Finite element thermomechanical simulation of steel continuous casting

International audienceIn continuous casting (CC), thermomechanical simulation is essential to analyze important issues: gap formation; stress and deformation of the solidified shell; bulging of product between supporting rolls in the case of steel CC; size of final product, butt-curl defect in direct chill casting of aluminium. The numerical simulation package THERCAST has been developed with the objective of supplying an accurate analysis of those phenomena, permitting to define relevant process actuators. In this paper, some characteristic features especially developed for steel continuous casting are presented and illustrated by examples of industrial application

Stoichiometry and Grain Boundaries Control by Spark Plasma Sintering in Ba0.6Sr0.4TiO3:Mn/MgO Composites

LaNbO4/La3NbO7 and LaNbO4/LaNb3O9 cer-cer composites were prepared by impregnating Ca-doped LaNbO4 powder, synthesized by spray pyrolysis, with La- or Nb-precursor solutions. The sintering of the calcined powders was investigated by dilatometry, and dense composites were prepared by conventional sintering, hot pressing, and spark plasma sintering. The particle size of the starting powders was about 50 nm, and the average grain size of the dense materials ranged from 100 nm and upwards, depending on the sintering temperature, sintering procedure, and the phase composition. The unit cell parameters of LaNbO4 showed a finite size effect and approached the cell parameters of tetragonal LaNbO4 with decreasing crystallite size, both for the single-phase material and the composites. The minority phase (La3NbO7 or LaNb3O9) were observed as isolated grains and accumulated at triple points and not along the grain boundaries, pointing to a large dihedral angle between the phases. The calcium-solubility in the minority phases was larger than in LaNbO4, which corresponds well with previous reports. The electrical conductivity of the heterodoped materials was similar to, or lower than, that for Ca-doped LaNbO4

Synthetic, structural, spectroscopic and theoretical study of a Mn(III)-Cu(II) dimer containing a Jahn-Teller compressed Mn ion

The heterobimetallic complex [Cu(II)Mn(III)(L)(2)(py)(4)](ClO4)center dot EtOH (1) built using the pro-ligand 2,2'-biphenol (LH2), contains a rare example of a Jahn-Teller compressed Mn(III) centre. Dc magnetic susceptibility measurements on 1 reveal a strong antiferromagnetic exchange between the Cu(II) and Mn(III) ions mediated through the phenolate O-atoms (J = -33.4 cm(-1)), with magnetisation measurements at low temperatures and high fields suggesting significant anisotropy. Simulations of high-field and high frequency powder EPR data suggest a single-ion anisotropy D-Mn(III) = +4.45 cm(-1). DFT calculations also yield an antiferromagnetic exchange for 1, though the magnitude is overestimated (J(DFT) = -71 cm(-1)). Calculations reveal that the antiferromagnetic interaction essentially stems from the Mn(d(x2-y2))-Cu(d(x2-y2)) interaction. The computed single-ion anisotropy and cluster anisotropy also correlates well with experiment. A larger cluster anisotropy for the S = 3/2 state compared to the single-ion anisotropy of Mn(III) is rationalised on the basis of orbital mixing and various contributions that arise due to the spin-orbit interaction

Detection of Lesions Underlying Intractable Epilepsy on T1-Weighted MRI as an Outlier Detection Problem

International audiencePattern recognition methods, such as computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems, can help clinicians in their diagnosis by marking abnormal regions in an image. We propose a machine learning system based on a one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) classi-fier for the detection of abnormalities in magnetic resonance images (MRI) applied to patients with intractable epilepsy. The system learns the features associated with healthy control subjects, allowing a voxelwise assessment of the deviation of a test subject pattern from the learned patterns. While any number of various features can be chosen and learned, here we focus on two texture parameters capturing image patterns associated with epileptogenic lesions on T1-weighted brain MRI e.g. heterotopia and blurred junction between the grey and white matter. The CAD output consists of patient specific 3D maps locating clusters of suspicious voxels ranked by size and degree of deviation from control patterns. System performance was evaluated using realistic simulations of challenging detection tasks as well as clinical data of 77 healthy control subjects and of eleven patients (13 lesions). It was compared to that of a mass univariate statistical parametric mapping (SPM) single subject analysis based on the same set of features. For all simulations, OC-SVM yielded significantly higher values of the area under the ROC curve (AUC) and higher sensitivity at low false positive rate. For the clinical data, both OC-SVM and SPM successfully detected 100% of the lesions in the MRI positive cases (3/13). For the MRI negative cases (10/13), OC-SVM detected 7/10 lesions and SPM analysis detected 5/10 lesions. In all experiments, OC-SVM produced fewer false positive detections than SPM. OC-SVM may be a versatile system for unbiased lesion detection

Sensitivity to the rheology and geometry of granular collapses by using the μ(I) rheology

International audienc

Caractérisations microondes de capacités accordables réalisées sur des céramiques BST dopées Manganèse

International audienc

Grignard reagent-promoted 6-endo-dig cyclization: instantaneous synthesis of original dipyrido[1,2-a:3 ',4 '-d]imidazole

International audienceDipyrido[1,2-a:3',4'-d]imidazole derivatives can be readily synthetized from various 3-alkyne-2-cyanoimidazo[1,2-a]pyridines via an efficient Grignard reagent-promoted 6-endo-dig cyclization of nitrile to alkynes. A previous optimization of the Sonogashira coupling reaction at C(3) of the 2-cyanoimidazo[1,2-a]pyridine was necessary as this coupling reaction is known to be largely influenced by the nature of the 2-substituent. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Microwave study of tunable planar capacitors using MN-doped Ba0.6Br0.4TiO3 ceramics

International audienc