T he issue of mold contamination has drawn the national and international spotlight on the heels of publicity about prominent situations , such as a hotly contended link between mold and severe illness—and one death—in 10 Ohio infants in 1993 and 1994; a major 2001 insurance battle over the moldy Dripping Springs, Texas, house of Melinda Ballard and her family; the mushrooming mold infestations...

In-mold assembly process has been used for manufacturing articulated structures at the macro scale. But the in-mold assembly process at the mesoscale behaves differently and poses new challenges due to reduced structural rigidity of the mesoscale premolded component. One of the major challenges that need to be addressed is that of the plastic deformation of the premolded component during the se...

Mold is ubiquitous, and exposure to mold and its products of metabolism is unavoidable, whether indoors or outdoors. Mold can produce a variety of adverse health outcomes by four scientifically validated pathophysiologic mechanisms: hypersensitivity, toxicity, infection, and irritation. Some adverse health outcomes have been attributed to mold for which mechanisms of injury are not well defined...

In the conventional continuous casting of steel, either mold powder or oil can be added to lubricate the mold from sticking to the solidifying steel shell. The mold powder melts to form a molten slag or flux layer, and also acts to protect the molten steel from oxidation, to insulate the molten steel from heat loss, to absorb inclusions from the molten steel, to regulate heat transfer to mold w...

In this paper we propose a multicast-on-large-demand (MOLD) approach to the flash crowd problem. A MOLD Web server may dynamically open a multicast channel for resources when detecting a very high demand for them, and it reverts back to the normal unicast mode when the flash crowd subsides. A number of mechanisms necessary for realizing the MOLD system are thoroughly discussed. We have implemen...

This paper utilizes a probabilistic mold risk assessment method, introducing a novel mold risk indicator (MRI). The MRI captures the risk of mold occurrence at identified “trouble spots” under uncertainty. It will show how the MRI can enhance decision-making in a mold remediation case. When used in decision making under uncertainty, the MRI enables the best selection of remediation actions in t...

Exposure to indoor dampness and mold is associated with numerous adverse respiratory conditions, including asthma. While no quantitative health-based threshold currently exists for mold, the conditions that support excessive dampness and mold are known and preventable; experts agree that controlling these conditions could lead to substantial savings in health care costs and improvement in publi...

Development of CAx for numerical simulation of injection molding and mold design has opened new possibilities for product analysis during the design process of plastic products. This development contributed to higher quality performance as well as to lower cost of product. The paper presents developed integrated CAD/CAE software for mold design. This program solution presents integrated system ...

This paper presents UV imprinting methods for fabricating a high-aspect-ratio pillar array. A polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) mold was selected as the UV imprinting mold. The pillar pattern was formed on a 50 × 50 mm area on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film without remarkable deformation. The aspect ratios of the pillar and space were about four and ten, respectively. The mold was placed int...

We consider the problem of whether a given geometry can be molded in a two part, rigid, reusable mold with opposite removal directions. We describe an efficient algorithm for solving the opposite direction moldability problem for a 2D “polygon” bounded by edges that may be either straight or curved. We introduce a structure, the normal graph of the polygon, that represents the range of normals ...