Correction of pressure drop in a heavily loaded hybrid bearing when starting by using a constant flow lubrication system- Application to a rotary cement mill

We analyzed a lubricated journal plain bearing supporting heavy loaded rotary mill. During start-up operating, after the shaft is lifted by high external pressure lubricant, the speed of the shaft grows from 0 to the operating hydrodynamic speed when, suddenly after the first thirty seconds of shaft rotation, the pressure drops in one recess causing excessive damage to the pad bearing interface. The aim was to understand and provide some answers to the pressure drop in order to give an appropriate correction. Misalignment between the shaft and bearing surfaces was considered and analyzed in first part of the study. According to the obtained results the proposed correction is to use a suitable constant flow lubrication system which avoids the pressure to drop in recesses. A real application was made on a partial pad bearing supporting a heavy rotary cement mill localized at the cement plant of Chlef in Algeria.

     

Rapid manufacturing of metal components by laser forming

This overview will focus on the direct fabrication of metal components by using laser-forming techniques in a layer-by-layer fashion. The main driving force of rapid prototyping (RP) or layer manufacturing techniques changed from fabrication of prototypes to rapid tooling (RT) and rapid manufacturing (RM). Nowadays, the direct fabrication of functional or structural end-use products made by layer manufacturing methods, i.e. RM, is the main trend. The present paper reports on the various research efforts deployed in the past decade or so towards the manufacture of metal components by different laser processing methods (e.g. selective laser sintering, selective laser melting and 3-D laser cladding) and different commercial machines (e.g. Sinterstation, EOSINT, TrumaForm, MCP, LUMEX 25, Lasform). The materials and applications suitable to RM of metal parts by these techniques are also discussed.     

Influence of manufacturing errors on the dynamic behavior of planetary gears

Planetary gears are widely used in the transmissions of helicopters, automobiles, aircraft engines, etc. They have substantial advantages such as compactness and a large torque-to-weight ratio. In this work, a plane model of a planetary gear was investigated. The energetic Lagrange formulation was used to recover the equations of motion of the system. A modal analysis was performed, and the influence of gyroscopic effect in particular was scrutinized. The dynamic response was computed by an iterative spectral method. The excitation is induced by time-varying the gearmesh stiffness. The cases of a healthy planetary gear and one with the presence of eccentricity and profile error were compared. The influence on the transmission ratio was also studied.     

Structural robustness and service reachability in urban settings

The concept of city or urban resilience has emerged as one of the key challenges for the next decades. As a consequence, institutions like the United Nations or Rockefeller Foundation have embraced initiatives that increase or improve it. These efforts translate into funded programs both for action “on the ground” and to develop quantification of resilience, under the for of an index. Ironically, on the academic side there is no clear consensus regarding how resilience should be quantified, or what it exactly refers to in the urban context. Here we attempt to link both extremes providing an example of how to exploit large, publicly available, worldwide urban datasets, to produce objective insight into one of the possible dimensions of urban resilience. We do so via well-established methods in complexity science, such as percolation theory—which has a long tradition at providing valuable information on the vulnerability in complex systems. Our findings uncover large differences among studied cities, both regarding their infrastructural fragility and the imbalances in the distribution of critical services.     

On the tube hydroforming process using rectangular,trapezoidal, and trapezoid-sectional dies: modeling and experiments

It is generally known that the contact between tube and die, in the case of tube hydroforming process, leads to the appearance of friction effects. In this context, there are many different models for representing friction and many different tests to evaluate it. In the present paper, the pin-on-disk test has been used and the theoretical model of Orban-2007 has been chosen and developed to evaluate friction coefficient. The main goal is to prove the capacity of theoretical model to present the friction conditions in comparison with the pin-on-disk test. From the Orban model, values of 0.05 and 0.25 of friction coefficient have been found under lubricated and dry tests, respectively. On the other hand, by the classical pin-on-disk test, other values were experimentally obtained as friction coefficient at the copper/steel interface. In the case of pure expansion hydroforming, based on an internal pressure loading only, a “corner filling” test has been run for tube hydroforming. Both dry and lubricated contacts have been considered. Various configurations and shapes have been studied such as the rectangular, trapezoidal, and trapezoid-sectional dies. Finite element simulations with 3D shell and 3D solid models have been performed with different values of friction coefficients. From the main results, it was found that the critical thinning occurs in the transition zone for the square and rectangular section die and in the sharp angle for the trapezoidal and trapezoid-sectional die. The comparison between numerical data and experimental results shows a good agreement. Moreover, the thickness distribution along the cross section is relatively consistent with those measured for the 3D shell model; however, the 3D solid models do not provide a realistic representation of the thickness distribution in the shaped tube. Finally, the results obtained from the theoretical model were more efficient than the results obtained from the pin-on-disk test.     

