Powder Deposition and Sintering for a Two-Powder Approach to Solid Freeform Fabrication

A two-powder approach is presented where Fused Deposition modeling (FDM) is used to create a thin shell in the shape of the part to be fabricated. The shell is filled with powder of the part material and surrounded by a support powder that has a high sintering temperature. Upon compressing and sintering the shelVpowder system in a uniaxial hot press, the polymer shell burns out and the support powder compresses the part powder. The part powder consolidates into the desired part while the support material remains in powder form and can be easily removed. This paper presents results ofinitial experimental studies.Mechanical Engineerin

Light transmission through and its complete stoppage in an ultra slow wave optical medium

Light Wave transmission -- its compression, amplification, and the optical energy storage -- in an Ultra Slow Wave Medium (USWM) is studied analytically. Our phenomenological treatment is based entirely on the continuity equation for the optical energy flux, and the well known distribution-product property of Dirac delta-function. The results so obtained provide a clear understanding of some recent experiments on light transmission and its complete stoppage in an USWM. Keywords : Ultra slow light, stopped light, slow wave medium, EIT.Comment: (single-column 5pages PDF). Simple class-room phenomenological model of stopped light. Comments most welcom

Scaling of Fracture Strength in Disordered Quasi-Brittle Materials

This paper presents two main results. The first result indicates that in materials with broadly distributed microscopic heterogeneities, the fracture strength distribution corresponding to the peak load of the material response does not follow the commonly used Weibull and (modified) Gumbel distributions. Instead, a {\it lognormal} distribution describes more adequately the fracture strengths corresponding to the peak load of the response. Lognormal distribution arises naturally as a consequence of multiplicative nature of large number of random distributions representing the stress scale factors necessary to break the subsequent "primary" bond (by definition, an increase in applied stress is required to break a "primary" bond) leading up to the peak load. Numerical simulations based on two-dimensional triangular and diamond lattice topologies with increasing system sizes substantiate that a {\it lognormal} distribution represents an excellent fit for the fracture strength distribution at the peak load. The second significant result of the present study is that, in materials with broadly distributed microscopic heterogeneities, the mean fracture strength of the lattice system behaves as $\mu_f = \frac{\mu_f^\star}{(Log L)^\psi} + \frac{c}{L}$, and scales as $\mu_f \approx \frac{1}{(Log L)^\psi}$ as the lattice system size, $L$, approaches infinity.Comment: 24 pages including 11 figure