Electrostatic discharge sensitivity and electrical conductivity of composite energetic materials

Composite energetic material response to electrical stimuli was investigated and a correlation between electrical conductivity and ignition sensitivity was examined. The composites consisted of micrometer particle aluminum combined with another metal, metal oxide, or fluoropolymer. Of the nine tested mixtures, aluminum (Al) with copper oxide (CuO) was the only mixture to ignite by electrostatic discharge. Under the loose powder conditions of these experiments, the Al–CuO minimum ignition energy (MIE) is 25 mJ and exhibited an electrical conductivity two orders of magnitude higher than the next composite. This study showed a similar trend in MIE for ignition triggered by a discharged spark compared with a thermal hot wire source.     

Overcoming the boundary effects in surface spline interpolation

Surface spline interpolation when the domain is all of R^d isknown to converge much faster to the data function f than inthe case when the domain is the unit ball. This difference isunderstood to be due to boundary effects which, as will be shown,also affect the size of the surface spline's coefficients. Wepropose a modified form of surface spline interpolation which,to a great extent, overcomes these boundary effects. This modifiedsurface spline interpolant uses only the values of f at thegiven interpolation points.     

Sparsity Inducing Prior Distributions for Correlation Matrices of Longitudinal Data

For longitudinal data, the modeling of a correlation matrix ?R can be a difficult statistical task due to both the positive definite and the unit diagonal constraints. Because the number of parameters increases quadratically in the dimension, it is often useful to consider a sparse parameterization. We introduce a pair of prior distributions on the set of correlation matrices for longitudinal data through the partial autocorrelations (PACs), which vary independently over (?1,1). The first prior shrinks each of the PACs toward zero with increasingly aggressive shrinkage in lag. The second prior (a selection prior) is a mixture of a zero point mass and a continuous component for each PAC, allowing for a sparse representation. The structure implied under our priors is readily interpretable for time-ordered responses because each zero PAC implies a conditional independence relationship in the distribution of the data. Selection priors on the PACs provide a computationally attractive alternative to selection on the elements of ?R or ?R^{? 1} for ordered data. These priors allow for data-dependent shrinkage/selection under an intuitive parameterization in an unconstrained setting. The proposed priors are compared to standard methods through a simulation study and illustrated using a multivariate probit data example. Supplemental materials for this article (appendix, data, and R code) are available online.     

An acoustooptic method of measuring the noise equivalent power of optical heterodyne systems

The noise equivalent power of optical heterodyne detection at 10.6 m has been measured with a method based on Raman-Nath diffraction of a CO₂ laser beam. One of the frequency shifted first order diffracted beams is used as the signal radiation. The local oscillator radiation is obtained by splitting off a part of the laser beam incident upon the device used for the acoustooptic diffraction. The signal power can be varied over a large dynamic range by changing the acoustic input power. A study of the probable errors shows that the total error in the NEP measurement is less than 30%.     

Derivatives of 10,11-dihydro-5H-dibenzo[a,d] cycloheptene and related compounds. III. Azaketones

The preparation and properties of four isomeric azadibenzoeycloheptenones 3 and their 10,11-dihydro derivatives 2 are described. The ketones 2 were prepared by cyclization of appropriately substituted phenethylpyridine carboxylic acids and dehydrogenated to 3 . Four monochloro derivatives 24 of the 4-azaketone 2d are also described.