The Development of the Eastern Africa Collection at Syracuse University

With the inauguration of an African studies program in 1962, Syracuse University began the development of a unique collection of records relating to the eastern side of Africa. The most important part of the collection, the core, is related to Kenya, but there are also valuable records on the other countries of eastern Africa, nine in all, extending from Ethiopia to South Africa. Most of the items in this collection are on microfilm—an extraordinary holding of nearly four thousand reels of official and private records—but there is also much of value in supplementary books, periodicals, and documents in their original form. The acquisition of this collection required an unusual degree of cooperation not only between the faculty and administration at Syracuse, but also between the University, on the one hand, and the government ministers, archival and university personnel, and communal leaders in Africa on the other. Coordination, also, was essential with certain organizations in the United States such as the African Studies Association, the Center for Research Libraries, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Tuning the Performance of a Computational Persistent Homology Package

In recent years, persistent homology has become an attractive method for data analysis. It captures topological features, such as connected components, holes, and voids from point cloud data and summarizes the way in which these features appear and disappear in a filtration sequence. In this project, we focus on improving the performanceof Eirene, a computational package for persistent homology. Eirene is a 5000-line open-source software library implemented in the dynamic programming language Julia. We use the Julia profiling tools to identify performance bottlenecks and develop novel methods to manage them, including the parallelization of some time-consuming functions on multicore/manycore hardware. Empirical results show that performance can be greatly improved

Freeform Extrusion of High Solids Loading Ceramic Slurries, Part II: Extrusion Process Control

Part I of this paper provided a detailed description of a novel fabrication machine for high solids loading ceramic slurry extrusion and presented an empirical model of the ceramic extrusion process, with ram velocity as the input and extrusion force as the output. A constant force is desirable in freeform extrusion processes as it correlates with a constant material deposition rate and, thus, good part quality. The experimental results in Part I demonstrated that a constant ram velocity will produce a transient extrusion force. In some instances the extrusion force increased until ram motor skipping occurred. Further, process disturbances, such as air bubble release and nozzle clogging that cause sudden changes in extrusion force, were often present. In this paper a feedback controller for the ceramic extrusion process is designed and experimentally implemented. The controller intelligently adjusts the ram motor velocity to maintain a constant extrusion force. Since there is tremendous variability in the extrusion process characteristics, an on-off controller is utilized in this paper. Comparisons are made between parts fabricated with and without the feedback control. It is demonstrated that the use of the feedback control reduces the effect of process disturbances (i.e., air bubble release and nozzle clogging) and dramatically improves part quality.Mechanical Engineerin

Freeform Extrusion of High Solids Loading Ceramic Slurries, Part I: Extrusion Process Modeling

A novel solid freeform fabrication method has been developed for the manufacture of ceramic-based components in an environmentally friendly fashion. The method is based on the extrusion of ceramic slurries using water as the binding media. Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) is currently being used as the part material and solids loading as high as 60 vol. % has been achieved. This paper describes a manufacturing machine that has been developed for the extrusion of high solids loading ceramic slurries. A critical component of the machine is the deposition system, which consists of a syringe, a plunger, a ram actuated by a motor that forces the plunger down to extrude material, and a load cell to measure the extrusion force. An empirical, dynamic model of the ceramic extrusion process, where the input is the commanded ram velocity and the output is the extrusion force, is developed. Several experiments are conducted and empirical modeling techniques are utilized to construct the dynamic model. The results demonstrate that the ceramic extrusion process has a very slow dynamic response, as compared to other non-compressible fluids such as water. A substantial amount of variation exists in the ceramic extrusion process, most notably in the transient dynamics, and a constant ram velocity may either produce a relatively constant steady-state extrusion force or it may cause the extrusion force to steadily increase until the ram motor skips. The ceramic extrusion process is also subjected to significant disturbances such as air bubble release, which causes a dramatic decrease in the extrusion force, and nozzle clogging, which causes the extrusion force to slowly increase until the clog is released or the ram motor skips.Mechanical Engineerin

A Guide to the Secretariat Circulars: Kenya National Archives Microfilm

The Secretariat Circulars are made up of five reels of microfilm that comprise Section 7, the last section of the Guide to the Kenya National Archives. Microfilm number: 2807.https://surface.syr.edu/books/1008/thumbnail.jp

A Guide to the Kenya National Archives

The Guide is a compilation of 6 sections accessing approximately 157 microfilm reels of documents within the collection of the Kenya National Archives.https://surface.syr.edu/books/1005/thumbnail.jp

A Guide to the Kenya National Archives to the Microfilms of the Provincial and District Annual Reports, Record Books, and Handing-Over Reports; Miscellaneous Correspondence; and Intelligence Reports

The Guide is a compilation of 6 sections accessing approximately 157 microfilm reels of documents within the collection of the Kenya National Archives. Documents in the collection include archival material of the British colonial government in Kenya up to the mid 1960’s. For more information, refer to the Kenya National Archives subject guide.https://surface.syr.edu/archiveguidekenya/1000/thumbnail.jp