Thermal stability of shear-induced precursor structures in isotactic polypropylene by rheo-X-ray techniques with couette flow geometry

Combined in situ rheo-SAXS (small-angle X-ray scattering) and -WAXD (wide-angle X-ray diffraction) studies using couette flow geometry were carried out to probe thermal stabilty of shear-induced oriented precursor structure in isotactic polypropylene (iPP) at around its normal melting point (162 °C). Although SAXS results corroborated the emerging consensus about the formation of “long-living” metastable mesomorphic precursor structures in sheared iPP melts, these are the first quantitative measures of the limiting temperature at which no oriented structures survive. At the applied shear, rate = 60 s⁻¹ and duration t_s = 5 s, the oriented iPP structures survived a temperature of 185 °C for 1 h after shear, while no stable structures were detected at and above 195 °C. Following Keller's concepts of chain orientation in flow, it is proposed that the chains with highly oriented high molecular weight fraction are primarily responsible for their stability at high temperatures. Furthermore, the effects of flow condition, specifically the shear temperature, on the distributions of oriented and unoriented crystals were determined from rheo-WAXD results. As expected, at a constant flow intensity (i.e., rate = 30 s⁻¹ and duration, t_s = 5 s), the oriented crystal fraction decreased with the increase in temperature above 155 °C, below which the oriented fraction decreased with the decrease in temperature. As a result, a crystallinty “phase” diagram, i.e., temperature versus crystal fraction ratio, exhibited a peculiar “hourglass” shape, similar to that found in many two-phase polymer–polymer blends. This can be explained by the competition between the oriented and unoriented crystals in the available crystallizable species. Below the shear temperature (155 °C), the unoriented crystals crystallized so rapidly that they overwhelmed the crystallization of the oriented crystals, thus depleting a major portion of the crystallizable species and increasing their contribution in the final total crystalline phase. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 44: 3553–3570, 2006     

Further study of the viscoelastic phase separation of cyanate ester modified with poly(ether imide)

In this study, the viscoelastic phase separation process was studied further by time‐resolved light scattering, differential scanning calorimetry, and scanning electron microscopy in the system of poly(ether imide)‐modified bisphenol‐A dicyanate. It was observed that the evolution time of phase structure and relaxation time of diffusion flow of the bisphenol‐A dicyanate were similar with the phase diagram of curing conversion versus content of PEI. The results suggested that the viscoelastic phase separation was affected by the curing conversion of the system at the onset point of phase separation. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 44: 517–523, 2006     

Nd掺杂的Bi4Ti3O12变温X射线衍射分析

利用变温X射线衍射技术，在预烧过程中分析了Nd掺杂Bi4Ti3O12后生成Bi3.15Nd0.85Ti3O12（BNT）相的形成过程以及微结构的变化．实验观察到以30℃／min的升温速率，BNT相在700℃时开始形成，其衍射峰强度随温度的继续升高而增强，衍射峰半高宽随烧结时间延长而减小．X射线衍射分析结果表明，在900℃恒温条件下，烧结约2h，可形成单一的BNT相．     

Pulsed pump: Thermal effects in solid state lasers under super-Gaussian pulses

Solid state laser (SSL) powers can be realistically scaled when pumped by a real, efficient and multimode pulse. In this work, a fourth-order super-Gaussian pulse was assumed as a pump for SSL’s and a complete analytical expression for the thermal phase shift is given. Moreover, the focal length of thermal lens in paraxial ray approximation regime was studied. The results when applied to a Ti: sapphire crystal show an appreciable correction for abberation compared to a top-hat pulse.     

The Lagrangian Globalization Method for Nonsmooth Constrained Equations

The difficulty suffered in optimization-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear equations lies in that the traditional methods for solving the optimization problem have been mainly concerned with finding a stationary point or a local minimizer of the underlying optimization problem, which is not necessarily a solution of the equations. One method to overcome this difficulty is the Lagrangian globalization (LG for simplicity) method. This paper extends the LG method to nonsmooth equations with bound constraints. The absolute system of equations is introduced. A so-called Projected Generalized-Gradient Direction (PGGD) is constructed and proved to be a descent direction of the reformulated nonsmooth optimization problem. This projected approach keeps the feasibility of the iterates. The convergence of the new algorithm is established by specializing the PGGD. Numerical tests are given. This author's work was done when she was visiting The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His work is also supported by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong.     

Mutually Pumped Phase Conjugation of Three Incoherent Beams with a Novel Photorefractive Crystal

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Gating processes in Na-channel of biological membrane from the standpoint of superionic phase transition

The method of condensed matter physics is applied to reason out the problem of Na transport through a biological membrane. A similiarity of gating process in Na ion channel to the superionic phase transition is discussed. A possible microscopic mechanism is suggested.     

A complementary thermodynamic limit for classical Coulomb matter

The canonical equilibrium measure of classical two-component Coulomb matter with regularized interactions is analyzed in a finite volume. It is shown that, in the mean-field regime, the one-particle density is inhomogeneous on a new characteristic length scale _inh. For a system ofN positive andN negative particles, _inh and the characteristic length scale of correlations _corr (=Debye screening length) are related via _inh=(2N)^1/2 _corr. The major conceptual conclusion that is drawn from this is that one needs two nontrivial complementary thermodynamic limits to define the equilibrium thermodynamics of two-component Coulomb systems. One of them is the standard thermodynamic limit (infinite volume), where one takesN, _corr fixed. Its complementary limit is characterized byN, _inh fixed, and is a finite-volume inhomogeneous mean-field limit. The most prominent new feature in the mean-field thermodynamic limit, which is absent in the standard thermodynamic limit, is an anomalous first-order phase transition where the Coulomb system explodes or implodes, respectively. The phase transition is connected with the existence of a metastable plasma phase far below the ionization temperature.     

Infinite-order phase transition in a classical spin system

For an exactly soluble classical spin model with long-range inhomogeneous coupling it is proved that in the absence of external magnetic field the free energy is aC function of the temperature at the critical point.     

A fixed-point equation for the high-temperature phase of discrete lattice spin systems

A fixed-point equation on an infinite-dimensional space is proposed as an alternative to the usual definition of the infinite-volume limit in discrete lattice spin systems in the high-temperature phase. It is argued heuristically that the free energy and correlation functions one obtains by solving this equation agree with the usual definitions of these quantities. A theorem is then proved that says that if a certain finite-volume condition is satisfied, then this fixed-point equation has a solution and the resulting free energy is analytic in the parameters in the Hamiltonian. For particular values of the temperature this finite-volume condition may be checked with the help of a computer. The two-dimensional Ising model is considered as a test case, and it is shown that the finite-volume condition is satisfied for0.77 _critical.