Tensile and compressive test results for metal matrix composites

Experimental results of the mechanical behavior of two metal matrix composite systems at room temperature are presented. Ultimate stress, ultimate strain, Poisson's ratio, and initial Young's Modulus are documented for BORSIC/Aluminum in uniaxial tension and Boron/Aluminum in uniaxial tension and compression. Poisson's ratio is used for nonlinear stress-strain behavior. A comparison of compression results for B/Al as obtained from sandwich beam compression specimens and IITRI coupon compression specimens is presented

Parallel Recursive State Compression for Free

This paper focuses on reducing memory usage in enumerative model checking, while maintaining the multi-core scalability obtained in earlier work. We present a tree-based multi-core compression method, which works by leveraging sharing among sub-vectors of state vectors. An algorithmic analysis of both worst-case and optimal compression ratios shows the potential to compress even large states to a small constant on average (8 bytes). Our experiments demonstrate that this holds up in practice: the median compression ratio of 279 measured experiments is within 17% of the optimum for tree compression, and five times better than the median compression ratio of SPIN's COLLAPSE compression. Our algorithms are implemented in the LTSmin tool, and our experiments show that for model checking, multi-core tree compression pays its own way: it comes virtually without overhead compared to the fastest hash table-based methods.Comment: 19 page

Magnetic Field Strength in the Upper Solar Corona Using White-light Shock Structures Surrounding Coronal Mass Ejections

To measure the magnetic field strength in the solar corona, we examined 10 fast (> 1000 km/s) limb CMEs which show clear shock structures in SOHO/LASCO images. By applying piston-shock relationship to the observed CME's standoff distance and electron density compression ratio, we estimated the Mach number, Alfven speed, and magnetic field strength in the height range 3 to 15 solar radii (Rs). Main results from this study are: (1) the standoff distance observed in solar corona is consistent with those from a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model and near-Earth observations; (2) the Mach number as a shock strength is in the range 1.49 to 3.43 from the standoff distance ratio, but when we use the density compression ratio, the Mach number is in the range 1.47 to 1.90, implying that the measured density compression ratio is likely to be underestimated due to observational limits; (3) the Alfven speed ranges from 259 to 982 km/s and the magnetic field strength is in the range 6 to 105 mG when the standoff distance is used; (4) if we multiply the density compression ratio by a factor of 2, the Alfven speeds and the magnetic field strengths are consistent in both methods; (5) the magnetic field strengths derived from the shock parameters are similar to those of empirical models and previous estimates.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 11 Figures, 1 Tabl

Landsat Satellite Image Segmentation Using the Fuzzy ARTMAP Neural Network

This application illustrates how the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network can be used to monitor environmental changes. A benchmark problem seeks to classify regions of a Landsat image into six soil and crop classes based on images from four spectral sensors. Simulations show that fuzzy ARTMAP outperforms fourteen other neural network and machine learning algorithms. Only the k-Nearest-Neighbor algorithm shows better performance (91% vs. 89%) but without any code compression, while fuzzy ARTMAP achieves a code compression ratio of 6:1. Even with a code compression ratio of 50:1 fuzzy ARTMAP still maintains good performance (83%). This example shows how fuzzy ARTMAP can combine accuracy and code compression in real-world applications.Office of Naval Research (N00014-92-J-401J, N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-92-J-4015); National Science Foundation (IRI 90-00530