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Effects of solute content on grain refinement in an isothermal melt
This is the port-print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier LtdIt is well accepted in the literature that for effective grain refinement some solute is required in the melt to restrict the growth of the solid even if potent nucleating particles with a favourable physical nature are present. In this paper we investigate the effect of the solute on grain initiation in an isothermal melt, and an analytical model is developed to account for the effect of solute elements on grain size. This study revealed that the solute elements in the liquid ahead of the growing crystals reduce the growth velocity of the nucleated crystals and increase the maximum undercooling achievable before recalescence. This allows more particles to be active in nucleation and, consequently, increases the number density of active particles, giving rise to a finer grain size. The analytical model shows that the final grain size can be related to the maximum undercooling, average growth velocity and solid fraction at the moment of recalescence. Further analysis using the free growth model and experimental data in the literature revealed that for a given alloy system solidified under similar conditions the grain size can be empirically related to 1/Q (Q is the growth restriction factor) to a power of 1/3, which is considerably different from the empirical linear relationship in the literature. It is demonstrated that the 1/3 power law can describe the experimental data more accurately than a linear relationship.The EPSRC is gratefully acknowledged for providing financial support under Grant EP/H026177/1
Effects of lattice mismatch on interfacial structures of liquid and solidified Al in contact with hetero-phase substrates: MD simulations
Published under licence in IOP Conference Series: Material Science and Engineering by IOP Publishing Ltd. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.In this study, the effects of the misfit on in-plane structures of liquid Al and interfacial structure of solidified Al in contact with the heterophase substrates have been investigated, using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The MD simulations were conducted for Al/fcc (111) substrates with varied misfits. The order parameter and atomic arrangement indicated that the in-plane ordering of the liquid at the interface decreases significantly with an increase of the misfit, i.e., solid-like for small misfit and liquid-like for large misfit. Further, our MD simulation results revealed that a perfect orientation relationship forms at the interface between the substrate and the solidified Al for a misfit of less than -3% and the boundary is coherent. With an increase in the misfit, Shockley partial and extended dislocations form at the interface, and the boundary becomes a semi-coherent or low-angle twist boundary.EPSR
Transition of amorphous to crystalline oxide film in initial oxide overgrowth on liquid metals
It is important to understand the mechanism of oxidation in the initial stage on the free surface of liquid metals. Mittemeijer and co-workers recently developed a thermodynamic model to study the oxide overgrowth on a solid metal surface. Based on this model, we have developed a thermodynamic model to analyse the thermodynamic stability of oxide overgrowth on liquid metals. The thermodynamic model calculation revealed that the amorphous oxide phase is thermodynamically preferred up to 1.3 and 0.35 nm respectively, in the initial oxide overgrowth on liquid Al and Ga at the corresponding melting point. However, the amorphous phase is thermodynamically unstable in the initial oxide overgrowth on liquid Mg. The thermodynamic stability of amorphous phase in the Al and Ga oxide systems is attributed to lower sums of surface and interfacial energies for amorphous phases, compared to that of the corresponding crystalline phases.Financial support under grant EP/H026177/1 from the EPSRC was used
Accounting for the tongue-and-groove effect using a robust direct aperture optimization approach
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98733/1/MPH001266.pd
GPU-based ultra-fast direct aperture optimization for online adaptive radiation therapy
Online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) has great promise to significantly
reduce normal tissue toxicity and/or improve tumor control through real-time
treatment adaptations based on the current patient anatomy. However, the major
technical obstacle for clinical realization of online ART, namely the inability
to achieve real-time efficiency in treatment re-planning, has yet to be solved.
To overcome this challenge, this paper presents our work on the implementation
of an intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) direct aperture optimization
(DAO) algorithm on graphics processing unit (GPU) based on our previous work on
CPU. We formulate the DAO problem as a large-scale convex programming problem,
and use an exact method called column generation approach to deal with its
extremely large dimensionality on GPU. Five 9-field prostate and five 5-field
head-and-neck IMRT clinical cases with 5\times5 mm2 beamlet size and
2.5\times2.5\times2.5 mm3 voxel size were used to evaluate our algorithm on
GPU. It takes only 0.7~2.5 seconds for our implementation to generate optimal
treatment plans using 50 MLC apertures on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card. Our
work has therefore solved a major problem in developing ultra-fast
(re-)planning technologies for online ART
Ultrafast treatment plan optimization for volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT)
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134981/1/mp1675.pd
Fast Monte Carlo Simulation for Patient-specific CT/CBCT Imaging Dose Calculation
Recently, X-ray imaging dose from computed tomography (CT) or cone beam CT
(CBCT) scans has become a serious concern. Patient-specific imaging dose
calculation has been proposed for the purpose of dose management. While Monte
Carlo (MC) dose calculation can be quite accurate for this purpose, it suffers
from low computational efficiency. In response to this problem, we have
successfully developed a MC dose calculation package, gCTD, on GPU architecture
under the NVIDIA CUDA platform for fast and accurate estimation of the x-ray
imaging dose received by a patient during a CT or CBCT scan. Techniques have
been developed particularly for the GPU architecture to achieve high
computational efficiency. Dose calculations using CBCT scanning geometry in a
homogeneous water phantom and a heterogeneous Zubal head phantom have shown
good agreement between gCTD and EGSnrc, indicating the accuracy of our code. In
terms of improved efficiency, it is found that gCTD attains a speed-up of ~400
times in the homogeneous water phantom and ~76.6 times in the Zubal phantom
compared to EGSnrc. As for absolute computation time, imaging dose calculation
for the Zubal phantom can be accomplished in ~17 sec with the average relative
standard deviation of 0.4%. Though our gCTD code has been developed and tested
in the context of CBCT scans, with simple modification of geometry it can be
used for assessing imaging dose in CT scans as well.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, and 1 tabl
Foci of Schistosomiasis mekongi, Northern Cambodia: II. Distribution of infection and morbidity.
