With careful design, mixed microstructures consisting of fine plates of upper bainitic ferrite separated by thin films of stable retained austenite have exhibited impressive combinations of strength and toughness in highsilicon bainitic steels. The silicon suppresses the precipitation of brittle cementite leading to an improvement in toughness. The essential principles governing the optimisatio...

This paper describes the use of microdischarges between lithographically defined features as tools for further processing. Techniques based on the use of microplasmas can facilitate the microfabrication of complex microstructures (with dozens of structural levels) using just two masking steps, whereas microarcs can be used to increase the diversity of used in microstructures to WC-Co super-hard...

Laser irradiation parameters, especially the laser fluence and the number of pulses are very important factors affecting microstructures formation and improvement of the surface characteristics in different medical, electronic and the other industrial applications. Information about the fluence domain and the number of pulses for the formation of the structures is very important and determines ...

Salt transport in bulk electrolytes is limited by diffusion and advection, but in microstructures with charged surfaces (e.g., microfluidic devices, porous media, soils, or biological tissues) surface conduction and electro-osmotic flow also contribute to ionic fluxes. For small applied voltages, these effects lead to well known linear electrokinetic phenomena. In this paper, we predict some su...

■ Abstract We review progress made in quantitatively ascertaining the various statistical correlation functions that are fundamental to determining the material properties of specific classes of disordered materials. Topics covered include the definitions of the correlation functions, a unified theoretical means of representing and computing the different statistical descriptors, structural cha...

We present a fabrication approach for the production of micromachined biodegradable microstructures, and illustrate its application in two areas: biodegradable microneedles for transdermal drug delivery, and biodegradable ratcheting surgical ties for blood vessel surgery. We fabricated solid polymer microneedles out of polyglycolide, polylactide and their copolymer using a micromolding techniqu...