Comparison of different sampling heads applied for investigation of welding fume

Welding fume samples were collected in two Hungarian welding plants, where different types of steels were welded with metal active gas (MAG) welding. Welding fumes were sampled with “fixed point” and personal sampling techniques applying different sampling heads: Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM) sampler and conical inhalable sampler (CIS) for the inhalable aerosol fraction and the Higgins-Dewell (HD) cyclone for the respirable fraction. When sampled, the welding fume samples were digested with the mixture of nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide in a closed vessel microwave digestion system. The Cr, Mn, Ni and Co contents of the solutions were determined by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Iron was analysed only by the ICP-AES method. Metal concentrations of the workplace air were calculated for the three samplers, and the results were compared to each other. The differences of the metal concentrations determined by the different inhalable sampling heads, which were paired during the sampling, proved not to be significant. Therefore, the IOM and CIS heads can be equally used for the sampling of welding fume. Finally, the distributions of metals were determined between the inhalable and respirable fractions. Metal concentrations in the respirable aerosol fraction were 57-98% of the concentrations in the inhalable fraction. These high rates of metals in the respirable aerosol call the attention to the increased health risk of the welding fume.     

New second derivative multistep methods for stiff systems

In this paper we present details of a new class of second derivative multistep methods. Stability analysis is discussed and an improvement in stability region is obtained. With a simple modification we take advantage of calling for the solution of algebraic equations with the same coefficient matrix in each step. Moreover, using IOM to solve the resulting linear systems, the coefficient matrix is not needed explicitly. Some numerical experiments and comparison with several popular codes are given, showing strong superiority of this new class of methods.     

On IGMRES: An incomplete generalized minimal residual method for large unsymmetric linear systems

The truncated version of the generalized minimal residual method (GMRES), the incomplete generalized minimal residual method (IGMRES), is studied. It is based on an incomplete orthogonalization of the Krylov vectors in question, and gives an approximate or quasi-minimum residual solution over the Krylov subspace. A convergence analysis of this method is given, showing that in the non-restarted version IGMRES can behave like GMRES once the basis vectors of Krylov subspace generated by the incomplete orthogonalization are strongly linearly independent. Meanwhile, some relationships between the residual norms for IOM and IGMRES are established. Numerical experiments are reported to show convergence behavior of IGMRES and of its restarted version IGMRES(m). Project supported by the China State Key Basic Researches, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 19571014), the Doctoral Program (97014113), the Foundation of Returning Scholars of China and the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province.     

A QUASI-MINIMAL RESIDUAL VARIANT OF THE IOM (q) FOR LARGE UNSYMMETRIC LINEAR SYSTEMS

1　IntroductionThe solution of large N× N nonsingular unsymmetric( non-Hermitian) sparse sys-tems of linear equationsAx =b, ( 1 )is one of the most frequently encountered tasks in numerical computations.For example,such systems arise from finite difference or finite element approximations to partial differ-ential equationsA major class of methods for solving ( 1 ) is Krylov subspace or conjugate gradienttype methods.Most successful scheme of these methods are based on the orthogonal pro-jec…