Equation of state of forsterite

Shock wave data for pure forsterite with initial bulk densities of 2.6 and 3.1 g/cm^3 are obtained to 0.370 Mb by impacting series of specimens with tungsten alloy plates that are launched at speeds of up to 2.3 km/sec with a high-performance propellant gun. The onset of a shock-induced phase change, probably corresponding to the forsterite-‘post spinel’ phase change is observed at 0.280±0.025 Mb. Because of the low shock temperatures, the transition is believed to be limited by the reaction rate and this pressure value should be taken only as an upper limit. Adiabats derived from the Hugoniot data for the forsterite phase are fit to the two-parameter finite strain Birch-Murnaghan equation and to two simple ionic equations of state. The Birch-Murnaghan form of the equation of state gives a zero-pressure bulk modulus (1.29 Mb) that agrees more closely with the ultrasonic data than the modulus obtained from the ionic equations of state. An unusual relaxation effect, in which the elastic shock precursor velocity varies from 5.8 to 9.5 km/sec, is also observed. The characteristic time of the relaxation process appears to be less than 1 μsec

Automating the packing heuristic design process with genetic programming

The literature shows that one-, two-, and three-dimensional bin packing and knapsack packing are difficult problems in operational research. Many techniques, including exact, heuristic, and metaheuristic approaches, have been investigated to solve these problems and it is often not clear which method to use when presented with a new instance. This paper presents an approach which is motivated by the goal of building computer systems which can design heuristic methods. The overall aim is to explore the possibilities for automating the heuristic design process. We present a genetic programming system to automatically generate a good quality heuristic for each instance. It is not necessary to change the methodology depending on the problem type (one-, two-, or three-dimensional knapsack and bin packing problems), and it therefore has a level of generality unmatched by other systems in the literature. We carry out an extensive suite of experiments and compare with the best human designed heuristics in the literature. Note that our heuristic design methodology uses the same parameters for all the experiments. The contribution of this paper is to present a more general packing methodology than those currently available, and to show that, by using this methodology, it is possible for a computer system to design heuristics which are competitive with the human designed heuristics from the literature. This represents the first packing algorithm in the literature able to claim human competitive results in such a wide variety of packing domains

Exploring the Semantic Structure of Technical Document Collections: A Cooperative Systems Approach

. Identifying and analyzing the knowledge available in document form is a key element of corporate knowledge management. In engineering-intensive organizations, it involves tasks such as standard generation and evaluation, comparison of related cases and experience reuse in their treatment. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and some application experiences with a modular approach that allows a variety of techniques from semantic document analysis to interoperate with a tailorable map-centered visualization of the structure of technical document collections.