In the province of Kracheh, in Northern Cambodia, a baseline epidemiological survey on Schistosoma mekongi was conducted along the Mekong River between December 1994 and April 1995. The results of household surveys of highly affected villages of the East and the West bank of the river and of school surveys in 20 primary schools are presented. In household surveys 1396 people were examined. An overall prevalence of infection of 49.3% was detected by a single stool examination with the Kato-Katz technique. The overall intensity of infection was 118.2 eggs per gram of stool (epg). There was no difference between the population of the east and west shore of the Mekong for prevalence (P = 0.3) or intensity (P = 0.9) of infection. Severe morbidity was very frequent. Hepatomegaly of the left lobe was detected in 48.7% of the population. Splenomegaly was seen in 26.8% of the study participants. Visible diverted circulation was found in 7.2% of the population, and ascites in 0.1%. Significantly more hepatomegaly (P = 0.001), splenomegaly (P = 0. 001) and patients with diverted circulation (P = 0.001) were present on the west bank of the Mekong. The age group of 10-14 years was most affected. The prevalence of infection in this group was 71.8% and 71.9% in the population of the West and East of the Mekong, respectively. The intensity of infection was 172.4 and 194.2 epg on the West and the East bank, respectively. In the peak age group hepatomegaly reached a prevalence of 88.1% on the west and 82.8% on the east bank. In the 20 schools 2391 children aged 6-16 years were examined. The overall prevalence of infection was 40.0%, ranging from 7.7% to 72.9% per school. The overalls mean intensity of infection was 110.1 epg (range by school: 26.7-187.5 epg). Both prevalence (P = 0.001) and intensity of infection (P = 0.001) were significantly higher in schools on the east side of the Mekong. Hepatomegaly (55.2%), splenomegaly (23.6%), diverted circulation (4. 1%), ascites (0.5%), reported blood (26.7%) and mucus (24.3%) were very frequent. Hepatomegaly (P = 0.001), splenomegaly (P = 0.001), diverted circulation (P = 0.001) and blood in stool (P = 0.001) were significantly more frequent in schools of the east side of the Mekong. Boys suffered more frequently from splenomegaly (P = 0.05), ascites (P = 0.05) and bloody stools (P = 0.004) than girls. No difference in sex was found for the prevalence and intensity of infection and prevalence of hepatomegaly. On the school level prevalence and intensity of infection were highly associated (r = 0. 93, P = 0.0001). The intensity of infection was significantly associated only with the prevalence of hepatomegaly (r = 0.44, P = 0. 05) and blood in stool (r = 0.40, P = 0.02). This comprehensive epidemiological study documents for the first time the public health importance of schistosomiasis mekongi in the Province of Kracheh, Northern Cambodia and points at key epidemiological features of this schistosome species, in particular the high level of morbidity associated with infection
A GPU-based finite-size pencil beam algorithm with 3D-density correction for radiotherapy dose calculation
Targeting at the development of an accurate and efficient dose calculation
engine for online adaptive radiotherapy, we have implemented a finite size
pencil beam (FSPB) algorithm with a 3D-density correction method on GPU. This
new GPU-based dose engine is built on our previously published ultrafast FSPB
computational framework [Gu et al. Phys. Med. Biol. 54 6287-97, 2009].
Dosimetric evaluations against Monte Carlo dose calculations are conducted on
10 IMRT treatment plans (5 head-and-neck cases and 5 lung cases). For all
cases, there is improvement with the 3D-density correction over the
conventional FSPB algorithm and for most cases the improvement is significant.
Regarding the efficiency, because of the appropriate arrangement of memory
access and the usage of GPU intrinsic functions, the dose calculation for an
IMRT plan can be accomplished well within 1 second (except for one case) with
this new GPU-based FSPB algorithm. Compared to the previous GPU-based FSPB
algorithm without 3D-density correction, this new algorithm, though slightly
sacrificing the computational efficiency (~5-15% lower), has significantly
improved the dose calculation accuracy, making it more suitable for online IMRT
replanning
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