Microtopographic Inspection of Thermoplastic Rubber Shoe’s Sole: The Influence of Surface Roughness on Sole to Leather Gluing

In Portugal quality shoe’s industry has a major economical importance. The strength and quality of the gluing of the sole to leather are of major importance in the process of making a high quality shoe. This pasting process is standardized for different kinds of sole/leather combinations. However even if proceeding carefully, strictly by the rules, problems due happen and specially as new kinds of sole’s materials and leather’ types are introduced in the production lines. A careful physical characterization of the gluing process as well as all items intervening is again necessary

Efficient implementation of high-order finite elements for Helmholtz problems

Computational modeling remains key to the acoustic design of various applications, but it is constrained by the cost of solving large Helmholtz problems at high frequencies. This paper presents an efficient implementation of the high-order Finite Element Method for tackling large-scale engineering problems arising in acoustics. A key feature of the proposed method is the ability to select automatically the order of interpolation in each element so as to obtain a target accuracy while minimising the cost. This is achieved using a simple local a priori error indicator. For simulations involving several frequencies, the use of hierarchic shape functions leads to an efficient strategy to accelerate the assembly of the finite element model. The intrinsic performance of the high-order FEM for 3D Helmholtz problem is assessed and an error indicator is devised to select the polynomial order in each element. A realistic 3D application is presented in detail to demonstrate the reduction in computational costs and the robustness of the a priori error indicator. For this test case the proposed method accelerates the simulation by an order of magnitude and requires less than a quarter of the memory needed by the standard FEM

Circulation characteristics of a monsoon depression during BOBMEX-99 using high-resolution analysis

The skill and efficiency of a numerical model mostly varies with the quality of initial values, accuracy on parameterization of physical processes and horizontal and vertical resolution of the model. Commonly used low-resolution reanalyses are hardly able to capture the prominent features associated with organized convective processes in a monsoon depression. The objective is to prepare improved high-resolution analysis by the use of MM5 modelling system developed by the Pennsylvania State University/National Center for Atmospheric Research (PSU/NCAR). It requires the objective comparison of high and low-resolution analysis datasets in assessing the specific convective features of a monsoon depression. For this purpose, reanalysis datasets of NCAR/NCEP (National Center for Atmospheric Research/National Centers for Environmental Prediction) at a horizontal resolution of 2.5° (latitude/longitude) have been used as first guess in the objective analysis scheme. The additional asynoptic datasets obtained during BOBMEX-99 are utilized within the assimilation process. Cloud Motion Wind (CMW) data of METEOSAT satellite and SSM/I surface wind data are included for the improvement of derived analysis. The multiquadric (MQD) interpolation technique is selected and applied for meteorological objective analysis at a horizontal resolution of 30 km. After a successful inclusion of additional data, the resulting reanalysis is able to produce the structure of convective organization as well as prominent synoptic features associated with monsoon depression. Comparison and error verifications have been done with the help of available upper-air station data. The objective verification reveals the efficiency of the analysis scheme

Funciones de Núcleo o Topologías [Ma]

Se utiliza el conocido concepto de núcleo topológico de un punto para definir la noción de "función de núcleo sobre un conjunto" y analizar sus propiedades básicas. Para un conjunto X se encuentra la adjunción entre la colección de sus funciones de núcleo y la de sus topologías. Las topologías puntos fijos de esta adjunción son aquellas en las que para cada punto existe el menor abierto que lo contiene y son denominados aquí "topologías [Ma]", las cuales coinciden con las "topologías discretas" que P. S. Alexandroff introdujo en 1937, como aquellas en las que la intersección de cualquier colección de abiertos es un conjunto abierto

Damage progression in compressively loaded laminates containing a circular cutout

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76038/1/AIAA-10597-113.pd

Language support for immigrant children: a study of state schools in the UK and US

In recent decades, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers have sought a new way of life in large numbers, often leaving their countries of origin behind in search of places that offer a better way of life. The purpose of this study was to investigate how elementary and middle school students in state schools in Reading, England (primarily speakers of Asian languages), and Richmond, Virginia (primarily speakers of Spanish), were supported academically, when most children’s first language was not English. The authors were interested in exploring whether or not there were cultural or structural differences in the way each country helped or hindered these students as they progressed through the school systems. Three UK schools in a district of approximately 100,000 and three US schools in a district of approximately 250,000 were the focus of this exploration from 2000 to 2003. Findings indicated that there were cultural and legislative differences and similarities. Teachers and administrators in both countries attempted to provide services with limited and sometimes diminishing resources. Community support varied based on resources, attitudes toward various ethnic groups, and the coping strategies adopted by these groups in their new environments. Marked differences appeared with regard to the manner in which assessments took place and how the results were made available to the public

