Investigation of precipitate hardening of slip and twinning in Mg5%Zn by micropillar compression

A Mg-5%Zn alloy has been aged to form c-axis rod precipitates which are known to increase strength. Micropillar compression tests were carried out in the precipitate-free and aged samples to investigate the effects of these precipitates on twinning and slip in magnesium alloys. Basal slip, pyramidal slip and {101¯2} twinning were selectively activated by compressing micropillars in the [112¯3], [0 0 0 1] and [112¯0] orientations, respectively. It has been found that precipitation causes moderate hardening of the basal slip system, and also significantly increases the work hardening rate. The compression of [112¯0] initiated twinning, but the present experiments were dominated by twin nucleation, rather than growth. It was found that the effect of precipitation on twin nucleation was negligible. Precipitation had little effect on specimens compressed in the c-axis.

A fault detection scheme for time-delay systems using minimum-order functional observers

This paper presents a method for designing residual generators using minimum-order functional observers to detect actuator and component faults in time-delay systems. Existence conditions of the residual generators and functional observers are first derived, and then based on a parametric approach to the solution of a generalized Sylvester matrix equation, we develop systematic procedures for designing minimum-order functional observers to detect faults in the system. The advantages of having minimum-order observers are obvious from the economical and practical points of view as cost saving and simplicity can be achieved, particularly when dealing with high-order complex systems. Extensive numerical examples are given to illustrate the proposed fault detection scheme. In all the numerical examples, we design minimum-order residual generators and functional observers to detect faults in the system.

Association between perception of fault for the crash and function, return to work and health status 1 year after road traffic injury: a registry-based cohort study

Objectives To establish the association between the patient's perception of fault for the crash and 12-month outcomes after non-fatal road traffic injury.Setting Two adult major trauma centres, one regional trauma centre and one metropolitan trauma centre in Victoria, Australia.Participants 2605 adult, orthopaedic trauma patients covered by the state's no-fault third party insurer for road traffic injury, injured between September 2010 and February 2014.Outcome measures EQ-5D-3L, return to work and functional recovery (Glasgow Outcome Scale—Extended score of upper good recovery) at 12 months postinjury.Results After adjusting for key confounders, the adjusted relative risk (ARR) of a functional recovery (0.57, 95% CI 0.46 to 0.69) and return to work (0.92, 95% CI 0.86 to 0.99) were lower for the not at fault compared to the at fault group. The ARR of reporting problems on EQ-5D items was 1.20–1.35 times higher in the not at fault group. Conclusions Patients who were not at fault, or denied being at fault despite a police report of fault, experienced poorer outcomes than the at fault group. Attributing fault to others was associated with poorer outcomes. Interventions to improve coping, or to resolve negative feelings from the crash, could facilitate better outcomes in the future.

FESTAL: fault-tolerant elastic scheduling algorithm for real-time tasks in virtualized clouds

As clouds have been deployed widely in various fields, the reliability and availability of clouds become the major concern of cloud service providers and users. Thereby, fault tolerance in clouds receives a great deal of attention in both industry and academia, especially for real-time applications due to their safety critical nature. Large amounts of researches have been conducted to realize fault tolerance in distributed systems, among which fault-tolerant scheduling plays a significant role. However, few researches on the fault-tolerant scheduling study the virtualization and the elasticity, two key features of clouds, sufficiently. To address this issue, this paper presents a fault-tolerant mechanism which extends the primary-backup model to incorporate the features of clouds. Meanwhile, for the first time, we propose an elastic resource provisioning mechanism in the fault-tolerant context to improve the resource utilization. On the basis of the fault-tolerant mechanism and the elastic resource provisioning mechanism, we design novel fault-tolerant elastic scheduling algorithms for real-time tasks in clouds named FESTAL, aiming at achieving both fault tolerance and high resource utilization in clouds. Extensive experiments injecting with random synthetic workloads as well as the workload from the latest version of the Google cloud tracelogs are conducted by CloudSim to compare FESTAL with three baseline algorithms, i.e., Non-M igration-FESTAL (NMFESTAL), Non-Overlapping-FESTAL (NOFESTAL), and Elastic First Fit (EFF). The experimental results demonstrate that FESTAL is able to effectively enhance the performance of virtualized clouds.