The mold design/manufacturing plays a crucial role in the development of high-volume mold-injected, pressed, and/or formed products. A mold fabrication consists of a set of sub-processes and usually takes several months to complete its design and production. Due to the shortening of product lifecycle, the sequence of process execution has to be reengineered to improve its efficiency. This resea...

Electroformed microfluidic chip mold faces the problem of uneven thickness, which decreases the dimensional accuracy of the mold, and increases the production cost. To fabricate a mold with uniform thickness, two methods are investigated. Firstly, experiments are carried out to study how the ultrasonic agitation affects the thickness uniformity of the mold. It is found that the thickness unifor...

BACKGROUND When the federal levee system broke after Hurricane Katrina, 80 percent of New Orleans, approximately 134,000 homes, flooded. As repopulation and revitalization activities continue, exposure to mold and other respiratory irritants has emerged as a major health concern; however, there has been no study examining children's respiratory health and indoor mold levels in the post-Katrina ...

The objectives in this work were to develop, calibrate, and apply a model to predict ideal taper profiles down the narrow faces of the SIDERAR slab casting mold for several different casting speeds, steel grades, flux powder compositions, and widths. A significant amount of original research was undertaken for this challenging problem. A finite difference model of transient 1-D heat conduction ...

A new miniaturized sensor system with an internal optical reference for the detection of mold growth is presented. The sensor chip comprises a reaction chamber provided with a culture medium that promotes the growth of mold species from mold spores. The mold detection is performed by measuring impedance changes with integrated electrodes fabricated inside the reaction chamber. The impedance cha...

Mold and mildew can develop in both indoor and outdoor gardens but tends to be more devastating indoors, and can wipe out an entire crop if it is not controlled. Ultraviolet (UV) light can be used to eradicate mold spores that accumulate on floors or that spread via air currents. The primary mold spore of concern is usually Botrytis cinerea, a ubiquitous fungi that often contaminates soil and i...

Damp buildings often have a moldy smell or obvious mold growth; some molds are human pathogens. This has caused concern regarding health effects of moldy indoor environments and has resulted in many studies of moisture- and mold-damaged buildings. Recently, there have been reports of severe illness as a result of indoor mold exposure, particularly due to Stachybotrys chartarum. While many autho...

Slide gate dithering can reduce nozzle clogging and sticking during continuous casting, but also influences transient flow in the mold and meniscus level fluctuations. In this work, a semi-analytical model was first developed and validated to predict nozzle flow rate from slide-gate opening position. A transient CFD model of 3-D turbulent flow was then validated with surface velocity measuremen...