Adaptive multistage parallel interference cancellation for CDMA

Although the multistage interference cancellation detector is simple in structure, its performance degrades when the number of active users becomes large. In some cases, the performance is even worse than that without cancellation, due to the lack of the exact knowledge of the interfering signal in cancellation. Partial interference cancellation suggested by Divsalar and Simon (see IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.46, p.258-68, 1998) tries to remedy this weakness by reducing the cost of a wrong interference estimation through a weight in each stage. This paper presents an adaptive multistage structure based on the partial interference cancellation approach. In this structure, the weights are obtained by minimizing the mean-square error between the received signal and its estimate through a least mean square (LMS) algorithm. The resulting weights contain reliability information for the hard decisions made in the previous stage. Neither a training sequence nor a pilot signal is needed in the proposed scheme, and its complexity is much lower than that of linear multiuser detectors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can outperform some of the existing interference cancellation methods in both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the multipath fading channels     

Multistage interference cancellation with diversity reception forasynchronous QPSK DS/CDMA systems over multipath fading channels

This paper introduces a multistage interference cancellation (MIC) technique with diversity reception for quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) asynchronous direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) systems over frequency-selective multipath Rayleigh fading channels. Unlike the previous MIC, which tries to remove the lump sum of the multiple-access interference (MAI) and self-interference (SI), this introduced MIC attempts to cancel only the MAI and part of the SI due to the intersymbol interference, while treating the remaining SI created by the current symbol as useful information for symbol decision. In this technique, the RAKE combining is used to collect signal replicas over multiple fading paths. Upper and lower bounds on the bit error probability are derived using a Gaussian approximation and the characteristic function method. Furthermore, effects of channel estimation error on the performance are studied. Analytical and simulation results show that the introduced MIC can provide a performance extremely close to that in an ideal single-user environment and outperforms the previous MIC even in the presence of channel estimation error     

Effect of Hydrothermic Ageing on Dielectric and Mechanical Properties of Rigid Poly(vinyl chloride)

An accelerated hydrothermic ageing (according to N.F.T. 54043 method) was performed on samples of rigid poly(vinyl chloride). The test consisted of sample immersion in boiling water at 100°C for different exposure periods up to 480 h. The samples were removed from the boiling water every two hours for mechanical and dielectric characterization and color test. The dielectric measurements carried out on aged samples, up to 40 h, showed that the permittivity remained almost constant and its value was found to be 2.3 in the range –100 to +62.8°C. However, as the temperature approaches the glass transition (T_g = 88.3°C), the permittivity was observed to increase rapidly. It was also found that the permittivity of aged samples was lower than that of the non‐aged samples. The dielectric loss factor (tan δ) measurements with respect to temperature have confirmed the presence of two relaxations: β at low temperature (around –35°C) and α near the T_g. The combined action of water and temperature reduced the intensity of the corresponding relaxation peaks. The sample color index was evaluated up to 480 h using the SYNMERO scale in order to estimate the degradation extent. Unexpectedly, elongation at break under uniaxial traction remained unaffected by the hydrothermic ageing, meaning that two competing processes were involved simultaneously (sample degradation via chain scission and sample plastification via water absorption).     

Total Synthesis of Symbioramide: a Flexible Approach for the Efficient Preparation of Structural Isomers

A concise, enantioselective total synthesis of symbioramide, starting from simple achiral compounds and racemic α‐amino‐β‐keto ester derivatives is reported. This highly flexible strategy allowed the efficient preparation of seven structural isomers of the natural product as well. The synthesis relies on a convergent route that involves the efficient stereoselective reduction of a α‐keto‐β‐yne ester, and the dynamic kinetic resolution of an α‐amino‐β‐keto ester through ruthenium‐mediated asymmetric hydrogenation.