Moisture sorption, transport, and hydrolytic degradation in polylactide

Management of moisture penetration and hydrolytic degradation of polylactide (PLA) is extremely important during the manufacturing, shipping, storage, and end-use of PLA products. Moisture transport, crystallization, and degradation, in PLA have been measured through a variety of experimental techniques including size-exclusion chromatography, differential scanning calorimetry, and X-ray diffraction. Quartz crystal microbalance and dynamic vapor sorption experiments have also been used to measure moisture sorption isotherms in PLA films with varying crystallinity. A surprising result is that, within the accuracy of the experiments, crystalline and amorphous PLA films exhibit identical sorption isotherms.     

The response of microstructure to processing in a series of poly(siloxaneimide) copolymers

Poly(siloxaneimide) (PSI) segmented copolymers exhibit organized microdomains if the blocks are sufficiently incompatible. As with neat diblock and triblock copolymers, the processing route employed to prepare films of PSI materials is expected to influence the dimensions and/or morphology of the resultant microstructure. In this work, small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) is utilized to characterize the disordered microstructure found in films of a series of PSI copolymers which are subjected to solvent casting and various thermal treatments. Microstructural dimensions such as the periodicity and correlation length are deduced from the Teubner-Strey (TS) model for disordered microemulsions. The scattering intensity of each copolymer up to q = 5.0 nm^?1, where q is the scattering vector, is found to scale as q^?2.8+?0.1. Results indicate that processing the materials as cast films or as melt-pressed films allowed to cool slowly has a small, but discernible, effect on microstructural characteristics. SANS profiles of films quenched from elevated temperatures reveal a clear transition in microdomain periodicity, which correlates well with the glass transition temperature of the imide microphase in these and other materials of similar chemical structure. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Exponential convergence for one dimensional contact processes

The complete convergence theorem implies that starting from any initial distribution the one dimensional contact process converges to a limit ast. In this paper we give a necessary and sufficient condition on the initial distribution for the convergence to occur with exponential rapidity.This work was discussed while the authors were visiting the Nankai Mathematics Institute in Tianjin.Partially supported by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office through the Mathematical Sciences Institute at Cornell University, and a Guggenheim fellowship.Research supported by the National Science Foundation of China.     

Homogeneous equation of thermoacoustics: Low frequency approximation

In this article, homogeneous Parker's equation is solved. Relations for temperature, velocity and pressure are found. The possibility of low frequency approximation is shown and thermoacoustic effect in gas near plane motionless wall is treated.I would like to thank Prof. Zdenk kvor for his interest and encouragement.     

An analysis of reduced Hessian methods for constrained optimization

We study the convergence properties of reduced Hessian successive quadratic programming for equality constrained optimization. The method uses a backtracking line search, and updates an approximation to the reduced Hessian of the Lagrangian by means of the BFGS formula. Two merit functions are considered for the line search: the ₁ function and the Fletcher exact penalty function. We give conditions under which local and superlinear convergence is obtained, and also prove a global convergence result. The analysis allows the initial reduced Hessian approximation to be any positive definite matrix, and does not assume that the iterates converge, or that the matrices are bounded. The effects of a second order correction step, a watchdog procedure and of the choice of null space basis are considered. This work can be seen as an extension to reduced Hessian methods of the well known results of Powell (1976) for unconstrained optimization.This author was supported, in part, by National Science Foundation grant CCR-8702403, Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant AFOSR-85-0251, and Army Research Office contract DAAL03-88-K-0086.This author was supported by the Applied Mathematical Sciences subprogram of the Office of Energy Research, U.S. Department of Energy, under contracts W-31-109-Eng-38 and DE FG02-87ER25047, and by National Science Foundation Grant No. DCR-86-02071.     

Stabilizing an uncertain production system

Consider a production system that consists ofm machines each of which can produce parts ofn types. When machinek is used, it produces a part of typei with probabilityp _ki . Requests arrive for parts, one at a time. With probability _i an arriving request is for a part of typei. The requests must be served without waiting. Thus, if a requested part is not available, it must be produced. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a strategy (a choice of the machines to be used) which makes the inventory of parts stable and we provide such a strategy.Two variations of this model are also considered: the case of batch arrivals of requests, and that of a system where the requests can be queued.     

Markovian network processes: Congestion-dependent routing and processing

A Markovian network process describes the movement of discrete units among a set of nodes that process the units. There is considerable knowledge of such networks, often called queueing networks, in which the nodes operate independently and the routes of the units are independent. The focus of this study, in contrast, is on networks with dependent nodes and routings. Examples of dependencies are parallel processing across several nodes, blocking of transitions because of capacity constraints on nodes, alternate routing of units to avoid congestion, and accelerating or decelerating the processing rate at a node depending on downstream congestion. We introduce a general network process representing the numbers of units at the nodes and derive its equilibrium distribution. This distribution takes the form of a product of functions of vectors in which the arguments of the functions satisfy an interchangeability property. This new type of distribution may apply to other multi-variate processes as well. A basic idea in our approach is a linking of certain micro-level balance properties of the network routing to the processing rates at the nodes. The link is via routing-balance partitions of nodes that are inherent in any network. A byproduct of this approach is a general characterization of blocking of transitions without the restriction that the process is reversible, which had been a standard assumption. We also give necessary and sufficient conditions under which a unit moving in the network sees a time average for the unmoved units (called the MUSTA property). Finally, we discuss when certain flows between nodes in an open network are Poisson processes.This research was sponsored in part by Air Force Office of Scientific Research contract 84-0367.     

Replacement-Policy Development: A Case Study of Glove Replacement at a Nuclear Processing Facility

Individual/group replacement models were used to identify the minimum-cost policy for replacing protective gloves that are utilized in product fabrication at a nuclear processing facility. Since historical data on glove longevity were not available to determine the failure-rate distribution, the classical replacement model for items that fail was modified to consider glove life as a normally distributed variable. Moreover, the absence of replacement-cost required that the classical model be transformed to incorporate the ratio of single to unit-group replacement cost. Sensitivity analysis on these two input parameter values provided guidance for the development of an appropriate replacement policy.