in saturated soils, heating induces thermal expansion of both grains and the pore fluid. lower thermal expansion coefficient of aggregates results in the increase of pore pressure and reduction of the effective stress besides subsequent volume changes due to the dissipation of pore pressure and heat transfer. dissipation of thermally induced pore pressure with time is a coupled thermo-hydro-mec...

We report on multiple improvements made in the calibration services offered for thermal converters and thermal transfer standards in the ac-dc Difference Standards and Measurement Techniques Project at NIST during the past year. The major improvement in this calibration is the increased efficiency made possible by the consolidation of three disparate calibration services – low voltage thermal t...

When a mass of saturated clay is heated, as in the case of host soils surrounding nuclear waste disposals at great depth, the thermal expansion of the constituents generates excess pore pressures. The mass of clay is submitted to gradients of pore pressure and temperature, to hydraulic and thermal flows, and to changes in its mechanical properties. In this work, some of these aspects were exper...

A rapid hot press system in which the heat is supplied by RF induction to rapidly consolidate thermoelectric materials is described. Use of RF induction heating enables rapid heating and consolidation of powdered materials over a wide temperature range. Such rapid consolidation in nanomaterials is typically performed by spark plasma sintering (SPS) which can be much more expensive. Details of t...

Server consolidation using virtualization technologies allow large-scale datacenters to improve resource utilization and energy efficiency. However, most existing consolidation strategies solely focused on balancing the tradeoff between performance service-level-agreements (SLAs) desired by cloud applications and energy costs consumed by hosting servers. With the presence of fluctuating workloa...

Consolidation and scaling down can be used as enabling techniques to effectively manage power for distributed systems. To support power management for cloud computing with consolidation and scaling down, it is necessary to study the effects of mixed workloads and the consolidation on the performance of application in the virtual machines. Accordingly, we present two studies investigating the ef...

Refractory oxide dispersion strengthened 13Cr-2Mo steel powder was successfully consolidated to near theoretical density using high voltage electric discharge compaction. Cylindrical samples with relative density from 90% to 97% and dimensions of 10 mm in diameter and 10-15 mm in height were obtained. Consolidation conditions such as pressure and voltage were varied in some ranges to determine ...