Oliver–Pharr indentation method in determining elastic moduli of shape memory alloys—A phase transformable material

Instrumented indentation test has been extensively applied to study the mechanical properties such as elastic modulus of different materials. The Oliver–Pharr method to measure the elastic modulus from an indentation test was originally developed for single phase materials. During a spherical indentation test on shape memory alloys (SMAs), both austenite and martensite phases exist and evolve in the specimen due to stress-induced phase transformation. The question, “What is the measured indentation modulus by using the Oliver–Pharr method from a spherical indentation test on SMAs?” is answered in this paper. The finite element method, combined with dimensional analysis, was applied to simulate a series of spherical indentation tests on SMAs. Our numerical results indicate that the measured indentation modulus strongly depends on the elastic moduli of the two phases, the indentation depth, the forward transformation stress, the transformation hardening coefficient and the maximum transformation strain. Furthermore, a method based on theoretical analysis and numerical simulation was established to determine the elastic moduli of austenite and martensite by using the spherical indentation test and the Oliver–Pharr method. Our numerical experiments confirmed that the proposed method can be applied in practice with satisfactory accuracy. The research approach and findings can also be applied to the indentation of other types of phase transformable materials.     

The Transmission Problem of Viscoelastic Waves

In this paper we consider the transmission problem of viscoelastic waves. That is, we study the wave propagations over materials consisting of elastic and viscoelastic components. We show that for this types of materials the dissipation produced by the viscoelastic part is strong enough to produce exponential decay of the solution, no matter how small is its size. We also show that the linear model is well posed.     

Molecular-dynamics of a 2D model of the shape memory effect

A 2-dimensional molecular-dynamic model is presented for the investigation of crystalline phase transitions. The model is based on potential functions of the Lennard-Jones type. By use of two types of particles a stable square crystalline lattice may be created. It may transform into sheared variants, which represent martensitic phases. It turns out that the phase stability is dependent on the temperature of the body. In numerical experiments it is shown that the austenite appears to be stable at high temperature, while martensite is stable at lower temperature. The present article - being the first part of a work on the subject - explains the used model in detail. In several examples it is shown, how the model is capable to cover temperature-induced transitions between austenite and martensite. It turns out that the presented molecular dynamic experiments exhibit important characteristics as they are known from shape memory alloys.Received: 15 April 2002, Accepted: 18 March 2003, Published online: 27 June 2003 Dedicated to Professor Ingo Müller on the occasion of his 65th birthday     

Efficient and flexible memory architecture to alleviate data and context bandwidth bottlenecks of coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays

The computational capability of a coarse-grained reconfigurable array(CGRA)can be significantly restrained due to data and context memory bandwidth bottlenecks.Traditionally,two methods have been used to resolve this problem.One method loads the context into the CGRA at run time.This method occupies very small on-chip memory but induces very large latency,which leads to low computational efficiency.The other method adopts a multi-context structure.This method loads the context into the on-chip context memory at the boot phase.Broadcasting the pointer of a set of contexts changes the hardware configuration on a cycle-by-cycle basis.The size of the context memory induces a large area overhead in multi-context structures,which results in major restrictions on application complexity.This paper proposes a Predictable Context Cache(PCC)architecture to address the above context issues by buffering the context inside a CGRA.In this architecture,context is dynamically transferred into the CGRA.Utilizing a PCC significantly reduces the on-chip context memory and the complexity of the applications running on the CGRA is no longer restricted by the size of the on-chip context memory.Data preloading is the most frequently used approach to hide input data latency and speed up the data transmission process for the data bandwidth issue.Rather than fundamentally reducing the amount of input data,the transferred data and computations are processed in parallel.However,the data preloading method cannot work efficiently because data transmission becomes the critical path as the reconfigurable array scale increases.This paper also presents a Hierarchical Data Memory(HDM)architecture as a solution to the efficiency problem.In this architecture,high internal bandwidth is provided to buffer both reused input data and intermediate data.The HDM architecture relieves the external memory from the data transfer burden so that the performance is significantly improved.As a result of using PCC and HDM,experiments running mainstream video decoding programs achieved performance improvements of 13.57%–19.48%when there was a reasonable memory size.Therefore,1080p@35.7fps for H.264high profile video decoding can be achieved on PCC and HDM architecture when utilizing a 200 MHz working frequency.Further,the size of the on-chip context memory no longer restricted complex applications,which were efficiently executed on the PCC and HDM architecture.     

An accurate algorithm to calculate the Hurst exponent of self-similar processes

In this paper, we introduce a new approach which generalizes the GM2 algorithm (introduced in Sánchez-Granero et al. (2008) [52]) as well as fractal dimension algorithms (FD1, FD2 and FD3) (first appeared in Sánchez-Granero et al. (2012) [51]), providing an accurate algorithm to calculate the Hurst exponent of self-similar processes. We prove that this algorithm performs properly in the case of short time series when fractional Brownian motions and Lévy stable motions are considered.We conclude the paper with a dynamic study of the Hurst exponent evolution in the S&P500 index stocks.     

Correlation between crystallinity and resistive switching behavior of sputtered WO3 thin films

The as-deposited WO₃ thin films were post-annealed at different temperatures (300 °C and 600 °C) in air to investigate a correlation between crystallinity and switching behavior of WO₃ thin films. Associating the results of XRD, FTIR, XPS and FESEM measurements, the annealing-caused crystallinity change contributes to the variation of the switching behaviors of the WO₃ thin films. The as-deposited WO₃ films with low crystalline structure are preferred for random Ag conducting path, resulting in large switching ratio but fluctuating I–V hysteresis, whereas the annealed WO₃ films with crystallized compact structure limits Ag conducting path, favoring the stable I–V hysteresis but small switching ratio. It is therefore concluded that electrochemical redox reaction-controlled resistance switching depends not only on electrode materials (inert and reactive electrodes) but also on crystallinity of host oxide.     

Intramolecular photoinduced electron transfer in Pd-porphyrin-quinone in the picosecond time range

Photoinduced electron transfer (PET) was studied in toluene solutions of the Pd-porphyrin-quinone (Pd-PQ) dyad by flash photolysis in the picosecond time range and by a luminescence method. It is found that Pd-PQ has a high rate of intercombination conversion K_isc=(7.7±0.2)·10¹⁰ sec⁻¹. Competing intramolecular PET occurs from the lower excited singlet state of the dyad with the rate constant K _et ^s =(2.7 ±0.3)·10¹⁰ sec⁻¹. Therefore, ∼74% of excited molecules from the dyad make a transition to the triplet T₁ state and 26% take part in intramolecular PET resulting in formation of radical products. The radical products relax to the ground state with the rate constant K=(7.4±0.2)·10⁹ sec⁻¹. Institute of Molecular and Atomic Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, 70, F. Skorina St., Minsk, 220072, Belarus. Translated from Zhurnal Prikladnoi Spektroskopii, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 11–18, January–February, 1999.     

Spline collocation methods for nonlinear Volterra integral equations with unknown delay

In this paper we introduce and study polynomial spline collocation methods for systems of Volterra integral equations with unknown lower integral limit arising in mathematical economics. Their discretization leads to implicit Runge-Kutta-type methods. The global convergence and local superconvergence properties of these methods are proved, and the theory is illustrated by a numerical example arising in the application of such equations in certain mathematical models of liquidation.