*Department of Mechanical Engineering, Anna University of Technology Tirunelveli, Tirunelveli627 007, Tamilnadu, India **Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli-620 015, TamilNadu, India ABSTRACT Super heater tubes are subjected to alternate heating and cooling in power plants causes crack and eventually fail. This phenomenon is termed as ‘thermal...

conclusions people with chronic kidney disease regardless of their age, gender, state of health, and duration of hemodialysis experience high levels of fatigue; it is particularly important for health providers to understand this level of fatigue which affects the daily life of patients. results all the patients experienced degrees of fatigue and 50 (30.7%) of the participants experienced a hig...

Strength-Probability-Time (SPT) diagrams provide an intuitively pleasing method for presenting reliability data based on extrapolations from accelerated fatigue testing data. If power-law crack growth kinetics are assumed the calculations required to generate the SPT diagram are particularly simple. However, if exponential or other more complex forms are used, this is not the case. If the accel...

In this study, fatigue life of power semiconductor devices measured in cycles to failure during an accelerated stress test in a climate chamber is analyzed. The tested devices fail mainly in a short circuit event and their physical inspection reveals cracks in the power metallization. Commonly, the time till fracture of macroscopic metal layers is modeled with S-N or ε-N fields, this means that...

The present work has used an accelerated test method, based upon cyclic-fatigue testing using a fracture-mechanics approach, to study the durability of organosilanepretreated joints which were adhesively-bonded using a hot-cured epoxy-film adhesive. The silane primer investigated was γ-glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane (GPS). The cyclic-fatigue tests were mainly conducted in (a) a ‘dry’ environme...

Solder joint fatigue failure is a serious reliability concern in area array technologies, such as flip chip and ball grid array packages of integrated-circuit chips. The selection of different substrate materials could affect solder joint thermal fatigue life significantly. The mechanism of substrate flexibility on improving solder joint thermal fatigue was investigated by thermal mechanical an...

The paper discusses the work carried out over the past decade within ISO TC59/SC8 and RILEM TC139-DBS committees towards the development of a durability test standard for sealants. In 2001, RILEM TC139-DBS published a RILEM Technical Recommendation (RTR) on a durability test method for curtain wall joint sealants. The paper discusses the development of this test method as well as results obtain...

Halting an epidemic outbreak in its early stages requires a detailed understanding of the contact dynamics between the agents capable of carrying the pathogen. While current epidemic models assume that agents interact at a uniform rate, following a Poisson process, here we provide evidence that for several computer and biological viruses the inter contact time distribution is heavy tailed. This...

Service-based systems should be able to dynamically seek replacements for faulty or underperforming services, thus performing self-healing. It may however be the case that available services do not match all requirements, leading the system to grind to a halt. In similar situations it would be better to choose alternative candidates which, while not fulfilling all the constraints, allow the sys...