Evaluation of the thermal oxidative stability of polyimides via TGA techniques

Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) has been used for many years to evaluate polymer thermal stability. The objective of this study is to determine if weight-loss curves from TGA and isothermal TGA (IGA) can be used to determine degradation activation energies and thus rank the thermal stability (TS) and thermooxidative stability (TOS) for selected polyimides. Two high-temperature stable addition-cured polyimides and two aromatic condensation polyimides, all four containing fluorinated connecting linkages in the dianhydride monomers, were compared. Three TGA kinetic methods (Coats/Redfern, Ingraham/Marier, Horowitz/Metzger) were used to determine the activation energy for decomposition in air. The results were then used to rank polyimide stability compared to more traditional rankings based on long-term isothermal air aging weight-loss (IWL) studies and thermal decomposition temperatures (T_d) from TGA data. Use of TGA coupled to a Fourier transform infrared (TGA–FTIR) spectrophotometer allowed for the simultaneous identification and relative quantification of evolved decomposition products (CO₂, CO, ArNCO, and CHF₃) of the four polyimides degraded in air or nitrogen. Isothermal TGA–FTIR (IGA–FTIR) was also done in air to determine the relative rate of product evolution at a constant temperature. Activation energies using TGA and IGA data were determined and then compared with IWL values for the degradation of the polyimide to examine for correlations of real-life thermal oxidative aging to accelerated aging techniques. The Coats/Redfern method and T_d were found to best reproduce stability rankings of those from long-term, high-temperature IWL studies. Together, they may provide a time-saving technique to evaluate polyimide thermal oxidative stability. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Polym Sci A: Polym Chem 37: 3943–3956, 1999     

A spirobicyclic complex of Schmidpeter's ligand,bis(tetraphenylimidodiphosphinato)beryllium,Be(OPh2PNPPh2O)2, an inorganic analog of beryllium bis(β‐diketonates)

The crystal structure of bis(tetra‐phenylimidodiphosphinato)beryllium (as a benzene solvate), Be(OPh₂PNPPh₂O)₂. C₆H₆, was determined by X‐ray diffraction and compared with that of beryllium acetylacetonate, Be(OCMeCHCMeO)₂. The imidodiphosphinate is an inorganic spirobicyclic system, Be(OPNPO)₂, with tetrahedrally coordinated beryllium. Unlike the planar BeO₂C₃ rings in the acetylacetonate, the two six‐membered BeO₂P₂N inorganic rings are nonplanar and display a skew boat conformation. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Heteroatom Chem 11:244–248, 2000     

The method of dynamic mode decomposition in shallow water and a swirling flow problem

In this paper, a new vector‐filtering criterion for dynamic modes selection is proposed that is able to extract dynamically relevant flow features from dynamic mode decomposition of time‐resolved experimental or numerical data. We employ a novel modes selection criterion in parallel with the classic selection based on modes amplitudes, in order to analyze which of these procedures better highlight the coherent structures of the flow dynamics. Numerical tests are performed on two distinct problems. The efficiency of the proposed criterion is proved in retaining the most influential modes and reducing the size of the dynamic mode decomposition model. By applying the proposed filtering mode technique, the flow reconstruction error is shown to be significantly reduced. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sampling and resolution characteristics in reduced order models of shallow water equations: Intrusive vs nonintrusive

We investigate the sensitivity of reduced order models (ROMs) to training data spatial resolution as well as sampling rate. In particular, we consider proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), coupled with Galerkin projection (POD-GP), as an intrusive ROM technique. For nonintrusive ROMs, we consider two frameworks. The first is using dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), and the second is based on artificial neural networks (ANNs). For ANN, we utilized a residual deep neural network, and for DMD we have studied two versions of DMD approaches; one with hard thresholding and the other with sorted bases selection. Also, we highlight the differences between mean subtracting the data (centering) and using the data without mean subtraction. We tested these ROMs using a system of 2D shallow water equations for four different numerical experiments, adopting combinations of sampling rates and spatial resolutions. For these cases, we found that the DMD basis obtained with hard thresholding is sensitive to sampling rate. The sorted DMD algorithm helps to mitigate this problem and yields more stabilized and converging solution. Furthermore, we demonstrate that both DMD approaches without mean subtraction provide significantly more accurate results than DMD with mean subtracting the data. On the other hand, POD is relatively insensitive to sampling rate and yields better representation of the flow field. Meanwhile, spatial resolution has little effect on both POD and DMD performances. Numerical results reveal that an ANN on POD subspace (POD-ANN) performs remarkably better than POD-GP and DMD in capturing system dynamics, even with a small number of modes.     

