Advances and trends in plastic forming technologies for welded tubes

AbstractWith the implementation of environmental protection, sustainable development and conservation-oriented policies, components and parts of thin-walled welded tubes have gained increasing application in the aircraft and automotive industries because of their advantages: easily achieving forming and manufacturing process at low cost and in a short time. The current research on welded tube plastic forming is mainly concentrated on tube internal high-pressure forming, tube bending forming, and tube spinning forming. The focuses are on the material properties and characterization of welded tubes, finite element modeling for welded tube forming, and inhomogeneous deformation behavior and the mechanism and rules of deformation coordination in welded tube plastic forming. This paper summarizes the research progress in welded tube plastic forming from these aspects. Finally, with a focus on the urgent demand of the aviation, aerospace and automotive industries for high-strength and light-weight tubes, this paper discusses the development trends and challenges in the theory and technology of welded tube plastic forming in the future. Among them, laser tailor-welded technology will find application in the manufacture of high-strength steel tubes. Tube-end forming technology, such as tube flaring and flanging technology, will expand its application in welded tubes. Therefore, future studies will focus on the FE modeling regarding how to consider effects of welding on residual stresses, welding distortions and microstructure, the inhomogeneous deformation and coordination mechanism of the plastic forming process of tailor-welded tubes, and some end-forming processes of welded tubes, and more comprehensive research on the forming mechanism and limit of welded tubes

The kurtosis of net baryon number fluctuations from a realistic Polyakov--Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model along the experimental freeze-out line

Firstly we qualitatively analyze the formation of the dip and peak structures of the kurtosis $\kappa \sigma^2$ of net baryon number fluctuation along imagined freeze-out lines and discuss the signature of the existence of the QCD critical end point (CEP) in the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model, Polyakov-NJL (PNJL) model as well as $\mu$-dependent PNJL($\mu$ PNJL) model with different parameter sets, and then we apply a realistic PNJL model with parameters fixed by lattice data at zero chemical potential, and quantitatively investigate its $\kappa \sigma^2$ along the real freeze-out line extracted from experiments. The important contribution from gluodynamics to the baryon number fluctuations is discussed. The peak structure of $\kappa \sigma^2$ along the freeze-out line is solely determined by the existence of the CEP mountain and can be used as a clean signature for the existence of CEP. The formation of the dip structure is sensitive to the relation between the freeze-out line and the phase boundary, and the freeze-out line starts from the back-ridge of the phase boundary is required. To our surprise, the kurtosis $\kappa \sigma^2$ produced from the realistic PNJL model along the experimental freeze-out line agrees with BES-I data well, which indicates that equilibrium result can explain the experimental data. It is worth to point out that the extracted freeze-out temperatures from beam energy scan measurement are indeed higher than the critical temperatures at small chemical potentials, which supports our qualitative analysis.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

Assessment of Long-Term Watershed Management on Reservoir Phosphorus Concentrations and Export Fluxes.

Source water nutrient management to prevent eutrophication requires critical strategies to reduce watershed phosphorus (P) loadings. Shanxi Drinking-Water Source Area (SDWSA) in eastern China experienced severe water quality deterioration before 2010, but showed considerable improvement following application of several watershed management actions to reduce P. This paper assessed the changes in total phosphorus (TP) concentrations and fluxes at the SDWSA outlet relative to watershed anthropogenic P sources during 2005⁻2016. Overall anthropogenic P inputs decreased by 21.5% over the study period. Domestic sewage, livestock, and fertilizer accounted for (mean ± SD) 18.4 ± 0.6%, 30.1 ± 1.9%, and 51.5 ± 1.5% of total anthropogenic P inputs during 2005⁻2010, compared to 24.3 ± 2.7%, 8.8 ± 10.7%, and 66.9 ± 8.0% for the 2011⁻2016 period, respectively. Annual average TP concentrations in SDWSA decreased from 0.041 ± 0.019 mg/L in 2009 to 0.025 ± 0.013 mg/L in 2016, a total decrease of 38.2%. Annual P flux exported from SDWSA decreased from 0.46 ± 0.04 kg P/(ha·a) in 2010 to 0.25 ± 0.02 kg P/(ha·a) in 2016, a decrease of 44.9%. The success in reducing TP concentrations was mainly due to the development of domestic sewage/refuse collection/treatment and improved livestock management. These P management practices have prevented harmful algal blooms, providing for safe drinking water

Spiniform phase-encoded metagratings entangling arbitrary rational-order orbital angular momentum

Quantum entanglements between integer-order and fractional-order orbital angular momentums (OAMs) have been previously discussed. However, the entangled nature of arbitrary rational-order OAM has long been considered a myth due to the absence of an effective strategy for generating arbitrary rational-order OAM beams. Therefore, we report a single metadevice comprising a bilaterally symmetric grating with an aperture, creating optical beams with dynamically controllable OAM values that are continuously varying over a rational range. Due to its encoded spiniform phase, this novel metagrating enables the production of an average OAM that can be increased without a theoretical limit by embracing distributed singularities, which differs significantly from the classic method of stacking phase singularities using fork gratings. This new method makes it possible to probe the unexplored niche of quantum entanglement between arbitrarily defined OAMs in light, which could lead to the complex manipulation of microparticles, high-dimensional quantum entanglement and optical communication. We show that quantum coincidence based on rational-order OAM-superposition states could give rise to low cross-talks between two different states that have no significant overlap in their spiral spectra. Additionally, future applications in quantum communication and optical micromanipulation may be found