Inclusion agglomeration in electrified molten metal: thermodynamic consideration

The effect of electric current on inclusion agglomeration in molten metal has been investigated. It is found that the agglomeration is dependent on the electric current density, distance between inclusions and orientation of electric field. Electric current retards the agglomeration unless two inclusions are aligned along or closely to the current flow streamlines and the distance between inclusions is less than a critical value. The mechanism is also validated in the computation of cluster agglomeration. The numerical results provide a comprehensive indication for the current-induced inclusion removal and current-induced inclusion elongation. When the inclusions are in long-thin shape, the calculation predicts the current-induced microstructure alignment and current-induced microstructure refinement phenomena

A test of the power law relationship between gamma-ray burst pulse width ratio and energy expected in fireballs or uniform jets

Recently, under the assumption that the Doppler effect of the relativistically expanding fireball surface is important, Qin et al. showed that in most cases the power law relationship between the pulse width and energy of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)would exist in a certain energy range. We check this prediction with two GRB samples which contain well identified pulses. A power law anti-correlation between the full pulse width and energy and a power law correlation between the pulse width ratio and energy are seen in the light curves of the majority (around 65%) of bursts of the two samples within the energy range of BATSE, suggesting that these bursts are likely to arise from the emission associated with the shocks occurred on a relativistically expanding fireball surface. For the rest of the bursts, the relationships between these quantities were not predicted previously. We propose to consider other spectral evolutionary patterns or other radiation mechanisms such as a varying synchrotron or Comptonized spectrum to check if the observed relationships for these rest bursts can also be accounted for by the Doppler model. In addition, we find that the upper limits of the width ratio for the two samples do not exceed 0.9, in agrement with what predicted previously by the Doppler model. The plateau/power law/plateau and the peaked features predicted and detected previously by Qin et al. are generally observed, with the exceptions being noticed only in a few cases. According to the distinct values of two power law indices of FWHM and ratio and energy, we divide the bursts into three subsets which are located in different areas of the two indices plane. We suspect that different locations of the two indices might correspond to different mechanisms.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, MNRAS accepte

Morphology and Orientation Selection of Non-Metallic Inclusions in Electrified Molten Metal

The effect of electric current on morphology and orientation selection of non-metallic inclusions in molten metal has been investigated using theoretical modelling and numerical calculation. Two geometric factors, namely the circularity (fc) and alignment ratio (fe) were introduced to describe the inclusions shape and configuration. Electric current free energy was calculated and the values were used to determine the thermodynamic preference between different microstructures. Electric current promotes the development of inclusion along the current direction by either expatiating directional growth or enhancing directional agglomeration. Reconfiguration of the inclusions to reduce the system electric resistance drives the phenomena. The morphology and orientation selection follows the routine to reduce electric free energy. The numerical results are in agreement with our experimental observations

Two types of softening detected in X-ray afterglows of Swift bursts: internal and external shock origins?

The softening process observed in the steep decay phase of early X-ray afterglows of Swift bursts has remained a puzzle since its discovery. The softening process can also be observed in the later phase of the bursts and its cause has also been unknown. Recently, it was suggested that, influenced by the curvature effect, emission from high latitudes would shift the Band function spectrum from higher energy band to lower band, and this would give rise to the observed softening process accompanied by a steep decay of the flux density. The curvature effect scenario predicts that the terminating time of the softening process would be correlated with the duration of the process. In this paper, based on the data from the UNLV GRB group web-site, we found an obvious correlation between the two quantities. In addition, we found that the softening process can be divided into two classes: the early type softening ($t_{s,max}\leq "4000"s$) and the late type softening ($t_{s,max} > "4000"s$). The two types of softening show different behaviors in the duration vs. terminating time plot. In the relation between the variation rates of the flux density and spectral index during the softening process, a discrepancy between the two types of softening is also observed. According to their time scales and the discrepancy between them, we propose that the two types are of different origins: the early type is of internal shock origin and the late type is of external shock origin. The early softening is referred to the steep decay just following the prompt emission, whereas the late decay typically conceives the transition from flat decay to late afterglow decay. We suspect that there might be a great difference of the Lorentz factor in two classes which is responsible for the observed discrepancy.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, Accepted for Publication to Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP

Graph Distillation for Action Detection with Privileged Modalities

We propose a technique that tackles action detection in multimodal videos under a realistic and challenging condition in which only limited training data and partially observed modalities are available. Common methods in transfer learning do not take advantage of the extra modalities potentially available in the source domain. On the other hand, previous work on multimodal learning only focuses on a single domain or task and does not handle the modality discrepancy between training and testing. In this work, we propose a method termed graph distillation that incorporates rich privileged information from a large-scale multimodal dataset in the source domain, and improves the learning in the target domain where training data and modalities are scarce. We evaluate our approach on action classification and detection tasks in multimodal videos, and show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the NTU RGB+D and PKU-MMD benchmarks. The code is released at http://alan.vision/eccv18_graph/.Comment: ECCV 201