Spark plasma sintering (SPS) or pulsed electric current sintering (PECS) is a sintering techni‐ que utilizing uniaxial force and a pulsed (on-off) direct electrical current (DC) under low at‐ mospheric pressure to perform high speed consolidation of the powder. This direct way of heating allows the application of very high heating and cooling rates, enhancing densifica‐ tion over grain growth p...

Apache Spark has become a key platform for Big Data Analytics, yet it lacks complete support for debugging analytics programs. As a result, the development of a new analytical toolkit can be a painstakingly long process [7, 2, 4]. To fill this gap, we are developing Spark-BDD (Big Data Debugger), which brings a traditional interactive debugger experience to the Spark platform. Analytic programm...

During these last years, the evolution of the machining speed of the EDM processes has become a key challenge for this technology. The recent progress made on the spark generators leads to a higher production speed in all processes such wire EDM, die-sinking, drilling, milling, etc. Nevertheless, if the electrical process is developing fast, many limiting factors still remain under investigatio...

Using an external electric field, one can modulate the band gap of Bernal stacked bilayer graphene by breaking the A-[Formula: see text] symmetry. We analyze strain effects on the bilayer graphene using the extended Hückel theory and find that reduced interlayer distance results in higher band gap modulation, as expected. Furthermore, above about 2.5 Å interlayer distance, the band gap is direc...

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS Approximate expressions for polar gap electric field of pulsars Abstract. We derive easy-to-handle approximations for the polar gap electric field due to inertial frame dragging as derived by Harding & Muslimov (1998). A formula valid for polar gap height comparable to the polar cap radius is presented.