Exploiting asynchrony from exact forward recovery for DUE in iterative solvers

This paper presents a method to protect iterative solvers from Detected and Uncorrected Errors (DUE) relying on error detection techniques already available in commodity hardware. Detection operates at the memory page level, which enables the use of simple algorithmic redundancies to correct errors. Such redundancies would be inapplicable under coarse grain error detection, but become very powerful when the hardware is able to precisely detect errors. Relations straightforwardly extracted from the solver allow to recover lost data exactly. This method is free of the overheads of backwards recoveries like checkpointing, and does not compromise mathematical convergence properties of the solver as restarting would do. We apply this recovery to three widely used Krylov subspace methods, CG, GMRES and BiCGStab, and their preconditioned versions. We implement our resilience techniques on CG considering scenarios from small (8 cores) to large (1024 cores) scales, and demonstrate very low overheads compared to state-of-the-art solutions. We deploy our recovery techniques either by overlapping them with algorithmic computations or by forcing them to be in the critical path of the application. A trade-off exists between both approaches depending on the error rate the solver is suffering. Under realistic error rates, overlapping decreases overheads from 5.37% down to 3.59% for a non-preconditioned CG on 8 cores.This work has been partially supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's 7th FP, ERC Advanced Grant 321253, and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2012-34557. L. Jaulmes has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports under grant FPU2013/06982. M. Moreto has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship JCI-2012-15047. M. Casas has been partially supported by the Secretary for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the Co-fund programme of the Marie Curie Actions of the European Union's 7th FP (contract 2013 BP B 00243).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Synthesis and Characterization of Templated Ion Exchange Resins for the Selective Complexation of Actinide Ions

The purpose of this research is to develop a polymeric extractant for the selective complexation of uranyl ions (and subsequently other actinyl and actinide ions) from aqueous solutions (lakes, streams, waste tanks and even body fluids). Chemical insights into what makes a good complexation site will be used to synthesize reagents tailor-made for the complexation of uranyl and other actinide ions. These insights, derived from studies of molecular recognition include ion coordination number and geometry, ionic size and ionic shape, as well as ion to ligand thermodynamic affinity. Selectivity for a specific actinide ion will be obtained by providing the polymers with cavities lined with complexing ligands so arranged as to match the charge, coordination number, coordination geometry, and size of the actinide metal ion. These cavity-containing polymers will be produced by using a specific ion (or surrogate) as a template around which monomeric complexing ligands will be polymerized. The complexing ligands will be ones containing functional groups known to form stable complexes with a specific ion and less stable complexes with other cations. Prior investigator's approaches for making templated resins for metal ions have had marginal success. We have extended and amended these methodologies in our work with Pb(II) and uranyl ion, by changing the order of the steps, by the inclusion of sonication, by using higher complex loading, and the selection of functional groups with better complexation constants. This has resulted in significant improvements to selectivity. The unusual shape of the uranyl ion suggests that this approach will result in even greater selectivities than already observed for Pb(II). Preliminary data obtained for uranyl templated polymers shows unprecedented selectivity and has resulted in the first ion selective electrode for uranyl ion

Analysis of Transaction Management Performance

There is currently much interest in incorporating transactions into both operating systems and general purpose programming languages. This paper provides a detailed examination of the design and performance of the“¢ transaction manager of the Camelot system. Camelot is a transaction facility that provides a rich model of transactions intended to support a wide variety of general-purpose applications. The transaction manager's principal function is to execute the protocols that ensure atomicity. The conclusions of this study are: a simple optimization to two-phase commit reduces logging activity of distributed transactions; non-blocking commit is practical for some applications; multithreaded design improves throughput provided that log batching is used; multi-casting reduces the variance of distributed commit protocols in a LAN environment; and the performance of transaction mechanisms such as Camelot depend heavily upon kernel performance