During air–slip direct chill casting of aluminum alloys, uneven or low air pressure areas at the surface of the porous graphite ring mold, can cause the metal to stick to the graphite ring and produce traces along the billets called vertical drags (VD). To prevent this type of defect, it would be an advantage to decrease the wettability of the graphite ring. It has been shown that nanostructure...

The classical casting material cast iron is experiencing a renaissance. High strength CGI or alloyed cast iron components are substituting previously used non-ferrous castings in automotive power train applications. The mechanical engineering industry has recognized the value in substituting forged or welded structures with stiff and light-weight cast iron castings. New products such as wind tu...

During the solidification, and then cooling, generally a shrinkage gap or mechanical interaction (grip or slip) can occur between the casting and the mold. The character of interaction is decided by the shape of casting. Both these phenomena occur in most real castings. Shrinkage gap, and specifically its width, determines the heat flow between cast and mold, while the mechanical interactions l...

Heat transfer in the mold is the heart of the continuous casting process and its quantitative analysis was pioneered by Keith Brimacombe. With many different processes currently competing, it is appropriate to apply modeling to investigate the theoretical limits of continuous casting speed and productivity. The heat transfer rate during solidification processes drops with time so the shell thic...

In this work we present an acceleration technique for direct volume rendering, that is based on a preprocessing step. This transforms the original uniform grid into an adaptively reduced tetrahedral grid. The basic idea is to exploit the inherent adaptivity information of the reduced grid for the ray integration with importance sampling. An integration step is always performed from cell face to...

ÐSeveral e€ective acceleration techniques for volume rendering o€er ecient means to skip over empty space, providing signi®cant speedup without a€ecting image quality. The e€ectiveness of such an approach depends on its ability to accurately estimate the object boundary inside a volume with minimal computational overhead. We propose a novel boundary cell-based acceleration technique for ray ca...

Objectives There is a short period during rapid growth when a scoliosis brace is most effective. In standard practice, the inbrace correction is not measured during brace casting. The first assessment of the in-brace correction in the follow-up clinic may trigger brace adjustment for improved spinal alignment resulting in delay of effective treatment and increased number of radiographs. The obj...

The problem of voids and porosity has long plagued the dental technician. Many times an otherwise acceptable casting has had to be discarded because voids or porosities have developed within the casting. Because of numerous variables a technician often does not know the cause of the casting failure. Many investigators have studied variables that may affect the occurrence of voids and porosities...

Counteracting the atrophy of skeletal muscle associated with disuse has significant implications for minimizing the wasting and weakness in plaster casting, joint immobilization, and other forms of limb unloading, with relevance to orthopedics, sports medicine, and plastic and reconstructive surgery. We tested the hypothesis that antibody-directed myostatin inhibition would attenuate the loss o...