..............................................................................................iv Acknowledgements................................................................................vi List of Figures.......................................................................................ix Chapter 1: Introduction............................................................................

The effects of copper on the ageing precipitation behavior of as-quenched and pre-aged AA6016 aluminum alloy were studied by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Vickers hardness measurement and transmission electronic microscopy (TEM). The results indicate that the addition of copper facilitates the growth of clusters (GP I) to the critical size during pre-ageing. Therefore, the addition o...

A new strategy for synthesizing well-defined, chain-end-functionalized polymers containing multiple hydrogen-bonding (MHB) groups capable of heterodimerization in both solution and the melt has been developed. Two complementary MHB systems were chosen for initial studies: 2-ureido-4[1H]-pyrimidinone (UPy) and 2,7diamido-1,8-naphthyridine (Napy) and ATRP initiators containing either UPy or Napy ...

%'e have applied the Schwinger multichannel formulation [K. Takatsuka and V. McKoy, Phys. Rev. A 24, 2473 (1981)]to the elastic scattering of low-energy (1—30-eV) electrons by silane. Our results, obtained within the fixed-nuclei, static-exchange approximation, are in generally good agreement with recent differential, integral, and momentum-transfer cross-section measurements between 5 and 30 e...

A methodology is proposed to characterize through silicon via (TSV) induced noise coupling in threedimensional (3D) integrated circuits. Different substrate biasing schemes (such as a single substrate contact versus regularly placed substrate contacts) and TSV fabrication methods (such as via-first and via-last) are considered. A compact π model is proposed to efficiently estimate the coupling ...

The objective of this work is to investigate the microstrain effect on grain growth and strain release processes in nanocrystalline (nc) samples. Two kinds of nc Cu samples were studied by using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM): an electro-deposited nc Cu sample with an average grain size of about 30 nm and one after col...

Planar waveguides of SiO2:TiO2 (multilayer structure) and SiO2:CeO2 (thick layer) were prepared onto commercial glass substrates using a sol-gel technique combined with dip-coating. These glassy coatings were structural characterised by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis and by Confocal Microscopy. Thicknesses of 1230 nm and 4,15 μm and refractive indices of...

The ball milling technique has been successfully applied to the synthesis of various materials such as equilibrium intermetallic phases, amorphous compounds, nanocrystalline materials, or metastable crystalline phases. However, how the phase composition and nanoscale microstructure evolute during ball milling in various materials is still controversial due to the complex mechanism of ball milli...

Neutral delay differential equations contain the derivative of the unknown function both with and without delays. Some new phenomena can appear, hence the theory of neutral delay differential equations is even more complicated than the theory of non-neutral delay equations. The oscillatory behavior of the solutions of neutral systems is of importance in both the theory and applications, such as...

It is shown that Lotka-Volterra interaction terms are not appropriate to describe vertical cultural transmission. Appropriate interaction terms are derived and used to compute the effect of vertical cultural transmission on demic front propagation. They are also applied to a specific example, the Neolithic transition in Europe. In this example, it is found that the effect of vertical cultural t...