Fatigue properties and cracking behavior of cold-drawn commercially pure aluminum wires (CPAWs) widely used as the overhead transmission conductors were investigated. It was found that the fracture surface of the CPAWs shows an obvious four-stage fracture characteristic, i.e., crack initiation, planar crack propagation, 45°-inclined crack propagation and final rapid fracture. The crack growth m...

Ascorbate-glutathione (ASA-GSH) cycle is a major pathway of H2O2 scavenging and an effective mechanism of detoxification in plants. The differences in photosynthesis, chlorophyll content (Chl), relative water content (RWC), antioxidants and antioxidative enzyme activities involved in ASA-GSH metabolism were measured between the flag leaves and spike bracts (glumes and lemmas) during grain filli...

Grain legumes remain important to meet the projected targets relating to food and nutritional security worldwide. The complementation of cereal-based food with grain legumes is a vegetarian diet with high-quality protein. However, the performance of these crops is severely influenced by a number of biotic and abiotic stresses, of which pests and pathogens remain the crucial affecting plants at ...

The fatigue resistance of aerospace structures is degraded by the presence corrosion damage. This work characterizes micro-scale (<50 µm) morphologies and underlying microstructure AA7050 that impact crack formation. Corroded specimens were cycled to failure using a fracture surface marking spectrum. Pre-test characterization, fractography EBSD performed. No damage or metric independently corre...

Tef grain is becoming very attractive in the Western countries since it is a gluten-free grain with appreciated nutritional advantages. However there is little information of its functional properties and starch digestibility and how they are affected by variety type and particle size distribution. This work evaluates the effect of the grain variety and the mill used on tef flour physico-chemic...

The plastic co-deformation behavior at the homophase interfaces between the hard nanotwinned grain inclusions and the soft recrystallized matrix grains in a duplex-microstructured AISI 316L austenitic stainless steel is examined through the analysis of long-range orientation gradients within the matrix grains by electron backscatter diffraction and transmission electron microcopy. Our analysis ...

A pot experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of the non-protein amino acid, β-aminobutyric acid (BABA), on the homeostasis between reactive oxygen species (ROS) and antioxidant defence during progressive soil drying, and its relationship with the accumulation of abscisic acid (ABA), water use, grain yield, and desiccation tolerance in two spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivar...

The study examined the effect of moisture content on maize shelling speed using a manually operated hand Sheller (cone type). Twenty (20) unthreshed maize cob samples (A-J) were used for the study. The samples were analysed in the laboratory for parameters such as weight of samples before and after drying, moisture content and shelling speed. The result indicated that sample J, after sixty nine...

Rapid drying can increase brittleness and induce internal cracks which predispose the product to breakage during subsequent activities. The drying process must be understood and controlled so that design guidelines which reduce or minimize drying damage to rough rice can be established and improved. This study is to give a mathematical model with numerical solution to follow the mass distributi...

Water within pores of cementitious materials plays a crucial role in the damage processes of cement pastes, particularly in the binding material comprising calcium-silicate-hydrates (C-S-H). Here, we employed Grand Canonical Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the properties of water confined at ambient temperature within and between C-S-H nanoparticles or "grains" as a function of the relat...