Hysteretic and nonlinear dielectric behaviour in ferroelectric ceramics has been of interest since 1950s, when these materials found application in various electronic devices. Presently, these phenomena concern with important areas of science, technology and engineering. In particular, nonlinearity and hysteresis are the key factors in performance, precision and accuracy of modern devices. Many...

This paper presents a new formulation of a well known double hardening model often referred to as the Hardening Soil model. As an alternative to the existing Hardening Soil model’s Mohr-Coulomb failure surface, the new formulation allows for the incorporation of smooth failure surfaces, such as the failure surface proposed by Matsuoka & Nakai or that proposed by Lade & Duncan. Although the inco...

In this investigation a DoE (Design of Experiments) analysis of distortion for a typical manufacturing process of pre-straightened, cold drawn and induction hardened AISI 1045 cylindrical steel bars was carried out. A careful characterization of the material, including residual stress states and geometrical changes, was done for the different manufacturing steps. In order to identify effects an...

Cryopreservation has been recognized as a practical and efficient tool for long-term storage of vegetatively propagated plants. This study was conducted to investigate the effects of sucrose concentration, hardening temperature and different cryopreservation methods on the survival rate of potato shoot tips after cryopreservation. Excised shoot tips of in vitro plantlets of potato cultivars, At...

Precipitation hardening, because it involves the hardening of the material over a prolonged time, is also called age hardening, or ageing. By the appropriate heat treatment of precipitation hardening, the strength or hardness of some heat-treatable aluminium alloys can be enhanced by the formation of nano-meter sized second-phase precipitated particles within the original phase matrix. The fine...

Measurements of cosmic rays by experiments such as ATIC, CREAM, and PAMELA indicate a hardening of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum at TeV energies. In our recent work (Thoudam & Hörandel 2012a), we showed that the hardening can be due to the effect of nearby supernova remnants. We showed it for the case of proton and helium. In this paper, we present an improved and detailed version of our previ...

In computed tomography (CT), the nonlinear attenuation characteristics of polychromatic X-rays cause beam hardening artifacts in the reconstructed images. State-of-theart methods to correct the beam hardening effect are mostly single material precorrections (e.g. water-precorrection), which are far less efficient when more than one material is present in the field of measurement. The use of tho...

In this paper, we present new pointcuts and primitives to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) languages that are needed for systematic hardening of security concerns. The two proposed pointcuts allow to identify particular join points in a program’s control-flow graph (CFG). The first one is the GAFlow, Closest Guaranteed Ancestor, which returns the closest ancestor join point to the pointcuts of...

In this paper, a self-consistent plasticity theory is proposed to model the mechanical behaviours of irradiated face-centred cubic nanocrystalline metals. At the grain level, a tensorial crystal model with both irradiation and grain size effects is applied for the grain interior (GI), whereas both grain boundary (GB) sliding with irradiation effect and GB diffusion are considered in modelling t...