Advanced radar absorbing ceramic-based materials for multifunctional applications in space environment

In this review, some results of the experimental activity carried out by the authors on advanced composite materials for space applications are reported. Composites are widely employed in the aerospace industry thanks to their lightweight and advanced thermo-mechanical and electrical properties. A critical issue to tackle using engineered materials for space activities is providing two or more specific functionalities by means of single items/components. In this scenario, carbon-based composites are believed to be ideal candidates for the forthcoming development of aerospace research and space missions, since a widespread variety of multi-functional structures are allowed by employing these materials. The research results described here suggest that hybrid ceramic/polymeric structures could be employed as spacecraft-specific subsystems in order to ensure extreme temperature withstanding and electromagnetic shielding behavior simultaneously. The morphological and thermo-mechanical analysis of carbon/carbon (C/C) three-dimensional (3D) shell prototypes is reported; then, the microwave characterization of multilayered carbon-filled micro-/nano-composite panels is described. Finally, the possibility of combining the C/C bulk with a carbon-reinforced skin in a synergic arrangement is discussed, with the aid of numerical and experimental analyses

Dynamic properties in a family of competitive growing models

The properties of a wide variety of growing models, generically called $X/RD$, are studied by means of numerical simulations and analytic developments. The study comprises the following $X$ models: Ballistic Deposition, Random Deposition with Surface Relaxation, Das Sarma-Tamboronea, Kim-Kosterlitz, Lai-Das Sarma, Wolf-Villain, Large Curvature, and three additional models that are variants of the Ballistic Deposition model. It is shown that after a growing regime, the interface width becomes saturated at a crossover time ($t_{x2}$) that, by fixing the sample size, scales with $p$ according to $t_{x2}(p)\propto p^{-y}, \qquad (p > 0)$, where $y$ is an exponent. Also, the interface width at saturation ($W_{sat}$) scales as $W_{sat}(p)\propto p^{-\delta}, \qquad (p > 0)$, where $\delta$ is another exponent. It is proved that, in any dimension, the exponents $\delta$ and $y$ obey the following relationship: $\delta = y \beta_{RD}$, where $\beta_{RD} = 1/2$ is the growing exponent for $RD$. Furthermore, both exponents exhibit universality in the $p \to 0$ limit. By mapping the behaviour of the average height difference of two neighbouring sites in discrete models of type $X/RD$ and two kinds of random walks, we have determined the exact value of the exponent $\delta$. Finally, by linking four well-established universality classes (namely Edwards-Wilkinson, Kardar-Parisi-Zhang, Linear-MBE and Non-linear-MBE) with the properties of both random walks, eight different stochastic equations for all the competitive models studied are derived.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to Phys. Rev.

A Synthetic Aperture Radar-Based Robust Satellite Technique (RST) for Timely Mapping of Floods

Satellite data have been widely utilized for flood detection and mapping tasks, and in recent years, there has been a growing interest in using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data due to the increased availability of recent missions with enhanced temporal resolution. This capability, when combined with the inherent advantages of SAR technology over optical sensors, such as spatial resolution and independence from weather conditions, allows for timely and accurate information on flood event dynamics. In this study, we present an innovative automated approach, SAR-RST-FLOOD, for mapping flooded areas using SAR data. Based on a multi-temporal analysis of Sentinel 1 data, such an approach would allow for robust and automatic identification of flooded areas. To assess its reliability and accuracy, we analyzed five case studies in areas where floods caused significant damage. Performance metrics, such as overall (OA), user (UA), and producer (PA) accuracy, as well as the Kappa index (K), were used to evaluate the methodology by considering several reference flood maps. The results demonstrate a user accuracy exceeding 0.78 for each test map when compared to the observed flood data. Additionally, the overall accuracy values surpassed 0.96, and the kappa index values exceeded 0.78 when compared to the mapping processes from observed data or other reference datasets from the Copernicus Emergency Management System. Considering these results and the fact that the proposed approach has been implemented within the Google Earth Engine framework, its potential for global-scale applications is evident

Experimental evidence on the development of scale invariance in the internal structure of self-affine aggregates

It is shown that an alternative approach for the characterization of growing branched patterns consists of the statistical analysis of frozen structures, which cannot be modified by further growth, that arise due to competitive processes among neighbor growing structures. Scaling relationships applied to these structures provide a method to evaluate relevant exponents and to characterize growing systems into universality classes. The analysis is applied to quasi-two-dimensional electrochemically formed silver branched patterns showing that the size distribution of frozen structures exhibits scale invariance. The measured exponents, within the error bars, remind us those predicted by the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Critical Behavior of an Ising System on the Sierpinski Carpet: A Short-Time Dynamics Study

