One way of generating light weight composites is to insert porous ceramic grains into the melt of the matrix. The foam like inner structure of the grains causes a considerable weight reduction. On the other hand, it is desired that the mechanical properties of the matrix carry over to the composite. The properties of the composite depend both on the structure of grains as well as on their distr...

The migration of primary Si grains during the solidification of Al-18 wt%Si alloy under a high-gradient magnetic field has been investigated experimentally. It was found that under a gradient magnetic field, the primary Si grains migrated toward one end of the specimen, forming a Si-rich layer, and the thickness of the Si-rich layer increased with increasing magnetic flux density. No movement o...

We consider grains with superparamagnetic inclusions and report two new condensed matter effects that can enhance the internal relaxation of the energy of a wobbling grain, namely, superparamagnetic Barnett relaxation, as well as, an increase of frequencies for which nuclear relaxation becomes important. This findings extends the range of grain sizes for which grains are thermally trapped, i.e....

A finite element analysis was conducted to determine the effect of moisture diffusion and hygroscopic swelling in rice. A parallel simple stochastic modeling was performed to predict the number of grains cracked as a result of moisture absorption and hygroscopic swelling. Rice grains were soaked in thermally (25C) controlled water and then tested for compressive stress. The destructive compress...

The formation of a recrystallization texture is closely related to the nucleation and growth of recrystallizing grains, which may vary from grain to grain. Cube texture is a commonly observed recrystallization texture in face centered cubic metals of medium to high stacking fault energy after heavy cold-rolling and annealing. In this work, recrystallization of pure copper cold-rolled to a von M...

Composition of the Comet dust obtained by the dust impact analyzer on the Halley probes indicated that the comet dust is a mixture of silicate and carbonaceous material. The collected interplanetary dust particles (IDP’s) are fluffy and composite, having grains of several different types stuck together. Using Discrete Dipole Approximation (DDA) we study the scattering properties of composite gr...

[1] Saturn’s rings, terrestrial polar mesospheric clouds, and astrophysical molecular clouds are all dusty plasma environments where tiny grains of water ice are an important constituent. Existing models typically assume that the ice grains are spherical and then invoke various arguments about the normal distribution or the power law dependence of grain number density on grain radius. Using a l...