Thermal quenching of thermoluminescence in TLD-200, TLD-300 and TLD-400 after β-irradiation

The dosimetric characteristics of many TL materials are influenced by changes in location, size and shape of the glow curves due to changes in the heating rate. In this study, the effect of heating rate on the integrated peak areas of CaF₂:Dy (TLD-200), CaF₂:Tm (TLD-300) and CaF₂:Mn (TLD-400) crystals have been investigated after β-irradiation. It was observed that the peak temperatures of all peaks shifted to the high temperature sides and the integrated peak areas decrease as the heating rate increases due to thermal quenching, whose efficiency increases as temperature increases.     

Analysis of Slot Orientation in Shear-Compression Specimen (SCS)

This paper presents an analytical treatment as well as experimental measurement of the plastic deformation field in shear-compression specimen (SCS) by using digital image processing (DIC) technique. The results provide a set of useful expressions that relates externally applied displacement and load quantities to the equivalent stress and equivalent plastic strain within the gage section. Based on the analysis, we propose modifying the slot angle of SCS geometry from its original value of 45º to 35.26º in order to enhance the uniformity of stress and strain fields in gage section. It is shown by analysis that this enhancement is essentially because the compatibility and boundary conditions that yield a homogeneous deformation field is naturally satisfied for the particular slot orientation of ???=?35.26°. This conclusion is also supported by experimental evidence that comparatively shows the edge effects for varying slot angles.     

An educational visualization technique for Kolsky (split Hopkinson) bar

Experimental Techniques - A simple experimental technique is introduced that allows the design of a variety of creative and instructive experiments in the areas of one dimensional wave motion in...     

Optimal ship navigation with safety distance and realistic turn constraints

We consider the optimal ship navigation problem wherein the goal is to find the shortest path between two given coordinates in the presence of obstacles subject to safety distance and turn-radius constraints. These obstacles can be debris, rock formations, small islands, ice blocks, other ships, or even an entire coastline. We present a graph-theoretic solution on an appropriately-weighted directed graph representation of the navigation area obtained via 8-adjacency integer lattice discretization and utilization of the A^∗ algorithm. We explicitly account for the following three conditions as part of the turn-radius constraints: (1) the ship’s left and right turn radii are different, (2) ship’s speed reduces while turning, and (3) the ship needs to navigate a certain minimum number of lattice edges along a straight line before making any turns. The last constraint ensures that the navigation area can be discretized at any desired resolution. Once the optimal (discrete) path is determined, we smoothen it to emulate the actual navigation of the ship. We illustrate our methodology on an ice navigation example involving a 100,000 DWT merchant ship and present a proof-of-concept by simulating the ship’s path in a full-mission ship handling simulator.     

Bis(pentafluorophenylxenonium) tetrafluoroterephthalate, p-C6F5XeO(O)CC6F4C(O)OXeC6F5, a hypervalent compound with two xenon-carbon bonds

Bis(pentafluorophenylxenonium) tetrafluoroterephthalate (1) was obtained by metathesis reactions of pentafluorophenylxenonium and tetrafluoroterephthalate salts. The availability of suitable solvents for the metatheses hampered the optimization of the reaction. The new xenon-carbon compound with two polar Xe-O bonds was characterized by NMR spectroscopy in solution and by Raman spectroscopy in the solid state. From (CF₃)₂CHOH/MeCN solutions single crystals were obtained with four alcohol molecules attached to 1 by hydrogen bridges. The thermal properties of the intrinsically unstable title compound are reported.     

A generic method for the determination of acrylamide in thermally processed foods

A generic sample preparation method for the determination of acrylamide in foods was developed. The method entails extraction with methanol, purification with Carrez I and II solutions, evaporation and solvent change to water, and cleanup with Oasis HLB solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridge. The final extract was analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) for quantitation. The chromatographic separation was performed on ODS-3 column using the isocratic mixture of 0.01 mM acetic acid in 0.2% aqueous solution of formic acid at a flow rate of 0.6 ml/min at 25 degrees C. The recoveries of acrylamide from potato chips, biscuits and coffee ranged between 92.8 and 101.5% with relative standard deviations of 4.1% or less. The limit of detection (LOD) and the limit of quantitation (LOQ) were 2 ng/g and 6 ng/g in the basis of signal to noise ratios of 3:1 and 9:1, respectively.     

Titanium micromachining by femtosecond laser

The ultimate goal of this research was to characterize the ablation depth with respect to pulse energy, translation speed, and consecutive passes in order to obtain the parameters to have smooth microchannel surfaces. A logarithmic dependence of the channel depth on the laser pulse energy was observed with two different distinct ablation regimes. Although the same fluence values were used with two different lens sizes, the slopes of these ablation regimes were quite different. 100 mm lens has a small optical penetration length with steeper ablation slope in the first regime, whereas the 15 mm lens has the opposite. In the second part of the ablation regime, the slope was lower for 100 mm lens as compared to 15 mm lens. Furthermore, spike formation has been seen in 100 mm lens study at 0.308, 0.370, 0.431, and 0.493 J/cm² fluence values yet no spike formations have been seen in 15 mm lens study.     

Universal sound absorption in amorphous solids: A theory of elastically coupled generic blocks

Glasses are known to exhibit quantitative universalities at low temperatures, the most striking of which is the ultrasonic attenuation coefficient Q^?1. In this work we develop a theory of coupled generic blocks with a certain randomness property to show that universality emerges essentially due to the interactions between elastic blocks, regardless of their microscopic nature.     

Effects of copolymer concentration and chain length on the pH-responsive behavior of diblock copolymer micellar films

The pH-responsive behavior of adsorbed diblock copolymer films of PDMA-PDEA (poly(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate)-block-poly(2-(diethylamino)ethyl methacrylate)) on silica has been characterized using a quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D), an optical reflectometer (OR) and an atomic force microscope (AFM). The copolymer was adsorbed at pH 9 from various copolymer concentrations; QCM-D measurements indicate that the level of desorption when rinsed at pH 9 depends on the initial copolymer concentration. The adsorbed films produced at pH 9 generally have low charge densities; adjusting the solution pH to 4 results in a significant protonation of the constituent copolymers and a related interfacial structural change for the copolymer film. OR studies show no significant change during pH cycling, while QCM-D measurements indicate that the adsorbed mass and dissipation alter dramatically in response to the solution pH. The difference between the QCM-D adsorbed masses and dissipation values at pH 4 and 9 were found to be dependent on the initial copolymer concentration. This is due to differences in the initial conformations within the adsorbed copolymer layers at pH 9. The effect of the PDMA chain length on the pH-responsive behavior has also been studied; both the QCM-D adsorbed mass and dissipation of PDMA54-PDEA24 (shorter PDMA block) at pH 4 and 9 were observed to be greater than those of PDMA9X-PDEA2Y (longer PDMA block). This suggests that the normal extension of the adsorbed PDMA54-PDEA24 copolymer films is more significant than that of the PDMA9X-PDEA2Y films on silica.