Deep drawing simulation of Tailored Blanks

Tailored blanks are increasingly used in the automotive industry. A tailored blank consists of different metal parts, which are joined by a welding process. These metal parts usually have different material properties. Hence, the main advantage of using a tailored blank is to provide the right material properties at specific parts of the blank. The movement of the weld during forming is extremely important. Unwanted weld displacement can cause damage to both the product and the tool. This depends mainly on the original weld position and the process parameters. However experimental determination of the optimum weld position is quite expensive. Therefore a numerical tool has been developed for simulations of tailored blank forming. The Finite Element Code Dieka is used for the deep drawing simulations of some geometrically simple products. The results have been validated by comparing them with experimental data and show a satisfactory correlation

Observation of anomalous Hanle spin precession lineshapes resulting from interaction with localized states

It has been shown recently that in spin precession experiments, the interaction of spins with localized states can change the response to a magnetic field, leading to a modified, effective spin relaxation time and precession frequency. Here, we show that also the shape of the Hanle curve can change, so that it cannot be fitted with the solutions of the conventional Bloch equation. We present experimental data that shows such an effect arising at low temperatures in epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide with localized states in the carbon buffer layer. We compare the strength of the effect between materials with different growth methods, epitaxial growth by sublimation and by chemical vapor deposition. The presented analysis gives information about the density of localized states and their coupling to the graphene states, which is inaccessible by charge transport measurements and can be applied to any spin transport channel that is coupled to localized states.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

The Situated Self: identity in a world of ambient intelligence

De centrale onderzoeksvraag van deze dissertatie is ‘Heeft Ambient Intelligence invloed op menselijke identiteit, en als dat zo is, waar bestaat die invloed dan uit?’ Deze onderzoeksvraag roept onmiddellijk twee andere vragen op: ‘wat is Ambient Intelligence?’, en ‘wat versta je onder ‘menselijke identiteit’?’ Na een algemene inleiding in hoofdstuk 1, heb ik in hoofdstuk 2 en 3 van deze dissertatie de begrippen ‘Ambient Intelligence’ en ‘identiteit’ tegen het licht gehouden. In het daarna volgende deel, bestaande uit hoofdstuk 4 tot en met 6, kon ik vervolgens de onderzoeksvraag beantwoorden. Ambient Intelligence, zo laat ik in het hoofdstuk 2 van deze dissertatie zien, is een visie op de technologische toekomst, die oorspronkelijk ontwikkeld is door het Nederlandse Philips. Al vrij snel na haar lancering werd deze visie opgepikt door de Europese Commissie en zo is zij uitgegroeid tot een belangrijk onderdeel van de beleidsagenda van de Europese Unie. In een wereld van Ambient Intelligence, zo stelt deze visie, zijn we omringd door netwerken van technologie die aan het zicht onttrokken zijn – weggewerkt in meubels, in muren en ramen, in huishoudelijke en kantoorobjecten, en in kleding of zelfs onze lichamen

The utility of NBS profiling for plant systematics: a first study in tuber-bearing Solanum species

Systematic relationships are important criteria for researchers and breeders to select materials. We evaluated a novel molecular technique, nucleotide binding site (NBS) profiling, for its potential in phylogeny reconstruction. NBS profiling produces multiple markers in resistance genes and their analogs (RGAs). Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is a crop with a large secondary genepool, which contains many important traits that can be exploited in breeding programs. In this study we used a set of over 100 genebank accessions, representing 49 tuber-bearing wild and cultivated Solanum species. NBS profiling was compared to amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP). Cladistic and phenetic analyses showed that the two techniques had similar resolving power and delivered trees with a similar topology. However, the different statistical tests used to demonstrate congruency of the trees were inconclusive. Visual inspection of the trees showed that, especially at the lower level, many accessions grouped together in the same way in both trees; at the higher level, when looking at the more basal nodes, only a few groups were well supported. Again this was similar for both techniques. The observation that higher level groups were poorly supported might be due to the nature of the material and the way the species evolved. The similarity of the NBS and AFLP results indicate that the role of disease resistance in speciation is limite