Paving (through) Amazonia: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Reperipheralization of Roraima

This paper examines the neoliberal reshaping of infrastructure provision in Brazil's extreme north since the mid-1990s, when roadway investments resulted in unprecedented regional connectivity. The BR-174 upgrade, the era's most important project, marked a transition from resource-based developmentalism to free-market transnationalism. Primarily concerned with urban competitiveness, the federal government funded the trunk roadway's paving to facilitate manufacturing exports from Manaus. While an effort was made to minimize deforestation, planners sidelined development implications in adjacent Roraima. The state's urban system has thus experienced reperipheralization and intensified primacy. Market-led growth now compounds the inheritance of hierarchical centralism and ongoing governmental neglect. Our study shows a vast territory dependent on primate cities for basic goods and services. Travelling with Roraimans from bypassed towns, we detected long-distance passenger transportation and surface logistics with selective routes. Heterogeneous Roraiman (im)mobilities comprise middle-class tourism and heightened consumerism as well as informal mobility tactics and transnational circulations of precarious labor. The paper exhorts neoliberal urbanism research to look beyond both Euro America's metropoles and their Global South counterparts. Urbanization dynamics in Brazil's extreme north demonstrate that market-disciplined investments to globalize cities produce far-reaching spatial effects. These are felt even by functionally-articulated-yet-marginalized peripheries in ostensibly remote locations

Trueness of CAD/CAM digitization with a desktop scanner – an in vitro study

Desktop scanners are devices for digitization of conventional impressions or gypsum casts by indirect Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Assisted Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) in dentistry. The purpose of this in vitro study was: 1, to investigate whether virtual models produced by the extraoral scanner have the same trueness as sectioned casts; and 2, to assess if digitization with an extraoral scanner influences the surface information

Evaluation of strain and stress states in the single point incremental forming process

Single point incremental forming (SPIF) is a promising manufacturing process suitable for small batch production. Furthermore, the material formability is enhanced in comparison with the conventional sheet metal forming processes, resulting from the small plastic zone and the incremental nature. Nevertheless, the further development of the SPIF process requires the full understanding of the material deformation mechanism, which is of great importance for the effective process optimization. In this study, a comprehensive finite element model has been developed to analyse the state of strain and stress in the vicinity of the contact area, where the plastic deformation increases by means of the forming tool action. The numerical model is firstly validated with experimental results from a simple truncated cone of AA7075-O aluminium alloy, namely, the forming force evolution, the final thickness and the plastic strain distributions. In order to evaluate accurately the through-thickness gradients, the blank is modelled with solid finite elements. The small contact area between the forming tool and the sheet produces a negative mean stress under the tool, postponing the ductile fracture occurrence. On the other hand, the residual stresses in both circumferential and meridional directions are positive in the inner skin of the cone and negative in the outer skin. They arise predominantly along the circumferential direction due to the geometrical restrictions in this direction.The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under project PTDC/EMS-TEC/1805/2012. The first author is also grateful to the FCT for the postdoctoral grant SFRH/BPD/101334/2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio