ANALYTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF INVESTMENT CASTING WITH LASER STEREOLITHOGRAPHY MODELS by Wen-Long Yao This dissertation presents an analytical and experimental investigation of ceramic shell cracking during the burnout process in investment casting with internally webbed laser stereolithography (SLA) patterns. Included in the consideration are the cracking temperature of the ceramic shell...

iii Abstract: High manganese TWIP (TWinning Induced Plasticity) steels are particularly attractive for automotive applications because of their exceptional properties of strength combined with an excellent ductility. However, as austenitic steels, they appear to be sensitive to liquid zinc embrittlement during welding, the liquid zinc arising from the melted coating due to the high temperatures...

Modern business applications and scientific databases call for inherently dynamic data storage environments. Such environments are characterized by two challenging features: (a) they have little idle system time to devote on physical design; and (b) there is little, if any, a priori workload knowledge, while the query and data workload keeps changing dynamically. In such environments, tradition...

1. Introduction Zeolites have gained an irreplaceable role as catalysts in the refining industry. With a production capacity of 625·10 6 t in 2004, the fluid catalytic cracking process (FCC) represents the second most important heterogeneously catalyzed process [1]. As an active component, the catalyst of this process contains zeolite H-Y. Since a high-molecular feed is used, a detailed knowled...

Hydrogen sulfide (H$) has long been associated with the cause of corrosion damage and sulfide stress cracking (SSC) in high strength steels and high hardness weldments used in oil and gas production, petroleum refining, and petrochemical/chemical processing. Other applications where sulfide species have produced environmental cracking include heavy water production, electric power, marine appli...

Corrosion cracking of reinforced concrete caused by chloride salt is one of the main determinants of structure durability. Monitoring the entire process of concrete corrosion cracking is critical for assessing the remaining life of the structure and determining if maintenance is needed. Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensing technology is extensively developed in photoelectric monitoring technology ...