Microcrystalline silicon (mc-Si:H) cells can reach efficiencies up to typically 10% and are usually incorporated in tandem micromorph devices. When cells are grown on rough substrates, ‘‘cracks’’ can appear in the mc-Si:H layers. Previous works have demonstrated that these cracks have mainly detrimental effects on the fill factor and open-circuit voltage, and act as bad diodes with a high rever...

Many methods exist for removing defects such as gaps, cracks, and disconnections from digital shapes. However, most such methods have several limitations, such as removing both erroneous and important shape details, or requiring non-trivial effort from the end user in the form of manual delineation or parameter setting. In this paper, we propose a technique for removing defects such as internal...

Concrete is prone to crack formation in the tensile zone, which is why steel reinforcement is introduced in these zones. However, small cracks could still arise, which give liquids and gasses access to the reinforcement causing it to corrode. Self-healing concrete repairs and seals these small (300 µm) cracks, preventing the development of corrosion. In this study, a vascular system, carrying t...

ORAL PRESENTATION) To increase the efficiency of electronic devices their structures are getting smaller and the layered constructions are getting more complex. The inspection of these small and thin structures gives new demands on the NDT, especially in lateral and depth resolution. High-end X-ray tomography is one inspection method, which allows to detect cracks or delaminations. However, it ...

Nondestructive evaluation methods are widely used in quality control processes for critical components in systems such as aircraft engines and nuclear power plants. These same methods are also used in periodic field inspection to assure that the system continues to be reliable while it is in service. This paper describes a detection algorithm to automatically analyze vibrothermography sequence-...

The Adomian Decomposition Method (ADM) is employed in this paper to investigate the free vibrations of the uniform cracked Euler-Bernoulli beams. The proposed ADM method can be used to analyze the vibration of beams consisting of an arbitrary number of cracks through a recursive way. Based on the ADM and employing some simple mathematical operations, the natural frequencies and the correspondin...

A new approach was developed for the evaluation of energy release rate by the virtual crack closure technique in quadratic and linear elements. The generalized method allows arbitrary placement of the side nodes for quadratic elements and thus includes both standard elements, with mid-side nodes, and singularity elements, with quarter-point nodes, as special cases of one general equation. It al...

In the southwest U.S., cracks in alluvial fan surface clasts have a preferred orientation independent of rock fabric and shape. In this paper, we show that differential insolation of incipient cracks of random orientations predicts a distribution of crack orientations consistent with field observations. In this model, crack growth by hydration and/ or thermal weathering is primarily a function ...

In this section, we want to model a surface with flaws. We model it as a line from which N parallel cracks progress into the 2D material (see Fig. 2). The ensemble of cracks is submitted to a remote mode I loading p∞ as sketched in Fig. 2, but, because of the interactions between the cracks, each crack i (i = 1, ...N) is submitted locally to both a normal traction pi(x) and a shear traction ti(x).

The inspection of various structures often detects a fatigue cracks developed during long service life. These fatigue cracks significantly reduce remaining fatigue life and fatigue strength. Influence of the initial fatigue cracks size in non-load-carrying fillet-welded one-sided transverse attachment joints on the remaining fatigue life and fatigue strength is considered in this paper. A compu...