The objective of this work is to non-destructively determine the residual stress profile in the bulk of two characteristic types of alumina-based composites, with the aim of improving their durability and structural integrity.
Residual Stress Measurements of Alumina-Zirconia Ceramics by Time-of-Flight Neutron Diffraction K. Fan, J. Ruiz-Hervias, J. Gurauskis, C. Baudin Abstract. Neutron strain scanning and Rietveld analysis were used to study the residual stresses in Al2O3/Y-TZP ceramic composites fabricated by different green processing techniques (a novel tape casting and conventional slip casting) and with different zirconia content. […]
It is well known that there are some similarities among various naturally occurring amino acids. Thus, the complexity in protein systems could be reduced by sorting these amino acids with similarities into groups and then protein sequences can be simplified by reduced alphabets. This paper discusses how to group similar amino acids and whether there is a minimal amino acid alphabet by which proteins can be folded. Various reduced alphabets are obtained by reserving the maximal information for the simplified protein sequence compared with the parent sequence using global sequence alignment. With these reduced alphabets and simplified similarity matrices, we achieve recognition of the protein fold based on the similarity score of the sequence alignment. The coverage in dataset SCOP40 for various levels of reduction on the amino acid types is obtained, which is the number of homologous pairs detected by program BLAST to the number marked by SCOP40. For the reduced alphabets containing 10 types of amino acids, the ability to detect distantly related folds remains almost at the same level as that by the alphabet of 20 types of amino acids, which implies that 10 types of amino acids may be the degree of freedom for characterizing the complexity in proteins.
Owing to the increasing demand for tribological brakes for space applications, the development of novel materials and advanced technologies is necessary. This paper presents the design, characterization, and realization of powder metallurgy processed metal-matrix friction materials intended for the above-mentioned tribological brakes. Selecting appropriate ingredients, which provides an effective way to tailor the properties of the friction material, is evolving as a strategy to meet the design requirements. The tribological behaviors of the friction material are experimentally investigated under different conditions, and special attention is focused on the vacuum tribology. Examinations and analyses of the friction surface and subsurface corroborate the wear mechanism. In addition, the erosion resistances of the friction material are evaluated by exposure tests of ultraviolet irradiation and atomic oxygen. Finally, present and potential space applications of the friction material are also introduced based on experimental studies.