Relationship between microstructure and mechanical properties of polyether block amide foams

The mechanical behaviors of five polyether block amide foams, obtained by mold-opening foam injection process, were investigated with regard to their microstructures. The materials vary in mass ratios of hard versus soft segments, and/or in process packing time. The resulting microstructures have been characterized in terms of cavity size and shape ratios, by analyzing scanning electron microscope images after careful sample preparation. The foam mechanical responses have been characterized in compression at small and large strain. At small strain, the initial linear part of the stress–strain curve is enhanced firstly by the hard segment mass ratio and secondly by the fineness of the microstructure. Similar results have been obtained at large strain. The foam viscoelasticity at large strain has been characterized by stress relaxation and strain recovery tests, relevant for foam applications. Reduced packing time and pressure have been shown to lead to the presence of undesired large cavities. The morphological defects appear to have a negligible impact on the macroscopic mechanical behavior of the foams at infinitesimal strain, but lead to critical inconsistency at large strain. Furthermore, the mechanical behavior of the tested polyether block amide foams is controlled first by hard versus soft segments ratio, and second by the microstructure fineness.     

Receptance coupling for end mills

Identification of chatter free cutting conditions, the chatter stability lobes, requires a measurement of the frequency response function (FRF) of each tool mounted on the spindle. This paper presents a method of assembling known dynamics of the spindle–tool holder with an analytically modeled end mill using the receptance coupling technique. The classical receptance technique is enhanced by proposing a method of identifying the end mill–spindle/tool holder joint dynamics, which include both translational and rotational degrees of freedom. The method requires measurement of FRFs with impact tests applied on the spindle–tool holder assembly and blank calibration cylinders attached to the spindle. The spindle and tool holder characteristics are completely identified from the two experiments, and used for the mathematical prediction of FRF for end mills with arbitrary dimensions. The proposed method is experimentally proven and verified in cutting tests.     

Effects of ring substituents on the protective properties of self-assembled benzenethiols on copper

The self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of a series of substituted benzenethiol (BT) molecules, X-C₆H₄-SH (where X = meta-NH₂, ortho-NH₂, para-NH₂, para-NHCOCH₃, para-F, para-CH₃ and para-CH(CH₃)₂), have been prepared by adsorption from a solution onto a fresh copper (Cu) surface pretreated by a nitric acid etch. The corrosion inhibition efficiency of the modified Cu surfaces in a sulfuric acid solution was investigated by electrochemical characterization. The protection afforded by the substituted functional groups on BT is strongly influenced by the type and the position of the substituent on the benzene ring. BT molecules without any substituent group on the ring are ineffective corrosion inhibitors, indicating that the chemical configuration is the key factor in determining the efficacy of the SAMs as barriers to electrochemically corrosive ions. It is further proposed that the steric hindrance offered by the substituted group in the SAMs plays a very important role in determining its barrier properties.     

Influence of diurnal and seasonal temperature variations on the detection of corrosion in reinforced concrete by acoustic emission

Chloride rich reinforced concrete prisms were coupled to chloride-free prisms and exposed to diurnal and seasonal temperature cycles typical of those found in the UK. Acoustic emissions (AE) and galvanic currents were continuously monitored and correlated with ambient temperature. AE and galvanic currents were found to emulate the evolution of temperature in the diurnal cycles, although no specific relationship between AE and galvanic current could be obtained. The influence of seasonal variations in galvanic current had no obvious influence on AE Energy per second over the range of corrosion rates studied. The findings suggest that AE is more sensitive to short term (diurnal) changes in corrosion rates than the longer (seasonal) effects. It was hypothesised that this is due to transitory changes in the internal microclimate of the concrete.     

