Cleaning without chlorinated solvents

Because of health and environmental concerns, many regulations have been passed in recent years regarding the use of chlorinated solvents. The Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant has had an active program to find alternatives for these solvents used in cleaning applications for the past 7 years. During this time frame, the quantity of solvents purchased has been reduced by 92 percent. The program has been a twofold effort. Vapor degreasers used in batch cleaning operations have been replaced by ultrasonic cleaning with aqueous detergent, and other organic solvents have been identified for use in hand-wiping or specialty operations. In order to qualify these alternatives for use, experimentation was conducted on cleaning ability as well as effects on subsequent operations such as welding, painting, and bonding. Cleaning ability was determined using techniques such as x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) which are capable of examining monolayer levels of contamination on a surface. Solvents have been identified for removal of rust preventative oils, lapping oils, machining coolants, lubricants, greases, and mold releases. Solvents have also been evaluated for cleaning urethane foam spray guns, swelling of urethanes, and swelling of epoxies

Fault diagnosis for uncertain networked systems

Fault diagnosis has been at the forefront of technological developments for several decades. Recent advances in many engineering fields have led to the networked interconnection of various systems. The increased complexity of modern systems leads to a larger number of sources of uncertainty which must be taken into consideration and addressed properly in the design of monitoring and fault diagnosis architectures. This chapter reviews a model-based distributed fault diagnosis approach for uncertain nonlinear large-scale networked systems to specifically address: (a) the presence of measurement noise by devising a filtering scheme for dampening the effect of noise; (b) the modeling of uncertainty by developing an adaptive learning scheme; (c) the uncertainty issues emerging when considering networked systems such as the presence of delays and packet dropouts in the communication networks. The proposed architecture considers in an integrated way the various components of complex distributed systems such as the physical environment, the sensor level, the fault diagnosers, and the communication networks. Finally, some actions taken after the detection of a fault, such as the identification of the fault location and its magnitude or the learning of the fault function, are illustrated

Production of low-density poly (4-methyl-1-pentene) foam via phase inversion from binary solvent/nonsovent systems

Phase inversion from durene/naphthalene, durene/tmpdo, and durene/hexadecanol binary solvent/nonsolvent systems produced well interconnected, radiographically homogeneous, open-celled poly (4- methyl-1-pentene) or pmp foams. These foams ranged in density from 5 to 50 mg/cm{sup 2}. Foam homogeneity and casting efficiency were dependent on casting scheme, durene quality, solvent-to-nonsolvent ratio, and quench temperature. Foam density tracked linearly with dissolved-polymer content. Homogeneous, ultralow-density (5 to 6 mg/cm{sup 3}) foams were produced by using a 49/51 durene/naphthalene solvent eutectic. Foam hardness or firmness tracked somewhat linearly with foam density. Foams with densities above 20 mg/cm{sup 3} were too fragile to handle without damage