We have used ceramic capillary tips generally used in the microelectronics industry for the production of DNA microarrays. The ceramic tips improve the morphology of microarray elements, allow higher element density, and increase printing tip life over the customary slotted stainless-steel pins. Ceramic tips are less expensive than steel pins and allow printing from 1536-well sample source plat...

In the flat products steel industry, the hot rolling mill transforms the incoming slabs in a thin coil which then can be processed to obtain the final products. Thickness is reduced by pulling the plate between two parallel rolls while moving the upper work roll. The effect of uneven thickness at both sides can produce deviations in the longitudinal direction of the slab, which have to be manua...

A communication procedure for communicating scheduling expert systems based on fuzzy set theory is proposed. Fuzzy sets are used to express and to exchange constraints and their possible relaxations with other scheduling systems that can interpret these constraints. The procedure is intended to optimize the global evaluation among the communicating systems. An example from steel industry is tak...

The Hot Strip Mill Production Scheduling Problem is a hard problem that arises in the steel industry when scheduling steel coil production. It can be modeled as a generalization of the Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem with multiple and conflicting objectives and constraints. In this paper we formulate this problem as a mathematical program and propose a heuristic method to determine ...

Components were developed for the modeling of industrial furnaces in the iron and steel industry like pusher-type and walking beam furnaces. A cell model on the basis of the dynamic pipe model of the Modelica Fluid Library was designed. The cell model computes the heat transfer between furnace walls, flue gas and the processed steel goods. The radiative heat transfer is modeled by a 1-dimension...

The steel mill slab design problem from the CSPLIB is reallife problem from the steel industry. Finding optimal solutions to this problem is difficult. Existing constraint programming approaches can solve problems up to 30 orders. We propose a strong constraint programming model based on logical and global constraints. By designing a specific strategy for variable and value selection, we are ab...

An architecture and a procedure for communicating scheduling expert systems based on fuzzy set theory is proposed. Fuzzy sets are used to express and to exchange constraints and their potential relaxation with the cooperating scheduling system that can interpret these constraints. The procedure is intended to optimize the global evaluation among the communicating systems. An example from steel ...

In continuous casting of steel, plant observations have found that many serious quality problems are directly associated with the flow pattern in the mold. Previous studies have generated understanding mainly through numerical simulations using timeaveraged turbulence models. However, many problems are intermittent and the essential transient nature of the flow may be important to their formati...

Laser Aided Manufacturing Process (LAMP) can be applied to repair steel die/molds which are currently repaired using traditional welding process in industry. In order to fully understand the advantages of laser deposition repair process over traditional welded-repair process, the mechanical properties such as tensile strength and hardness of H13 tool steel samples produced by these two processe...

This work investigates the nature of technological development and the viability of applying an evolutionary approach to the early development of iron production in Sri Lanka. The main objective of this paper is to use modern techniques in the fields of Physics and Engineering to investigate the wind-driven furnace used in early iron and steel producing industry dating to 300 B.C. In order to s...