Numerical study of surface tension driven convection in thermal magnetic fluids

Microgravity conditions pose unique challenges for fluid handling and heat transfer applications. By controlling (curtailing or augmenting) the buoyant and thermocapillary convection, the latter being the dominant convective flow in a microgravity environment, significant advantages can be achieved in space based processing. The control of this surface tension gradient driven flow is sought using a magnetic field, and the effects of these are studied computationally. A two-fluid layer system, with the lower fluid being a non-conducting ferrofluid, is considered under the influence of a horizontal temperature gradient. To capture the deformable interface, a numerical method to solve the Navier???Stokes equations, heat equations, and Maxwell???s equations was developed using a hybrid level set/ volume-of-fluid technique. The convective velocities and heat fluxes were studied under various regimes of the thermal Marangoni number Ma, the external field represented by the magnetic Bond number Bom, and various gravity levels, Fr. Regimes where the convection were either curtailed or augmented were identified. It was found that the surface force due to the step change in the magnetic permeability at the interface could be suitably utilized to control the instability at the interface.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Unzipping DNA by force: thermodynamics and finite size behaviour

We discuss the thermodynamic behaviour near the force induced unzipping transition of a double stranded DNA in two different ensembles. The Y-fork is identified as the coexisting phases in the fixed distance ensemble. From finite size scaling of thermodynamic quantities like the extensibility, the length of the unzipped segment of a Y-fork, the phase diagram can be recovered. We suggest that such procedures could be used to obtain the thermodynamic phase diagram from experiments on finite length DNA.Comment: 10 pages, accepted for publication in special issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matte

Ge growth on ion-irradiated Si self-affine fractal surfaces

We have carried out scanning tunneling microscopy experiments under ultrahigh vacuum condition to study the morphology of ultrathin Ge films eposited on pristine Si(100) and ion-irradiated Si(100) self-affine fractal surfaces. The pristine and the ion-irradiated Si(100) surface have roughness exponents of alpha=0.19+/-0.05 and alpha=0.82+/-0.04 respectively. These measurements were carried out on two halves of the same sample where only one half was ion-irradiated. Following deposition of a thin film of Ge (~6 A) the roughness exponents change to 0.11+/-0.04 and 0.99+/-0.06, respectively. Upon Ge deposition, while the roughness increases by more than an order of magnitude on the pristine surface, a smoothing is observed for the ion-irradiated surface. For the ion-irradiated surface the correlation length xi increases from 32 nm to 137 nm upon Ge deposition. Ge grows on Si surfaces in the Stranski-Krastanov or layer-plus-island mode where islands grow on a wetting layer of about three atomic layers. On the pristine surface the islands are predominantly of square or rectangular shape, while on the ion-irradiated surface the islands are nearly diamond shaped. Changes of adsorption behaviour of deposited atoms depending on the roughness exponent (or the fractal dimension) of the substrate surface are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures and 1 tabl

Global Persistence Exponent in Critical Dynamics: Finite Size induced Crossover

We extend the definition of a global order parameter to the case of a critical system confined between two infinite parallel plates separated by a finite distance $L$. For a quench to the critical point we study the persistence property of the global order parameter and show that there is a crossover behaviour characterized by a non universal exponent which depends on the ratio of the system size to a dynamic length scale

A New process for the enrichment of nickel in Sukinda chromite overburden ore

Chrontite Over Burden (COB) ore from .Sukinda taller, Orissa is too lean in nickel concentration to he exploited for the extraction of nickel. The average nickel concentration in the COB ore lies in the range of 0.4-0.6%. An acid leaching route at atmospheric prsssure has been developed for screening out silica as insoluble. Metal values in the leach liquor are retrieved as hydroxides by appropriate manoeuvring of pH. The metal hydroxides are converted to corresponding oxides by calcining at 900°C. The resultant nickel content in the mixed oxide has been consistent1 ' .found to he 1.6% and above. This product star he directly used as a starting material for the preparation of ferro-nickel

Optical Phonon Limited High Field Transport in Layered Materials

An optical phonon limited velocity model has been employed to investigate high-field transport in a selection of layered 2D materials for both, low-power logic switches with scaled supply voltages, and high-power, high-frequency transistors. Drain currents, effective electron velocities and intrinsic cut-off frequencies as a function of carrier density have been predicted thus providing a benchmark for the optical phonon limited high-field performance limits of these materials. The optical phonon limited carrier velocities of a selection of transition metal dichalcogenides and black phosphorus are found to be modest as compared to their n-channel silicon counterparts, questioning the utility of these devices in the source-injection dominated regime. h-BN, at the other end of the spectrum, is shown to be a very promising material for high-frequency high-power devices, subject to experimental realization of high carrier densities, primarily due to its large optical phonon energy. Experimentally extracted saturation velocities from few-layer MoS2 devices show reasonable qualitative and quantitative agreement with predicted values. Temperature dependence of measured vsat is discussed and found to fit a velocity saturation model with a single material dependent fit parameter.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Finite Size Effect in Persistence

We have investigated the random walk problem in a finite system and studied the crossover induced in the the persistence probability scales by the system size.Analytical and numerical work show that the scaling function is an exponentially decaying function.The particle here is trapped with in a box of size $L$ . We have also considered the problem when the particle in trapped in a potential. Direct calculation and numerical result show that the scaling function here also an exponentially decaying function. We also present numerical works on harmonically trapped randomly accelerated particle and randomly accelerated particle with viscous drag.Comment: revtex4, 4 pages, 4 figure