Non‐intrusive reduced order modelling with least squares fitting on a sparse grid

This paper presents a non‐intrusive reduced order model for general, dynamic partial differential equations. Based upon proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and Smolyak sparse grid collocation, the method first projects the unknowns with full space and time coordinates onto a reduced POD basis. Then we introduce a new least squares fitting procedure to approximate the dynamical transition of the POD coefficients between subsequent time steps, taking only a set of full model solution snapshots as the training data during the construction. Thus, neither the physical details nor further numerical simulations of the original PDE model are required by this methodology, and the level of non‐intrusiveness is improved compared with existing reduced order models. Furthermore, we take adaptive measures to address the instability issue arising from reduced order iterations of the POD coefficients. This model can be applied to a wide range of physical and engineering scenarios, and we test it on a couple of problems in fluid dynamics. It is demonstrated that this reduced order approach captures the dominant features of the high‐fidelity models with reasonable accuracy while the computation complexity is reduced by several orders of magnitude. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

M?ssbauer, TEM/SAED and XRD investigation on waste dumps of the Valea lui Stan gold mines

The complementary investigation techniques, M?ssbauer spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy with selected area electron diffraction (TEM/SAED), X-ray diffraction (XRD) have been used to investigate the fate of the Valea lui Stan, Romania, gold-ore nanoscale-minerals during the long time of residence in the waste dumps. The preliminary investigations showed such waste dumps to contain significant amount of metals which cannot be identified by conventional methods. An intense research activity started up in order to evaluate the possibilities to recycle Valea lui Stan waste dumps and to recover metals by chemical or phytoextraction procedures. The waste dumps naturally show different mineral constituents with clay minerals as major phases, observed by XRD-technique. Although the waste dumps materials have whitish-yellowish colours, M?SSBAUER technique evidences the presence of the finely dispersed iron bearing minerals. The authors are focusing to inspect and analyze Fe-compounds in the samples collected from Valea lui Stan’s waste dumps in order to identify the magnetic phases by M?ssbauer technique.     

Numerical analysis of spatial distortions in a single-grating chirped pulse amplification system

A numerical study of spatial distortions of a laser beam after propagation through an optical single-grating chirp pulse amplification (CPA) system was developed. This study is based on numerical simulation using the ray-tracing model from Rayica module of MATHEMATICA and it relates the behavior of the aberrated beam in terms of spatial distortions (eg. spatial chirp and pulse front tilt) in case of grating incident angle variation. The results are relevant for different applications which use CPA systems with needs of high quality laser beam profile.     

On the steady vibrations problem in linear theory of micropolar solid–fluid mixture

In this paper we study the steady vibrations problem in linear theory of isothermal micropolar solid–fluid mixture. With the help of fundamental solution we establish representations of Somigliana type. Then, using the potentials of single layer and double layer, we reduce the boundary value problems to singular integral equations for which the Fredholm’s theorems are valid. Existence and uniqueness results for interior and exterior problems are presented.     

On nano-scale hydrodynamic lubrication models

Current magnetic head sliders and other micromechanisms involve gas lubrication flows with gap thicknesses in the nanometer range and stepped shapes fabricated by lithographic methods. In mechanical simulations, rarefaction effects are accounted for by models that propose Poiseuille flow factors which exhibit singularities as the pressure tends to zero or +∞. In this Note we show that these models are indeed mathematically well-posed, even in the case of discontinuous gap thickness functions. Our results cover popular models that were not previously analyzed in the literature, such as the Fukui–Kaneko model and the second-order model, among others. To cite this article: G. Buscaglia et al., C. R. Mecanique 333 (2005).     

Comparison of POD reduced order strategies for the nonlinear 2D shallow water equations

This paper introduces tensorial calculus techniques in the framework of POD to reduce the computational complexity of the reduced nonlinear terms. The resulting method, named tensorial POD, can be applied to polynomial nonlinearities of any degree p. Such nonlinear terms have an online complexity of , where k is the dimension of POD basis and therefore is independent of full space dimension. However, it is efficient only for quadratic nonlinear terms because for higher nonlinearities, POD model proves to be less time consuming once the POD basis dimension k is increased. Numerical experiments are carried out with a two‐dimensional SWE test problem to compare the performance of tensorial POD, POD, and POD/discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM). Numerical results show that tensorial POD decreases by 76× the computational cost of the online stage of POD model for configurations using more than 300,000 model variables. The tensorial POD SWE model was only 2 to 8× slower than the POD/DEIM SWE model but the implementation effort is considerably increased. Tensorial calculus was again employed to construct a new algorithm allowing POD/DEIM SWE model to compute its offline stage faster than POD and tensorial POD approaches. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.