Fracturing of Clay During Drying: Modelling and Numerical Simulation

Non-uniform distribution of moisture contents inside of the porous materials during drying results in compressional stresses inside of the material and tensional ones close to the surface. The tensional stresses together with brittleness of dry material are the reasons of fracturing of the material. The proposed model consists of two parts. The mass transfer is described by simple diffusion equation. The mechanical behaviour of the material is modelled with the network model in which the material is modelled as the set of small particles interconnected elastically via springs. The spring constants and strengths depend on Young modulus and the material tensional strength. The dependences of these material parameters on the moisture content are determined. Then two 2D initial-boundary problems are solved. The results show possible way of cracks initiation and generation by drying.     

Critical behavior of phase interfaces in porous media: Analysis of scaling properties with the use of noncoherent and coherent light

Image sequences of the surface of disordered layers of porous medium (paper) obtained under noncoherent and coherent illumination during capillary rise of a liquid are analyzed. As a result, principles that govern the critical behavior of the interface between liquid and gaseous phases during its pinning are established. By a cumulant analysis of speckle-modulated images of the surface and by the statistical analysis of binarized difference images of the surface under noncoherent illumination, it is shown that the macroscopic dynamics of the interface at the stage of pinning is mainly controlled by the power law dependence of the appearance rate of local instabilities (avalanches) of the interface on the critical parameter, whereas the growth dynamics of the local instabilities is controlled by the diffusion of a liquid in a layer and weakly depends on the critical parameter. A phenomenological model is proposed for the macroscopic dynamics of the phase interface for interpreting experimental data. The values of critical indices are determined that characterize the samples under test within this model. These values are compared with the results of numerical simulation for discrete models of directed percolation corresponding to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.     

Temperature induced nonlinearity in coupled microresonators

We present here, our most recent results from theoretical and experimental investigations of optical properties of coupled microresonators. While fused silica spherical microresonators with Q-factors of about 10⁷ to 10⁸ can be quite easily fabricated, the production of a number of equally sized spheres, which appears to be a necessary condition for effective light coupling, has proved challenging. In order to bypass this problem we focus our attention on the investigation of coupled disk microresonators made of fused silica. These may be fabricated in almost arbitrary two-dimensional configuration with nanometer precision. A Q-factor of 10⁵ can be routinely achieved, which relaxes the requirements on uniformity of the microdisks to within the range of fabrication accuracy. The achieved Q-factors are high enough to observe thermal nonlinear effects in the fabricated coupled disks. A detailed experimental analysis of the thermal nonlinear resonance behavior in a system of two coupled microdisks now follows. The results were found to be in good agreement with the respective calculations based on coupled mode theory including temperature induced nonlinear response.     

Neutron halo isomers in stable nuclei and their possible application for the production of low energy, pulsed, polarized neutron beams of high intensity and high brilliance

We propose to search for neutron halo isomers populated via γ-capture in stable nuclei with mass numbers of about A=140–180 or A=40–60, where the 4s _1/2 or 3s _1/2 neutron shell model state reaches zero binding energy. These halo nuclei can be produced for the first time with new γ-beams of high intensity and small band width (≤0.1%) achievable via Compton back-scattering off brilliant electron beams, thus offering a promising perspective to selectively populate these isomers with small separation energies of 1 eV to a few keV. Similar to single-neutron halo states for very light, extremely neutron-rich, radioactive nuclei (Hansen et al. in Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 45:591–634, 1995; Tanihata in J. Phys. G., Nucl. Part. Phys. 22:158–198, 1996; Aumann et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 84:35, 2000), the low neutron separation energy and short-range nuclear force allow the neutron to tunnel far out into free space much beyond the nuclear core radius. This results in prolonged half-lives of the isomers for the γ-decay back to the ground state in the 100 ps-μs range. Similar to the treatment of photodisintegration of the deuteron, the neutron release from the neutron halo isomer via a second, low-energy, intense photon beam has a known much larger cross section with a typical energy threshold behavior. In the second step, the neutrons can be released as a low-energy, pulsed, polarized neutron beam of high intensity and high brilliance, possibly being much superior to presently existing beams from reactors or spallation neutron sources.     

Laser cleaning of copper roofing sheets subjected to long-lasting environmental corrosion

The study was concerned with the effect of the laser fluence and pulse duration on the microstructure of copper roofing of the Wilanów Palace in Warsaw (Poland) subjected to environmental degradation since the turn 19th century. The techniques used for the microstructure examinations included: SEM+EDS, X-ray diffraction analysis, surface profiling and colour analysis. The measurements of colour of the laser-cleaned surfaces showed that series of 100-μs pulses offer the most effective cleaning. It was also found that by controlling the number of laser pulses it is possible to control the roughness of the cleaned surface.     

