There is worldwide interest in deriving increasing amounts of energy from bio-based agricultural materials including not only lignocellulosic residues but also a significant quantity of available livestock manure. This manure can be used as a feedstock for various thermochemical conversion processes such as pyrolysis and gasification. In order to apply these processes, the manure must be proper...

Recent advances in abrasive waterjet (AWJ) technology have resulted in new processes for surface treatment that are capable of introducing compressive residual stresses with simultaneous changes in the surface texture. While the surface residual stress resulting from AWJ peening has been examined, the subsurface residual stress field resulting from this process has not been evaluated. In the pr...

Balloting on a new test method for use in the ranking of porous packaging materials used in sterile packaging applications by their ability to provide bacterial holdout was completed in July 2007 by ASTM International Committee F02 Flexible Barrier Packaging. As a result of this balloting, there is a new test method available for evaluating the barrier capabilities of porous materials intended ...

The fracture toughness is a critical material property that determines engineering performance. However, as is well known for crystalline materials, if certain sample geometry and size requirements are not met, test results become sample-size dependent and difficult to compare between different studies. Here, the room-temperature fracture toughness of the Zr-based bulk metallic glass (BMG) Zr52...

Stainless steel has been frequently used for temporary implants but its use as permanent implants is restricted due to its low pitting corrosion resistance. Nitrogen additions to these steels improve both mechanical properties and corrosion resistance, particularly the pitting and crevice corrosion resistance. Many reports concerning allergic reactions caused by nickel led to the development of...

Recent efforts in the United States have led to the standardization of test methods for FRP composites for reinforcing and repairing concrete. These efforts are transitioning standards, originally published by the American Concrete Institute (Committee 440K), as ASTM standards under ASTM Committee D30, Composite Materials. One of the methods recently published involves the transverse shearing o...

Although symptom validity testing is an integral part of the repertory of neuropsychologists in a number of countries, this is not yet true for Germany. The German adaptations of two effort tests, the Medical Symptom Validity Test (MSVT) by Green and the Amsterdam Short-Term Memory Test (ASTM) by Schmand et al., were investigated with a German-language sample. An analog study was performed with...

There are different test methods to determine the abrasion resistance of concrete subjected to number of various types of abrasion. There are number of different tests used in various countries and it is clear that there is no single test that adequately measures the abrasion resistance of concrete under all conditions. This paper covers the summary and classification of the various abrasion te...

This paper investigates the use of Multi-Distribution Deep Neural Networks (MD-DNNs) for integrating acoustic and statetransition models in free phone recognition of L2 English speech. In Computer-Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) system, free phone recognition for L2 English speech is the key model of Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) in the cases of allowing freely speaking. A ...