Practical Issues in the Application of Direct Metal Laser Sintering

Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) was introduced to meet the objective of producing metal parts directly from CAD data. CRDM has accumulated six years of experience in applying this technique, mostly to prototyping parts for evaluation. For some applications, such as blow moulds, porosity generated in DMLS has proved to be beneficial, but for others a concession on tolerances or finish are necessary and/or complementary operations are required, which add to manufacturing time and cost. This paper examines such issues through some well chosen examples of parts to demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of the DMLS process.Mechanical Engineerin

Destroying black holes with test bodies

If a black hole can accrete a body whose spin or charge would send the black hole parameters over the extremal limit, then a naked singularity would presumably form, in violation of the cosmic censorship conjecture. We review some previous results on testing cosmic censorship in this way using the test body approximation, focusing mostly on the case of neutral black holes. Under certain conditions a black hole can indeed be over-spun or over-charged in this approximation, hence radiative and self-force effects must be taken into account to further test cosmic censorship.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the First Mediterranean Conference on Classical and Quantum Gravity (talk given by T. P. S.). Summarizes the results of Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 141101 (2009), arXiv:0907.4146 [gr-qc] and considers further example

Work function determination of promising material for thermionic converters

The work done to fabricate Marchuk plasma discharge tubes for measurement of the cesiated emission of lanthanum hexaboride and thoriated tungsten electrodes is described. A photon counting pyrometer was completed and is to be calibrated with a gold standard

Application of active controls technology to aircraft bide smoothing systems

A critical review of past efforts in the design and testing of ride smoothing and gust alleviation systems is presented. Design trade offs involving sensor types, choice of feedback loops, human comfort, and aircraft handling-qualities criteria are discussed. Synthesis of a system designed to employ direct-lift and side-force producing surfaces is reported. Two STOL aircraft and an executive transport are considered. Theoretically predicted system performance is compared with hybrid simulation and flight test data. Pilot opinion rating, pilot workload, and passenger comfort rating data for the basic and augmented aircraft are included

The great dichotomy of the Solar System: small terrestrial embryos and massive giant planet cores

The basic structure of the solar system is set by the presence of low-mass terrestrial planets in its inner part and giant planets in its outer part. This is the result of the formation of a system of multiple embryos with approximately the mass of Mars in the inner disk and of a few multi-Earth-mass cores in the outer disk, within the lifetime of the gaseous component of the protoplanetary disk. What was the origin of this dichotomy in the mass distribution of embryos/cores? We show in this paper that the classic processes of runaway and oligarchic growth from a disk of planetesimals cannot explain this dichotomy, even if the original surface density of solids increased at the snowline. Instead, the accretion of drifting pebbles by embryos and cores can explain the dichotomy, provided that some assumptions hold true. We propose that the mass-flow of pebbles is two-times lower and the characteristic size of the pebbles is approximately ten times smaller within the snowline than beyond the snowline (respectively at heliocentric distance $r<r_{ice}$ and $r>r_{ice}$, where $r_{ice}$ is the snowline heliocentric distance), due to ice sublimation and the splitting of icy pebbles into a collection of chondrule-size silicate grains. In this case, objects of original sub-lunar mass would grow at drastically different rates in the two regions of the disk. Within the snowline these bodies would reach approximately the mass of Mars while beyond the snowline they would grow to $\sim 20$ Earth masses. The results may change quantitatively with changes to the assumed parameters, but the establishment of a clear dichotomy in the mass distribution of protoplanets appears robust, provided that there is enough turbulence in the disk to prevent the sedimentation of the silicate grains into a very thin layer.Comment: In press in Icaru

Hawking radiation without black hole entropy

In this Letter I point out that Hawking radiation is a purely kinematic effect that is generic to Lorentzian geometries. Hawking radiation arises for any test field on any Lorentzian geometry containing an event horizon regardless of whether or not the Lorentzian geometry satisfies the dynamical Einstein equations of general relativity. On the other hand, the classical laws of black hole mechanics are intrinsically linked to the Einstein equations of general relativity (or their perturbative extension into either semiclassical quantum gravity or string-inspired scenarios). In particular, the laws of black hole thermodynamics, and the identification of the entropy of a black hole with its area, are inextricably linked with the dynamical equations satisfied by the Lorentzian geometry: entropy is proportional to area (plus corrections) if and only if the dynamical equations are the Einstein equations (plus corrections). It is quite possible to have Hawking radiation occur in physical situations in which the laws of black hole mechanics do not apply, and in situations in which the notion of black hole entropy does not even make any sense. This observation has important implications for any derivation of black hole entropy that seeks to deduce black hole entropy from the Hawking radiation.Comment: Uses ReV_TeX 3.0; Five pages in two-column forma

Modelling Planck-scale Lorentz violation via analogue models

Astrophysical tests of Planck-suppressed Lorentz violations had been extensively studied in recent years and very stringent constraints have been obtained within the framework of effective field theory. There are however still some unresolved theoretical issues, in particular regarding the so called "naturalness problem" - which arises when postulating that Planck-suppressed Lorentz violations arise only from operators with mass dimension greater than four in the Lagrangian. In the work presented here we shall try to address this problem by looking at a condensed-matter analogue of the Lorentz violations considered in quantum gravity phenomenology. Specifically, we investigate the class of two-component BECs subject to laser-induced transitions between the two components, and we show that this model is an example for Lorentz invariance violation due to ultraviolet physics. We shall show that such a model can be considered to be an explicit example high-energy Lorentz violations where the ``naturalness problem'' does not arise.Comment: Talk given at the Fourth Meeting on Constrained Dynamics and Quantum Gravity (QG05), Cala Gonone (Sardinia, Italy) September 12-16, 200