A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RULEMAKING PROVISIONS IN STATE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE ACTS

As the primary source of procedures that state agencies must follow, state Administrative Procedure Acts (APAs) structure administrative discretion in the promulgation of rules and regulations. While the federal APA has been studied extensively, much less has been written about state procedural statutes. This article describes the major rulemaking provisions in state APAs and provides a broad, comparative, and systematic understanding of these provisions. Our analysis yields three major findings. First, state procedural statutes vary considerably in the extent to which they structure administrative discretion in rulemaking. Second, adoption of these rulemaking provisions tends to vary in a systematic way, as states first incorporate due process provisions, and then adopt responsiveness and rationality provisions. Third, in the area of procedural regulatory reform, states have made considerable strides in reforming regulatory administration. Copyright 1987 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Modeling the Capillary Pressure for the Migration of the Liquid Phase in Granular Solid-Liquid-Vapor Systems: Application to the Control of the Composition Profile in W-Cu FGM Materials

International audienceA model is developed to compute the capillary pressure for the migration of the liquid phase out or into a uniform solid-liquid-vapor system. The capillary pressure is defined as the reduction of the overall interface energy per volume increment of the transferred fluid phase. The model takes into account the particle size of the solid particle aggregate, the packing configuration (coordination number, porosity), the volume fractions of the different phases, and the values of the interface energies in the system. The model is used for analyzing the stability of the composition profile during processing of W-Cu functionally graded materials combining a composition gradient with a particle size gradient. The migration pressure is computed with the model in two stages: (1) just after the melting of copper, i.e., when sintering and shape accommodation of the W particle aggregate can still be neglected and (2) at high temperature, when the system is close to full density with equilibrium particle shape. The model predicts well the different stages of liquid-phase migration observed experimentally