A damage constitutive model for sliding friction coupled to wear

Several new constitutive models are formulated for the planar interface of a soft body sliding on a rigid soil, describing stick-slip phenomena due to friction, and wear due to abrasion. Attention is focused on damage at the interface, by neglecting any interaction with damage of body and any propagation of damage inside the body. Models are formulated in the general framework of the Thermodynamics of the irreversible processes and account for suitable defined internal variables of phenomenological type, namely gap, isotropic friction hardening and wear. The main feature of the new presented models is that the formulation of the wear process at the interface is obtained in the contest of Damage Mechanics, and it is based on the formal analogy between abrasion of a soft body and ductile damage of an elastic-plastic material. By following this approach, a scalar wear field, an effective stress and appropriate state and dissipation potentials are defined, able to describe a tangential isotropic wear process due to stick-slip and to hardening mechanism. Both cases of linear and nonlinear friction hardening are formulated; moreover, wearable and no-wearable bodies are considered. Numerical results relevant to one-dimensional problems are illustrated for monotonic, forward-backward and cyclic displacement time-histories, showing evolution for stress, gap and wear. Results furnished by different models are compared and discussed.     

Ester hydrogenation catalyzed by Ru-CNN pincer complexes

We report new Ru-CNN pincer catalysts for ester hydrogenation under mild conditions.     

Charge injection across self-assembly monolayers in organic field-effect transistors: odd-even effects

We investigate the role of self-assembly monolayers in modulating the response of organic field-effect transistors. Alkanethiol monolayers of chain length n are self-assembled on the source and drain electrodes of pentacene field-effect transistors. The charge carrier mobility mu exhibits large fluctuations correlated with odd-even n. For n < 8, mu increases by 1 order of magnitude owing to the decrease of the hole injection barrier and the improved molecular order at the organic-metallic interface. For n > or = 8, mu decays exponentially with an inverse decay length beta = 0.6 A(-1). Our results show that (i) charge injection across the interface occurs by through-bond tunneling of holes mediated by the alkanethiol layer; (ii) in the long-chain regime, the charge injection across the alkanethiol monolayer completely governs the transistor response; (iii) the transistor is a sensitive gauge for probing charge transport across single monolayers. The odd-even effect is ascribed to the anisotropic coupling between the alkanethiol terminal sigma bond and the HOMO level of ordered pentacene molecules.     

A paradigmatic minimal system to explain the Ziegler paradox

The destabilization effect of damping on a class of general dynamical systems is discussed. The phenomenon of jump in the critical value of the bifurcation parameter, in passing from undamped to damped system, is view in a new perspective, according to which no discontinuities manifest themselves. By using asymptotic analysis, it is proved that all subcritically loaded undamped systems are candidate to become unstable, provided a suitable damping matrix is added. The mechanism of instability is explained by introducing the concept of modal dampings, as the components of the damping forces along the unit vectors of a non-orthogonal eigenvector basis. Such quantities can change sign while the load changes the eigenvectors of the basis, thus triggering instability. A paradigmatic, non-physical, minimal system has been built up, admitting closed-form solutions able to explain the essence of the destabilizing phenomenon. Series expansions carried out on the exact solution give information on how to deal more complex systems by perturbation methods.     

Fondamenti per la geometria sopra le suerficie razionali dal punto di vista reale

Un estratto di questa memoria trovasi inserito nei Rend. Acc. Linc., 19 novembre 1911.