The short-time dynamic evolution of an Ising model embedded in an infinitely ramified fractal structure with noninteger Hausdorff dimension was studied using Monte Carlo simulations. Completely ordered and disordered spin configurations were used as initial states for the dynamic simulations. In both cases, the evolution of the physical observables follows a power-law behavior. Based on this fact, the complete set of critical exponents characteristic of a second-order phase transition was evaluated. Also, the dynamic exponent $\theta$ of the critical initial increase in magnetization, as well as the critical temperature, were computed. The exponent $\theta$ exhibits a weak dependence on the initial (small) magnetization. On the other hand, the dynamic exponent $z$ shows a systematic decrease when the segmentation step is increased, i.e., when the system size becomes larger. Our results suggest that the effective noninteger dimension for the second-order phase transition is noticeably smaller than the Hausdorff dimension. Even when the behavior of the magnetization (in the case of the ordered initial state) and the autocorrelation (in the case of the disordered initial state) with time are very well fitted by power laws, the precision of our simulations allows us to detect the presence of a soft oscillation of the same type in both magnitudes that we attribute to the topological details of the generating cell at any scale.Comment: 10 figures, 4 tables and 14 page

Study of the one-dimensional off-lattice hot-monomer reaction model

Hot monomers are particles having a transient mobility (a ballistic flight) prior to being definitely absorbed on a surface. After arriving at a surface, the excess energy coming from the kinetic energy in the gas phase is dissipated through degrees of freedom parallel to the surface plane. In this paper we study the hot monomer-monomer adsorption-reaction process on a continuum (off-lattice) one-dimensional space by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The system exhibits second-order irreversible phase transition between a reactive and saturated (absorbing) phases which belong to the directed percolation (DP) universality class. This result is interpreted by means of a coarse-grained Langevin description which allows as to extend the DP conjecture to transitions occurring in continuous media.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, final version to appear in J. Phys.

Electrochemical corrosion of magnetron sputtered WTiN-coated mild steels in a chloride medium

The electrochemical corrosion behaviour of WTiN coatings, of composition W 31, Ti 28 and N 40 at.% sputtered on carbon steel, chromium steel and high speed steel (HSS) has been investigated and the effect of the steel heat treatment on the steel/WTiN system performance explored. Open circuit potential measurements, polarisation curves and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used, together with X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy to characterise the corroded and uncorroded coating/substrate systems. It was found that the influence of the substrate on corrosion resistance follows the order Carbon Steel<HSS<Chromium Steel. The best performance of the chromium steel/WTiN system can be associated with the higher compactness of the protective coating, since there is strong evidence that it is inert so that electrolyte penetration through the coating defects and pores is responsible for the initiation of substrate corrosion. Heat treatment of the substrate has some influence on the corrosion of the HSS/coating system, suggesting that there may be one ideal steel treatment temperature for which the coating adhesion is higher.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TVV-473F2MV-S/1/91525d9a77234a2d57d1825d9d68d1b

Numerical study of a first-order irreversible phase transition in a CO+NO catalyzed reaction model

The first-order irreversible phase transitions (IPT) of the Yaldran-Khan model (Yaldran-Khan, J. Catal. 131, 369, 1991) for the CO+NO reaction is studied using the constant coverage (CC) ensemble and performing epidemic simulations. The CC method allows the study of hysteretic effects close to coexistence as well as the location of both the upper spinodal point and the coexistence point. Epidemic studies show that at coexistence the number of active sites decreases according to a (short-time) power law followed by a (long-time) exponential decay. It is concluded that first-order IPT's share many characteristic of their reversible counterparts, such as the development of short ranged correlations, hysteretic effects, metastabilities, etc.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure

Analytic and Gevrey Hypoellipticity for Perturbed Sums of Squares Operators

We prove a couple of results concerning pseudodifferential perturbations of differential operators being sums of squares of vector fields and satisfying H\"ormander's condition. The first is on the minimal Gevrey regularity: if a sum of squares with analytic coefficients is perturbed with a pseudodifferential operator of order strictly less than its subelliptic index it still has the Gevrey minimal regularity. We also prove a statement concerning real analytic hypoellipticity for the same type of pseudodifferential perturbations, provided the operator satisfies to some extra conditions (see Theorem 1.2 below) that ensure the analytic hypoellipticity

Topological Effects caused by the Fractal Substrate on the Nonequilibrium Critical Behavior of the Ising Magnet

The nonequilibrium critical dynamics of the Ising magnet on a fractal substrate, namely the Sierpinski carpet with Hausdorff dimension $d_H$ =1.7925, has been studied within the short-time regime by means of Monte Carlo simulations. The evolution of the physical observables was followed at criticality, after both annealing ordered spin configurations (ground state) and quenching disordered initial configurations (high temperature state), for three segmentation steps of the fractal. The topological effects become evident from the emergence of a logarithmic periodic oscillation superimposed to a power law in the decay of the magnetization and its logarithmic derivative and also from the dependence of the critical exponents on the segmentation step. These oscillations are discussed in the framework of the discrete scale invariance of the substrate and carefully characterized in order to determine the critical temperature of the second-order phase transition and the critical exponents corresponding to the short-time regime. The exponent $\theta$ of the initial increase in the magnetization was also obtained and the results suggest that it would be almost independent of the fractal dimension of the susbstrate, provided that $d_H$ is close enough to d=2.Comment: 9 figures, 3 tables, 10 page