air pressure on the morphology of spray dried magnesium sulphate powders is investigated, experimentally. A reactor, capable of drying and pyrolyzing solution sprays at low pressures, is designed and manufactured. A vibrating mesh nebulizer is employed to generate the spray. Four different pressures, starting from 60 Torr to the atmospheric pressure, and two different reactor air temperatures of 130°C and 420°C, are considered. In addition, two different concentrations of magnesium sulphate solutions are tested. The results are explained based on the effect of reactor air pressure on the droplet evaporation rate.     

Query processing optimization in broadcasting XML data in mobile communications

Todays, XML as a de facto standard is used to broadcast data over mobile wireless networks. In these networks, mobile clients send their XML queries over a wireless broadcast channel and recieve their desired XML data from the channel. However, downloading the whole XML data by a mobile device is a challenge since the mobile devices used by clients are small battery powered devices with limited resources. To meet this challenge, the XML data should be indexed in such a way that the desired XML data can be found easily and only such data can be downloaded instead of the whole XML data by the mobile clients. Several indexing methods are proposed to selectively access the XML data over an XML stream. However, the existing indexing methods cause an increase in the size of XML stream by including some extra information over the XML stream. In this paper, a new XML stream structure is proposed to disseminate the XML data over a broadcast channel by grouping and summarizing the structural information of XML nodes. By summarizing such information, the size of XML stream can be reduced and therefore, the latency of retrieving the desired XML data over a wirless broadcast channel can be reduced. The proposed XML stream structure also contains indexes in order to skip from the irrelevant parts over the XML stream. It therefore can reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices in downloading the results of XML queries. In addition, our proposed XML stream structure can process different types of XML queries and experimental results showed that it improves the performace of XML query processing over the XML data stream compared to the existing research works in terms of access and tuning times.

     

Opposition-based learning in the shuffled differential evolution algorithm

This paper proposes using the opposition-based learning (OBL) strategy in the shuffled differential evolution (SDE). In the SDE, population is divided into several memeplexes and each memeplex is improved by the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. The OBL by comparing the fitness of an individual to its opposite and retaining the fitter one in the population accelerates search process. The objective of this paper is to introduce new versions of the DE which, on one hand, use the partitioning and shuffling concepts of SDE to compensate for the limited amount of search moves of the original DE and, on the other hand, employ the OBL to accelerate the DE without making premature convergence. Four versions of DE algorithm are proposed based on the OBL and SDE strategies. All algorithms similarly use the opposition-based population initialization to achieve fitter initial individuals and their difference is in applying opposition-based generation jumping. Experiments on 25 benchmark functions designed for the special session on real-parameter optimization of CEC2005 and non-parametric analysis of obtained results demonstrate that the performances of the proposed algorithms are better than the SDE. The fourth version of proposed algorithm has a significant difference compared to the SDE in terms of all considered aspects. The emphasis of comparison results is to obtain some successful performances on unsolved functions for the first time, which so far have not been reported any successful runs on them. In a later part of the comparative experiments, performance comparisons of the proposed algorithm with some modern DE algorithms reported in the literature confirm a significantly better performance of our proposed algorithm, especially on high-dimensional functions.