Mixed ionic and electronic conduction in zirconia and its applications in metallurgy

Mixed ionic and electronic conduction in Zr02-based solid electrolytes was studied.The effect of impurities and second-phase particles on the mixed conduction parameter, P,, was measured for different types of ZrOZ electrolytes. The performance of solid-state sensors incorporating ZrOZ electrolytes is sometimes limited by electronic conduction in ZrOZ, especially at temperatures >I800 K. Methods for eliminating or minimizing errors in measured emf due to electronically driven transport of oxygen anions are discussed. Examples include probes for monitoring oxygen content in liquid steel as well as the newly developed sulfur sensor based on a ZrOz(Ca0) + CaS electrolyte. The use of mixed conducting ZrOZ as a semipermeable membrane or chemically selective sieve for oxygen at high temperatures is discussed. Oxygen transport from liquid iron to CO + C& gas mixtures through a ZrOZ membrane driven by a chemical potential gradient, in the absence of electrical leads or imposed potentials, was experimentally observed.

FeatureMatch: A General ANNF Estimation Technique and its Applications

In this paper, we propose FeatureMatch, a generalised approximate nearest-neighbour field (ANNF) computation framework, between a source and target image. The proposed algorithm can estimate ANNF maps between any image pairs, not necessarily related. This generalisation is achieved through appropriate spatial-range transforms. To compute ANNF maps, global colour adaptation is applied as a range transform on the source image. Image patches from the pair of images are approximated using low-dimensional features, which are used along with KD-tree to estimate the ANNF map. This ANNF map is further improved based on image coherency and spatial transforms. The proposed generalisation, enables us to handle a wider range of vision applications, which have not been tackled using the ANNF framework. We illustrate two such applications namely: 1) optic disk detection and 2) super resolution. The first application deals with medical imaging, where we locate optic disks in retinal images using a healthy optic disk image as common target image. The second application deals with super resolution of synthetic images using a common source image as dictionary. We make use of ANNF mappings in both these applications and show experimentally that our proposed approaches are faster and accurate, compared with the state-of-the-art techniques.

Nano-hardness Techniques and Its Applications in Mechanical Property Measurements for Surface Engineering

结合纳米硬度技术测量各类薄膜和块体材料表层的纳米压痕硬度、弹性模量、断裂韧性、膜厚、微结构的弯曲变形,采用纳米划痕硬度技术测量各类薄膜和块体材料的粗糙度、临界附着力、摩擦系数、划痕横剖面.纳米硬度计是检测材料表层微米乃至几十纳米力学性能的先进仪器,可广泛应用于表面工程中的质量检测.

An exact solution for the three-phase piezoelectric cylinder model under antiplane shear and its applications to piezoelectric composites

A three-phase piezoelectric cylinder model is proposed and an exact solution is obtained for the model under a farfield antiplane mechanical load and a far-field inplane electrical load. The three-phase model can serve as a fiber/interphase layer/matrix model, in terms of which a lot of interesting mechanical and electrical coupling phenomena induced by the interphase layer are revealed. It is found that much more serious stress and electrical field concentrations occur in the model with the interphase layer than those without any interphase layer. The three-phase model can also serve as a fiber/matrix/composite model, in terms of which a generalized self-consistent approach is developed for predicting the effective electroelastic moduli of piezoelectric composites. Numerical examples are given and discussed in detail.

Ultrasonic Tomography and Its Applications in oilfield

UTT (Ultrasonic Tomography Tool) is widely used in the oil industry and can be used to inspect corrosion, casing wall damage, casing breakoff, and casing distortion in the well borehole with the maximum environment temperature being 125 °C, and the pressure being 60 MPa. UTT consists of tool head, upper centralization, electronic section, lower centralization, transmitters, and receivers. Its outer diameter is 4.6 cm and length is 320 cm. The measured casing diameter ranges from 60 mm to 254 mm. The tomography resolution is 512×512. The borehole measurement accuracy is 2 mm. It can supply 3D pipe tomography, including horizontal and vertical profile. This paper introduces its specification, measurement principle, and applications in oilfield.damage, casing breakoff, and casing distortion in the well borehole with the maximum environment temperature being 125 °C, and the pressure being 60 MPa. UTT consists of tool head, upper centralization, electronic section, lower centralization, transmitters, and receivers. Its outer diameter is 4.6 cm and length is 320 cm. The measured casing diameter ranges from 60 mm to 254 mm. The tomography resolution is 512×512. The borehole measurement accuracy is 2 mm. It can supply 3D pipe tomography, including horizontal and vertical profile. This paper introduces its specification, measurement principle, and applications in oilfield.

