A clinical study of failure in microchannel cooled diodes used in large laser systems

In this paper we investigate the source of failure in commercial, microchannel cooled CW diode bars placed in 12 bar horizontal arrays. The arrays were used to pump Nd:YAG rods in our 10 kW developmental laser. The laser was operated at low duty factor over a period of over 2 years. Experimental evidence indicated that the sudden, catastrophic failure was because of degraded cooling. We used optical microscopes, an X-ray microfocus imager, and a thermal neutron scattering camera to look inside the microcoolers. Our investigations revealed only one possible failure mechanism: cooling flow reduction because of delamination of the Au coating the walls of the microcoolers and the entrapment of Au flakes within the microchannel structures. We observed blisters in the microcoolers under working bars, and flake-like structures in the microcoolers under burnt-out bars (all taken from the laser). We observed no evidence of either massive blockages because of electrochemical deposits, or of corrosion/erosion in the microchannel walls. Integral operation times of the high flow-rate cooling system and of the diodes themselves were too short by one and two orders of magnitude, respectively, to explain the observed failures. Microchannel immersion times in the deionized water were, however, long enough to allow for corrosion of metals that may have been exposed through defects in the Au coatings. Three-dimensional heat flow simulations showed that blockage of multiple microchannels towards the edge of a bar can easily lead to catastrophic temperature increases.     

Very fast sorbent for organic dyes and pollutants

The increasing use of organic compounds endangering the environment encourages search for more efficient sorbents. While crude clay minerals are effective for the adsorption of cations, modified organoclays may adsorb negative and hydrophobic molecules. In this short communication, we present a very fast adsorbing organoclay based on montmorillonite with crystal violet pre-adsorbed up to neutralization of the negative charges. Sorption of erythrosin-B and 2,4,5-trichlorophenol to such organoclay reaches equilibrium in less than a minute, whereas with activated carbon, it took tens of minutes. The pseudo second-order kinetic coefficient for the process was at least two orders of magnitude smaller for the organoclay. Because sorption kinetics is an important factor in water purification, such fast sorbent might have broad environmental applications.     

Selectable Set Randomized Kaczmarz

The Randomized Kaczmarz method (RK) is a stochastic iterative method for solving linear systems that has recently grown in popularity due to its speed and low memory requirement. Selectable Set Randomized Kaczmarz is a variant of RK that leverages existing information about the Kaczmarz iterate to identify an adaptive “selectable set” and thus yields an improved convergence guarantee. In this article, we propose a general perspective for selectable set approaches and prove a convergence result for that framework. In addition, we define two specific selectable set sampling strategies that have competitive convergence guarantees to those of other variants of RK. One selectable set sampling strategy leverages information about the previous iterate, while the other leverages the orthogonality structure of the problem via the Gramian matrix. We complement our theoretical results with numerical experiments that compare our proposed rules with those existing in the literature.     

Minors in lifts of graphs

We study here lifts and random lifts of graphs, as defined by Amit and Linial (Combinatorica 22 (2002), 1–18). We consider the Hadwiger number η and the Hajós number σ of ?‐lifts of Kⁿ and analyze their extremal as well as their typical values (that is, for random lifts). When ? = 2, we show that , and random lifts achieve the lower bound (as n → ∞). For bigger values of ?, we show . We do not know how tight these bounds are, and in fact, the most interesting question that remains open is whether it is possible for η to be o(n). When ? < O(log n), almost every ?‐lift of Kⁿ satisfies η = Θ(n) and for , almost surely . For bigger values of ?, almost always. The Hajós number satisfies , and random lifts achieve the lower bound for bounded ? and approach the upper bound when ? grows. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2006