Stress analysis and fatigue life prediction of a wobble-plate

A five-stage compressor for compressing natural gas is being designed and evaluated. The compressor operates at 1500 rpm with natural gas pressure of 50 psi. This study examines deformation behavior, stress and strain distribution of the wobble plate component of the compressor. Fatigue loading on the wobble plate is computed from the reaction of compressed gas in each of the five cylinders. The highest pressure in the 5th cylinder is 3000 psi. The calculated stress evolution per revolution of the wobble plate is utilized to predict the fatigue lives of the wobble plate. The fatigue life prediction is performed using Brown-Miller algorithm with Morrow mean stress correction method. Results show that the stress is concentrated in the vicinity of the contact region between the guide plate and the polymer guide ball. The highest stress in the wobble plate and the polymer guide ball is 160.4 MPa and 127.8 MPa respectively. The corresponding predicted fatigue life of the wobble plate is 8x108 cycles. A higher stress gradient in the guide ball (max von Mises stress is 3.3 GPa) is predicted when a harder steel ball is employed. This is due to high stiffness of the mating plate/ball surfaces

Experiences of physics teachers when implementing problem-based learning : a case study at Entsikeni cluster in the Harry Gwala District Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an active teaching strategy that could be implemented in the South African educational system to assist in developing problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, collaborative skills, self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation in students. Even though it is not easy to drift from a teacher-centred strategy to a student-centred strategy, but this drift is supposed to be a paradigm drift for the nation. ‘Physics is difficult’ has been the anthem of students in South African high schools. This has led to lower pass rates in physics and as a result low physics career person in society. Physics students in high schools need to be exposed to the PBL strategy since the PBL strategy focuses on real-life problems to develop problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills and self-directed learning in students which are the skills needed for concept formation in Physical Science. Basically, the education of Physical Science students focused on the ability to acquire skills to solve real-life problems. This study focuses on exploring the experiences of high school physics teachers at Entsikeni cluster, South African, when implementing problem-based learning (PBL) in their physics classrooms. The study uses the mixed-method approach where three different research instruments were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data sequentially. Questionnaires, RTOP and interview protocol were employed. The findings of the study indicate that teachers project positive attitudes toward the PBL strategy but may probably not continue to use it because it requires more time than that which is allocated in the Curriculum Assessment and Policy Statement (CAPS) Physical Science document and as a result may not be able to finish their ATP on time. Teachers are teaching physics with no specialization in physics, which probably could lead to poor, pass rates in Physical Science. Teachers were inexperienced in teaching physics in the FET and could probably affect students’ academic performance. It is recommended they apply the PBL strategy to correct the negative effect of their inexperience on students’ performance. It is evident that if inexperienced trained teachers apply an instructional strategy based on research, they tend to develop students' performance as compared to applying the traditional instructional strategy.Science and Technology EducationM. Sc. (Physics Education

OctNetFusion: Learning Depth Fusion from Data

In this paper, we present a learning based approach to depth fusion, i.e., dense 3D reconstruction from multiple depth images. The most common approach to depth fusion is based on averaging truncated signed distance functions, which was originally proposed by Curless and Levoy in 1996. While this method is simple and provides great results, it is not able to reconstruct (partially) occluded surfaces and requires a large number frames to filter out sensor noise and outliers. Motivated by the availability of large 3D model repositories and recent advances in deep learning, we present a novel 3D CNN architecture that learns to predict an implicit surface representation from the input depth maps. Our learning based method significantly outperforms the traditional volumetric fusion approach in terms of noise reduction and outlier suppression. By learning the structure of real world 3D objects and scenes, our approach is further able to reconstruct occluded regions and to fill in gaps in the reconstruction. We demonstrate that our learning based approach outperforms both vanilla TSDF fusion as well as TV-L1 fusion on the task of volumetric fusion. Further, we demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D shape completion results.Comment: 3DV 2017, https://github.com/griegler/octnetfusio

Latent curing of epoxy-thiol thermosets

Epoxy-thiol curing is a click reaction which allows quantitative yield of the end products. The base-catalyzed reaction is rapid at low temperatures so it is most often desirable to harness reactivity by using latent catalysts. In this work, we used triazabicyclodecene tetraphenylborate (TBD·HBPh4) as a photobase generator (PB). We activated the PB either thermally or by UV light and monitored reaction kinetics by DSC and FTIR methods. Depending on the catalytic system used, the rate of the thiol-epoxy reaction was ordered as follows: Neat base > UV activated PB > thermally activated PB > uncatalyzed system. A series of isothermal and non-isothermal DSC experiments were run on non-irradiated and irradiated samples in order to study the effect of PB content and UV irradiation duration on PB activation efficiency and latency/storage stability. The data from DSC were analyzed using model-free linear isoconversional methods to estimate kinetic parameters such as activation energies. In addition, the kinetics data for both activation methods were shown to be accurately represented by multi-term Kamal models. The storage stability of the systems were studied at room temperature and was shown to fit well to the predictions of the kinetic model.Postprint (author's final draft

Indoor mould growth prediction using coupled computational fluid dynamics and mould growth model

This study investigates, using in-situ and numerical simulation experiments, airflow and hygrothermal distribution in a mechanically ventilated academic research facility with known cases of microbial proliferations. Microclimate parameters were obtained from in-situ experiments and used as boundary conditions and validation of the numerical experiments with a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis tool using the standard k–ε model. Good agreements were obtained with less than 10% deviations between the measured and simulated results. Subsequent upon successful validation, the model was used to investigate hygrothermal and airflow profile within the shelves holding stored components in the facility. The predicted in-shelf hygrothermal profile was superimposed on mould growth limiting curve earlier documented in the literature. Results revealed the growth of xerophilic species in most parts of the shelves. The mould growth prediction was found in correlation with the microbial investigation in the case-studied room reported by the authors elsewhere. Satisfactory prediction of mould growth in the room successfully proved that the CFD simulation can be used to investigate the conditions that lead to microbial growth in the indoor environment

Prosocial Organizational Behavior: Is it a Personal Trait or an Organizational One?

This study examines the relationship between types of Prosocial Organizational Behavior (POB) and  organizational factors, which are exchange-based and the personal factor that is self-enhancement is a personality trait that promotes the subsequent psychological well-being. 527 employees from one of the top 100 companies in Turkey have participated in this study. After applying a confirmatory factor analysis to the scales used in the research, the relationship between research variables has been analyzed by structural equation model (SEM). Research results suggest the POB toward coworkers (? = .85) and role (? = .45) are strongly affected by self-enhancement that is a personal factor and there is no relationship between self enhancement and POB towards the organization. The POB towards the organization (? = .70) is strongly affected by perceived organizational support that is one of the organizational factors and is exchange based. Keywords: organizational prosocial behavior, organizational support, supervisor support, interpersonal helping behavior, self enhancement, psychological well-bein