Development of all metal electrothermal actuator and its applications

The in-plane motion of microelectrothermal actuator ("heatuator") has been analyzed for Si-based and metallic devices. It was found that the lateral deflection of a heatuator made of a Ni metal is about ∼60% larger than that of a Si-based actuator under the same power consumption. Metals are much better for thermal actuators as they provide a relatively large deflection and large force, for a low operating temperature and power consumption. Electroplated Ni films were used to fabricate heatuators. The electrical and mechanical properties of electroplated Ni thin films have been investigated as a function of temperature and plating current density, and the process conditions have been optimized to obtain stress-free films suitable for microelectromechanical systems applications. Lateral thermal actuators have been successfully fabricated, and electrically tested. Microswitches and microtweezers utilizing the heatuator have also been fabricated and tested. © 2005 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

A Pressure-Correction Method And Its Applications On An Unstructured Chimera Grid

In this paper, an unstructured Chimera mesh method is used to compute incompressible flow around a rotating body. To implement the pressure correction algorithm on unstructured overlapping sub-grids, a novel interpolation scheme for pressure correction is proposed. This indirect interpolation scheme can ensure a tight coupling of pressure between sub-domains. A moving-mesh finite volume approach is used to treat the rotating sub-domain and the governing equations are formulated in an inertial reference frame. Since the mesh that surrounds the rotating body undergoes only solid body rotation and the background mesh remains stationary, no mesh deformation is encountered in the computation. As a benefit from the utilization of an inertial frame, tensorial transformation for velocity is not needed. Three numerical simulations are successfully performed. They include flow over a fixed circular cylinder, flow over a rotating circular cylinder and flow over a rotating elliptic cylinder. These numerical examples demonstrate the capability of the current scheme in handling moving boundaries. The numerical results are in good agreement with experimental and computational data in literature. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Generalized rayleigh principle and its applications

In this paper, we mainly deal with cigenvalue problems of non-self-adjoint operator. To begin with, the generalized Rayleigh variational principle, the idea of which was due to Morse and Feshbach, is examined in detail and proved more strictly in mathematics. Then, other three equivalent formulations of it are presented. While applying them to approximate calculation we find the condition under which the above variational method can be identified as the same with Galerkin's one. After that we illustrate the generalized variational principle by considering the hydrodynamic stability of plane Poiseuille flow and Bénard convection. Finally, the Rayleigh quotient method is extended to the cases of non-self-adjoint matrix in order to determine its strong eigenvalne in linear algebra.

Multi-pipe string electromagnetic detection tool and its applications

The MID-K, a new kind of multi-pipe string detection tool is introduced. This tool provides a means of evaluating the condition of in-place pipe string, such as tubing and casino. It is capable of discriminating the defects of the inside and outside, and estimating the thickness of tubing and casing. It is accomplished by means of a low frequency eddy current to detect flaws on the inner surface and a magnetic flux leakage to inspect the full thickness. The measurement principle, the technology and applications are presented in this paper.

An Improved Ce/Se Scheme For Multi-Material Elastic-Plastic Flows And Its Applications

In this paper, a new definition of SE and CE, which is based on the hexahedron mesh and simpler than Chang's original CE/SE method (the space-time Conservation Element and Solution Element method), is proposed and an improved CE/SE scheme is constructed. Furthermore, the improved CE/SE scheme is extended in order to solve the elastic-plastic flow problems. The hybrid particle level set method is used for tracing the interfaces of materials. Proper boundary conditions are presented in interface tracking. Two high-velocity impact problems are simulated numerically and the computational results are carefully compared with the experimental data, as well as the results from other literature and LS-DYNA software. The comparisons show that the computational scheme developed currently is clear in physical concept, easy to be implemented and high accurate and efficient for the problems considered. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A CE/SE Scheme for Flows in Porous Media and Its Applications

In this paper, a new computational scheme for solving flows in porous media was proposed. The scheme was based on an improved CE/SE method (the space-time Conservation Element and Solution Element method). We described porous flows by adopting DFB (Brinkman-Forchheimer extended Darcy) equation. The comparison between our computational results and Ghia's confirmed the high accuracy, resolution, and efficiency of our CE/SE scheme. The proposed first-order CE/SE scheme is a new reliable way for numerical simulations of flows in porous media. After investigation of effects of Darcy number on porous flow, it shows that Darcy number has dominant influence on porous flow for the Reynolds number and porosity considered.

