master moulds are used to cast copper anode moulds. these iron moulds are made of grey or nodular cast irons. according to desirable properties of ductile irons, it was expected that ductile cast iron moulds could have performed their nominal life. but in service, these moulds have not performed their nominal life and they have experienced premature failures due to warping and cracking. also gr...

The Joint Transportation Research Program serves as a vehicle for INDOT collaboration with higher education institutions and industry in Indiana to facilitate innovation that results in continuous improvement in the planning, design, construction , operation, management and economic efficiency of the Indiana transportation infrastructure. NOTICE The contents of this report reflect the views of ...

An experimental study of the influence of autogeneous healing on chloride ingress in cracked concrete is presented. In the study, two concrete mixtures (a Portland cement mix and a blast furnace slag mix), two healing regimes (submerged and fog room regime), two cracking ages (14 and 28 days), and multiple crack widths are used as parameters. An adapted Rapid Chloride Migration testing procedur...

The Bridgman furnace is widely used in industry and research. This paper outlines a working 1-dimensional model for tracking the columnar solidification front in a Bridgman furnace where the pulling velocity, and hence front position, change as a function of time. The front tracking model is applied to a fixed grid of control volumes using an explicit numerical finite difference scheme to solve...

Micro-cracking in polycrystalline Silicon is a serious concern for the durability of photovoltaic (PV) modules due to the resulting electrical power-loss. In this contribution, a thermo-mechanical cohesive zone model is proposed to predict the evolution of micro-cracks under the action of mechanical and thermal loads. The classical nonlinear cohesive zone approach, used in fracture mechanics to...

The modeling of thermal reaction furnaces of Sulfur Recovery Units (SRUs) is a rather complex problem since it involves different modeling scales such as the kinetic/molecular scale, the reactor scale, and the chemical process scale. This work introduces the multi-scale modeling approach to characterize the kinetic and reaction engineering scales for the thermal section of SRUs, involving the r...

To simulate more realistically the effects of strains and stresses on the reliability of portable electronic products, lead-free test assemblies were thermally cycled (−45°C/+125°C, 15-min. dwell time, 750 cycles) or isothermally annealed (125°C, 500 h) before the standard drop test. The average number of drops to failure increased when the thermal cycling was performed before the drop test (1,...

We report the thermally induced unconventional cracking of graphene to generate zigzag edges. This crystallography-selective cracking was observed for as-grown graphene films immediately following the cooling process subsequent to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on Cu foil. Results from Raman spectroscopy show that the crack-derived edges have smoother zigzag edges than the chemically formed gr...

In this paper, a positive effect of rapid thermal annealing (RTA) technique has been researched and compared with conventional furnace annealing for Si nanocrystalline in silicon carbide (SiC) matrix system. Amorphous Si-rich SiC layer has been deposited by co-sputtering in different Si concentrations (50 to approximately 80 v%). Si nanocrystals (Si-NC) containing different grain sizes have bee...

A new technique combining in situ X-ray diffraction using synchrotron radiation and infrared thermal imaging is reported. The technique enables the application, generation and measurement of significant thermal gradients, and furthermore allows the direct spatial correlation of thermal and crystallographic measurements. The design and implementation of a novel furnace enabling the simultaneous ...