Evolution-in-materio: solving computational problems using carbon nanotube–polymer composites

Evolution-in-materio uses evolutionary algorithms to exploit properties of materials to solve computational problems without requiring a detailed understanding of such properties. We show that using a purpose-built hardware platform called Mecobo, it is possible to solve computational problems by evolving voltages and signals applied to an electrode array covered with a carbon nanotube–polymer composite. We demonstrate for the first time that this methodology can be applied to function optimization and also to the tone discriminator problem (TDP). For function optimization, we evaluate the approach on a suite of optimization benchmarks and obtain results that in some cases come very close to the global optimum or are comparable with those obtained using well-known software-based evolutionary approach. We also obtain good results in comparison with prior work on the tone discriminator problem. In the case of the TDP we also investigated the relative merits of different mixtures of materials and organizations of electrode array.     

Hierarchical classification in text mining for sentiment analysis of online news

Sentiment analysis in text mining is a challenging task. Sentiment is subtly reflected by the tone and affective content of a writer’s words. Conventional text mining techniques, which are based on keyword frequencies, usually run short of accurately detecting such subjective information implied in the text. In this paper, we evaluate several popular classification algorithms, along with three filtering schemes. The filtering schemes progressively shrink the original dataset with respect to the contextual polarity and frequent terms of a document. We call this approach “hierarchical classification”. The effects of the approach in different combination of classification algorithms and filtering schemes are discussed over three sets of controversial online news articles where binary and multi-class classifications are applied. Meanwhile we use two methods to test this hierarchical classification model, and also have a comparison of the two methods.     

Experimental study of stable surfaces for anti-slug control in multi-phase flow

Severe slugging flow is always challenging in oil & gas production, especially for the current offshore based production. The slugging flow can cause a lot of problems, such as those relevant to production safety, fatigue as well as capability. As one typical phenomenon in multi-phase flow dynamics, the slug can be avoided or eliminated by proper facility design or control of operational conditions. Based on a testing facility which can emulate a pipeline-riser or a gas-lifted production well in a scaled-down manner, this paper experimentally studies the correlations of key operational parameters with severe slugging flows. These correlations are reflected through an obtained stable surface in the parameter space, which is a natural extension of the bifurcation plot. The maximal production opportunity without compromising the stability is also studied. Relevant studies have already showed that the capability, performance and efficiency of anti-slug control can be dramatically improved if these stable surfaces can be experimentally determined beforehand. The paper concludes that obtaining the stable surface on the new developed map can significantly improve the production rate in a control scheme. Even though the production rate can be further improved by moving the stable surface using advanced control strategies, the constant inputs can in some cases be preferable due to the easier implementation.     

Physically Meaningful Rendering using Tristimulus Colours

In photorealistic image synthesis the radiative transfer equation is often not solved by simulating every wavelength of light, but instead by computing tristimulus transport, for instance using sRGB primaries as a basis. This choice is convenient, because input texture data is usually stored in RGB colour spaces. However, there are problems with this approach which are often overlooked or ignored. By comparing to spectral reference renderings, we show how rendering in tristimulus colour spaces introduces colour shifts in indirect light, violation of energy conservation, and unexpected behaviour in participating media. Furthermore, we introduce a fast method to compute spectra from almost any given XYZ input colour. It creates spectra that match the input colour precisely. Additionally, like in natural reflectance spectra, their energy is smoothly distributed over wide wavelength bands. This method is both useful to upsample RGB input data when spectral transport is used and as an intermediate step for corrected tristimulus‐based transport. Finally, we show how energy conservation can be enforced in RGB by mapping colours to valid reflectances.     

Future Proof: The Transition to Digital at IFI Archive

Informed by research over the past two years and the work of colleagues in peer institutions, the IFI Irish Film Archive developed a six-year Digital Preservation and Access strategy which launched in 2014. Fundamental to this Strategy was the design and installation of digital archive tools for long term preservation and the redesign of workflow practices to facilitate accession and management of high resolution digital film and broadcast assets and associated metadata. This article outlines the steps taken and standards applied in developing a future proof digital audiovisual archive.