Index for vehicle acoustical comfort inside a passenger car

Sound quality is among the main factors that influence customers’ preference for choosing good automobile products. It all started more than 10 years ago and grows up so fast due to high competition in the automotive industries. A-weighted noise levels and sound power are usually utilised to measure the noise but they are not adequate to characterise the impact sound inside a car. The most popular approach to determine sound quality of a product is to define an annoyance or specific index, which involves both subjective and objective evaluations. Subjective and objective tests should be studied concurrently in order to determine the sound quality inside a passenger car. This approach is used in this paper to evaluate vehicle comfort index according to most frequently used sound quality metrics, namely; Zwicker loudness, sharpness, roughness and fluctuation strength. As a result researchers of different fields of automotive acoustics investigations can use this index according to the type of road (international road roughness) without any need to perform time-consuming jury tests. The metrics are correlated with jury test results that show which of them and how much has affected the acoustical comfort of the vehicle. The relation between road roughness and vehicle acoustical comfort index is another point of interest in this research.     

Phase-field modeling of void evolution and swelling in materials under irradiation

Void swelling is an important phenomenon observed in both nuclear fuels and cladding materials in operating nuclear reactors. In this work we develop a phase-field model to simulate void evolution and void volume change in irradiated materials. Important material processes, including the generation of defects such as vacancies and self-interstitials, their diffusion and annihilation, and void nucleation and evolution, have been taken into account in this model. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties, such...     

Simple regge pole model for the reactionπ − p →η’n

The most recently measured differential cross-section data forπ ⁻ p → η’n has been fitted by using a simple Regge pole model with phenomenological residue functions. It has also been observed that this inelastic process has the scaling property.     

Pion-proton elastic scattering at 200 GeV/c

Recent measurements of differential and elastic cross-sections, slope parameters and ratios of the real and imaginary parts of the forward scattering amplitudes for pion-proton elastic scattering at 200 GeV/c have been fitted by using a simple Regge pole model with phenomenological residue functions. The computed results for total cross-sections have also been compared with the experimental data.     

Synthesis and pharmacological properties of polysubstituted 2-amino-4H-pyran-3-carbonitrile derivatives

Molecular Diversity - 2-Amino-3-cyano-4H-chromenes are structural core motifs that received increasing attention in the last years due to their interesting potential pharmacological properties. In...     

Terahertz bandpass filters using double-stacked metamaterial layers

Bandpass filters are reported based on double-stacked metamaterial layers separated by an air gap for operation at terahertz frequencies. Several stacking configurations were investigated designed for a ~0.5 THz center frequency. The filters exhibited improved spectral transmission properties when compared with conventional ones based on single metamaterial layers. 3 dB bandwidth of ~78 GHz and sidelobe suppression ratio >16 dB were determined when symmetric or asymmetric double layers were stacked. We demonstrate that superior frequency selectivity can be achieved when metamaterial layers with different unit cells are used. Good agreement was found between measured and simulated transmission response.     

Electromagnetic fields near plasmonic wedges

The behavior of electromagnetic fields near the edge of a plasmonic wedge is investigated. We study the scattering properties, field divergence, and field enhancement near an Au wedge bounded by SiO2 upon illumination by TM-polarized light using hypersingular integral equations, as a function of wavelength, wedge angle, and angle of incidence. The transverse scattered field components show a convergent behavior at wavelengths approaching the surface plasmon energy asymptote (on the corresponding flat Au-SiO2 interface), and become strongly divergent at longer wavelengths. The computed divergence is compared with Meixner's theory and is found to be in good agreement over a restricted range of parameters.     

First principles investigations of hydrazine adsorption conformations on Ni(111) surface

Theoretical investigation on hydrazine (N₂H₄) adsorption on Ni(111) was done by using density functional theory. Stability and mechanism of hydrazine adsorption in anti, gauche and cis conformation on nickel surface were studied. Charge transfer between lone-pair orbital and d-band was found to stabilize the anti-conformation as the most stable conformation, in contrast with hydrazine in the gas-phase where gauche conformation is more favored. However, the derived anti-bonding state between adsorbate and substrate is partially occupied due to the spin-polarization in the local states near the Fermi level and thus contributes in weakening the bonding. The stable adsorption structure was further verified by comparing the calculated vibrational frequencies with HREELS measurement results. The results were found to be in agreement with experimental results. It was also found that the adsorption in cis-conformation is a transition state as evident from the existence of imaginary frequency on its lowest vibrational mode which belongs to NH₂ torsional movement around N–N axis.     

Phase-controlled atom-photon entanglement in a three-level Λ-type closed-loop atomic system

We study the entanglement of dressed atom and its spontaneous emission in a three-level Λ-type closed-loop atomic system in a multi-photon resonance condition and beyond it.It is shown that the von Neumann entropy in such a system is phase-dependent,and it can be controlled by either the intensity or relative phase of applied fields.It is demonstrated that for the special case of the Rabi frequency of applied fields,the system is disentangled.In addition,we take into account the effect of Doppler broadening on the entanglement and it is found that a suitable choice of laser propagation direction allows us to obtain the steady state degree of entanglement(DEM) even in the presence of the Doppler effect.     

Simplified SCF calculations on the diatomic alkali metal molecules

An account is given of a new formalism for calculating energy levels in molecules using techniques that derive from the band theory of metals. After showing how the molecular potential may be transformed into a cellular potential we define the basis set of muffin-tin orbitals and discuss some of their properties. The relationship between the scattered wave formulation of Johnson, which is restricted to muffin-tin potentials, and our more general approach based on the use of a linear combination of muffin-tin orbitals (L.C.M.T.O.) is explicitly indicated. We then show how the properties of the muffin-tin orbitals, together with the technique of cellular integration, give rise to a hamiltonian matrix. This matrix is as general as, but simpler than that obtained by the use of atomic orbitals, and it is linear in energy and therefore computationally faster than the secular matrix of the scattered wave method.