Designing micro-patterned Ti films that survive up to 10% applied tensile strain

Reducing the strain in brittle device layers is critical in the fabrication of robust flexible electronic devices. In this study, the cracking behavior of micro-patterned 500-nm-thick Ti films was investigated via uniaxial tensile testing by in situ SEM and 4-point probe measurements. Both visual observations by SEM and 4-pt resistance measurements showed that strategically patterned oval holes, off-set and rotated by 45°, had a significant effect on limiting the extent of cracking, specifically, in preventing cracks from converging. Failure with regard to electrical conduction was delayed from less than 2% to more than 10% strain.     

Pairwise clustering using a Monte Carlo Markov Chain

In this work an application of MCMC is proposed for unsupervised data classification, in conjunction with a novel pairwise objective function, which is shown to work well in situations where clusters to be identified have a strong overlap, and the centroid oriented methods (such as K-means) fail by construction. In particular, an exceptionally simple but difficult situation is addressed when cluster centroids coincide, and one can differentiate between the clusters only on the basis of their variance. Performance of the proposed approach is tested on synthetic and real datasets.     

Survey of chemical residues and biological evaluation of photochemically pre-vulcanized surgical gloves

Abstract  

Latex allergies arise from the presence of latex proteins as well as noxious rubber additives (mainly accelerators and activators used in conventional sulfur-accelerated vulcanization processes) in medical devices (e.g., medical gloves, catheters) made from natural rubber latex. As a new approach the ultraviolet (UV) light-initiated pre-vulcanization of natural rubber latex makes efficient cross-linking feasible without using any toxic, mutagenic, or irritating chemicals. The cross-linking in the latex particles is accomplished via the thiol-ene addition reaction in the presence of a polyfunctional thiol and a photoinitiator. The new process is carried out in a falling film photoreactor on a pilot scale which provides a continuous irradiation of the latex emulsion. The UV technique is suitable for an easy up-scaling and represents the entrance into large-volume industrial production. The surgical gloves are then made by a conventional coagulant dipping process comprising good physical properties and high ageing stabilities. The aim of this study was to evaluate the biological properties and skin compatibility of UV-pre-cured gloves in skin sensitization, skin irritation studies, and cytotoxic tests. In addition the biologically available chemical residues in the gloves were characterized by UV–visible spectroscopy, elementary analyses, and high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectroscopy. The results of the studies revealed that UV-cross-linked surgical gloves exhibit good skin compatibility together with low cytotoxicity and residual chemical levels in the range of 60 and 120 μg/g_glove.     

Theoretical study of the role of solvent Stark effect in electron transitions

The possible influence of the solvent Stark effect (SSE) on the solvatochromic shift in electron transitions has been analyzed by using the ASEP/MD (averaged solvent electrostatic potential from molecular dynamics) method. With this purpose, four molecules, two polar (acrolein and formaldehyde) and two non-polar (p-difluorobenzene and trans-difluoroethene) have been studied in solvents of diverse polarity. Independently of the nature of the system we found that the contribution of SSE on the average value of the solvent shift or on the multipole moment values is negligible. In the case of centro-symmetric molecules, our results permit to discard the SSE as cause of the solvent shift found, which must be assigned to the electrostatic interaction of the solute quadrupole and higher multipoles with the solvent. As the SSE values provide also a measure of the errors introduced by the mean field approximation (MFA), these results indicate that MFA permits a very accurate determination of the solvent shift at the same time that it reduces drastically the computational cost. Finally, a new procedure suited to the ASEP/MD method has been presented that permits to estimate the inhomogeneous broadening of spectral bands, complementing the information provided by mean field theories. This procedure does not need additional quantum calculations and its computational cost is minimal.     

Trim-to-Coherence Fourier Transform

We introduce a discrete Fourier transform technique which extracts more spectral information from a given time series data set than conventional discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Valid information is obtained between the spectral bins of conventional DFT, scalloping error is greatly reduced, and amplitude and phase of Fourier components are more true to the process under study as with conventional DFT. We call the general idea Trim-to-Coherence Fourier Transform, and its particular embodiment ‘Phase-Rotation Fourier Transform’. Treatment of the raw data is minimally invasive; e.g. there is no zero padding.