The optoelectronic swept-frequency laser and its applications in ranging, three-dimensional imaging, and coherent beam combining of chirped-seed amplifiers

This thesis explores the design, construction, and applications of the optoelectronic swept-frequency laser (SFL). The optoelectronic SFL is a feedback loop designed around a swept-frequency (chirped) semiconductor laser (SCL) to control its instantaneous optical frequency, such that the chirp characteristics are determined solely by a reference electronic oscillator. The resultant system generates precisely controlled optical frequency sweeps. In particular, we focus on linear chirps because of their numerous applications. We demonstrate optoelectronic SFLs based on vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and distributed-feedback lasers (DFBs) at wavelengths of 1550 nm and 1060 nm. We develop an iterative bias current predistortion procedure that enables SFL operation at very high chirp rates, up to 10^16 Hz/sec. We describe commercialization efforts and implementation of the predistortion algorithm in a stand-alone embedded environment, undertaken as part of our collaboration with Telaris, Inc. We demonstrate frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) ranging and three-dimensional (3-D) imaging using a 1550 nm optoelectronic SFL.

We develop the technique of multiple source FMCW (MS-FMCW) reflectometry, in which the frequency sweeps of multiple SFLs are "stitched" together in order to increase the optical bandwidth, and hence improve the axial resolution, of an FMCW ranging measurement. We demonstrate computer-aided stitching of DFB and VCSEL sweeps at 1550 nm. We also develop and demonstrate hardware stitching, which enables MS-FMCW ranging without additional signal processing. The culmination of this work is the hardware stitching of four VCSELs at 1550 nm for a total optical bandwidth of 2 THz, and a free-space axial resolution of 75 microns.

We describe our work on the tomographic imaging camera (TomICam), a 3-D imaging system based on FMCW ranging that features non-mechanical acquisition of transverse pixels. Our approach uses a combination of electronically tuned optical sources and low-cost full-field detector arrays, completely eliminating the need for moving parts traditionally employed in 3-D imaging. We describe the basic TomICam principle, and demonstrate single-pixel TomICam ranging in a proof-of-concept experiment. We also discuss the application of compressive sensing (CS) to the TomICam platform, and perform a series of numerical simulations. These simulations show that tenfold compression is feasible in CS TomICam, which effectively improves the volume acquisition speed by a factor ten.

We develop chirped-wave phase-locking techniques, and apply them to coherent beam combining (CBC) of chirped-seed amplifiers (CSAs) in a master oscillator power amplifier configuration. The precise chirp linearity of the optoelectronic SFL enables non-mechanical compensation of optical delays using acousto-optic frequency shifters, and its high chirp rate simultaneously increases the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold of the active fiber. We characterize a 1550 nm chirped-seed amplifier coherent-combining system. We use a chirp rate of 5*10^14 Hz/sec to increase the amplifier SBS threshold threefold, when compared to a single-frequency seed. We demonstrate efficient phase-locking and electronic beam steering of two 3 W erbium-doped fiber amplifier channels, achieving temporal phase noise levels corresponding to interferometric fringe visibilities exceeding 98%.

Symmetry of the Talbot effect and its applications

The Talbot effect is one of the most basic optical phenomena that has received extensive investigations both because its new results provide us more understanding of the fundamental Fresnel diffraction and also because of its wide applications. We summarize our recent results on this subject. Symmetry of the Talbot effect, which was reported in Optics Communications in 1995, is now realized as the key to reveal other rules for explanation of the Talbot effect for array illumination. The regularly rearranged-neighboring-phase-differences (RRNPD) rule, a completely new set of analytic phase equations (Applied Optics, 1999), and the prime-number decomposing rule (Applied Optics, 2001) are the newly obtained results that reflect the symmetry of the Talbot effect in essence. We also reported our results on the applications of the Talbot effect. Talbot phase codes are the orthogonal codes that can be used for phase coding of holographic storage. A new optical scanner based on the phase codes for Talbot array illumination has unique advantages. Furthermore, a novel two-layered multifunctional computer-generated hologram based on the fractional Talbot effect was proposed and implemented (Optics Letters, 2003). We believe that these new results should bring us more new understanding of the Talbot effect and help us to design novel optical devices that should benefit practical applications. (C) 2004 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.