Vibration analysis of beam with multiple cracks

The present work deals with the free vibration analysis of a cracked beam with multiple transverse cracks using finite element method. In this analysis, an ‘overall additional flexibility matrix’, instead of the ‘local additional flexibility matrix’ is added to the flexibility matrix of the corresponding intact beam element to obtain the total flexibility matrix, and from there the result is compared with previous studies. The natural frequencies of free vibration of the beam with multiple cracks are computed. It is observed that with increase in number of cracks the natural frequencies decreases. The effect of cracks is more pronounced when the cracks are near to the fixed end than free end. The natural frequency decreases with increase in relative crack depth

Load balancing techniques for I/O intensive tasks on heterogeneous clusters

Load balancing schemes in a cluster system play a critically important role in developing highperformance cluster computing platform. Existing load balancing approaches are concerned with the effective usage of CPU and memory resources. I/O-intensive tasks running on a heterogeneous cluster need a highly effective usage of global I/O resources, previous CPU-or memory-centric load balancing schemes suffer significant performance drop under I/O- intensive workload due to the imbalance of I/O load. To solve this problem, Zhang et al. developed two I/O-aware load-balancing schemes, which consider system heterogeneity and migrate more I/O-intensive tasks from a node with high I/O utilization to those with low I/O utilization. If the workload is memory-intensive in nature, the new method applies a memory-based load balancing policy to assign the tasks. Likewise, when the workload becomes CPU-intensive, their scheme leverages a CPU-based policy as an efficient means to balance the system load. In doing so, the proposed approach maintains the same level of performance as the existing schemes when I/O load is low or well balanced. Results from a trace-driven simulation study show that, when a workload is I/O-intensive, the proposed schemes improve the performance with respect to mean slowdown over the existing schemes by up to a factor of 8. In addition, the slowdowns of almost all the policies increase consistently with the system heterogeneity

Effect of Substrate Texture on Electroplating

Electroplating studies have been conducted extensively in the past due to their lower cost and fastness. Mechanical and functional properties of such coatings depend highly on the chemistry and the structure of the same. Deviation from random orientation in the crystallographic directions is known as preferred orientation or texturing in materials. Depending upon the texture, material property may be highly anisotropic. So, texture study of coating is of prime importance and moreover how the texturing phenomenon is occurring in coatings is also to be examined. The influence of substrate texture and electroplating conditions on the texture and surface morphology of electrodeposits is still unclear. Preferred orientation or texturing is governed by the lowest energy condition. During growth of a specific phase, there is a competition between strain energy and surface energy. But, experimental analysis of such system has not been done widely. In this study, an attempt has been made to study the role of substrate texture on the coating texture. Routine microscopic study and surface mechanical testing was also carried out