Simulating the Effects of Substrate Pre-Heating on the Final Structure of Steel Parts Built by Laser Powder Deposition

Tool steel parts built by laser powder deposition often present a heterogeneous distribution of properties caused by the complex structural transformations that occur during the deposition process. A model describing these transformations has been developed. It couples finite element heat transfer calculations with transformation kinetic theory to predict the final microstructure and properties of the material and their variation across a laser powder deposited part. Pre-heating is often used to reduce the residual stresses and the risk of thermal distortion and cracking. However, this changes the heat transfer conditions and affects the final microstructure and properties. In this work the proposed model was used to evaluate the effects of substrate preheating on the final hardness distribution. The results show that the final hardness depends considerably on the initial temperature of the substrate.Mechanical Engineerin

Out-of-plane seismic response of stone masonry walls: experimental and analytical study of real piers

This paper presents the application of an existing simplified displacement-based procedure to the characterization of the nonlinear force-displacement relationship for the out-of-plane behaviour of unreinforced traditional masonry walls. According to this procedure, tri-linear models based on three different energy based criteria were constructed and confronted with three experimental tests on existing stone masonry constructions. Moreover, a brief introduction is presented regarding the main characteristics of the in situ cyclic testing recently carried out using distributed loads, as well as results obtained during the experimental campaigns performed. The comparison between the experimental and the analytical results are presented and discussed

Impurities near an Antiferromagnetic-Singlet Quantum Critical Point

Heavy fermion systems, and other strongly correlated electron materials, often exhibit a competition between antiferromagnetic (AF) and singlet ground states. Using exact Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations, we examine the effect of impurities in the vicinity of such AF- singlet quantum critical points, through an appropriately defined impurity susceptibility, $\chi_{imp}$. Our key finding is a connection, within a single calculational framework, between AF domains induced on the singlet side of the transition, and the behavior of the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation rate $1/T_1$. We show that local NMR measurements provide a diagnostic for the location of the QCP which agrees remarkably well with the vanishing of the AF order parameter and large values of $\chi_{imp}$. We connect our results with experiments on Cd-doped CeCoIn$_5$

The Redner - Ben-Avraham - Kahng cluster system

We consider a coagulation model first introduced by Redner, Ben-Avraham and Krapivsky in [Redner, Ben-Avraham, Kahng: Kinetics of 'cluster eating', J. Phys. A: Math. Gen., 20 (1987), 1231-1238], the main feature of which is that the reaction between a j-cluster and a k-cluster results in the creation of a |j-k|-cluster, and not, as in Smoluchowski's model, of a (j+k)-cluster. In this paper we prove existence and uniqueness of solutions under reasonably general conditions on the coagulation coefficients, and we also establish differenciability properties and continuous dependence of solutions. Some interesting invariance properties are also proved. Finally, we study the long-time behaviour of solutions, and also present a preliminary analysis of their scaling behaviour.Comment: 24 pages. 2 figures. Dedicated to Carlos Rocha and Luis Magalhaes on the occasion of their sixtieth birthday

The Redner - Ben-Avraham - Kahng coagulation system with constant coefficients: the finite dimensional case

We study the behaviour as $t\to\infty$ of solutions $(c_j(t))$ to the Redner--Ben-Avraham--Kahng coagulation system with positive and compactly supported initial data, rigorously proving and slightly extending results originally established in [4] by means of formal arguments.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur