Hydrostatic Stress and Fatigue Crack Growth of Notched Ti6Al4V in Aggressive Media

The behavior of structures, machine or components made of composite materials or light high-performance alloys is still a great concern for applications in which high strength-to-mas-ratio is a fundamental requirement. Procedures to detect flaws of small initial cracks and evaluate fatigue crack growth are nowadays essentials for high performance flying or ground machines (airplanes, automobiles,...). Structural reliability and structural health monitoring are considered in this paper and the surface replica method is deepened. Numerical FEM models were developed to assist the surface replica method analysis of the results. Ti6Al4V alloy was considered. This paper is a short technical communication.

Virtual Truing and Dressing of Grinding Wheel

Truing and dressing are essential processes of grinding wheel preparation. They make the wheel geometry true with respect to its rotational axis and its cutting surface sharp. These factors significantly influence the quality of the final profile and surface produced from the grinding process. Prediction of the optimum wheel surface for grinding, defined as one which produces an accurate profile and cuts most efficiently can greatly minimize the time to optimize grinding wheel performance. This paper describes virtual dressing and truing operations, takes under account vibration of the dressing apparatus and shows how to generate wheel surface replica under different conditions.

Fatigue crack initiation at Nd-rich particles in an Nd containing high temperature titanium alloy

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and surface replica method have been employed to study the micromechanism of fatigue crack initiation at Nd-rich phase particles in a high temperature titanium (Ti-55) alloy. It was found that the microcrack initiates near the equator of Nd-rich particles in the matrix. The microcrack grows first at an angle of about 45° with respect to the tensile axis, and then its growth direction becomes approximately normal to the tensile axis. The experimental results are analyzed in terms of the elastic stress distribution around soft particles imbedded in the matrix to account for the experimental findings of particle cracking and the associated surface microcrack initiation near the particle “equator.” A model of fatigue crack initiation at a soft surface particle is proposed.

The variations of virus shape and size in different preparations

Envelope is a very important structure for viral attachment and entry into the host cell, but it is also a morphologically variable portion of enveloped viruses. Studying the fine structure of enveloped viruses, we noticed that different sample preparations of viruses resulted in the change of viral size and shape to some extent, which we believe was caused by the variation of the viral envelope. Four typical enveloped viruses: IBRV (Infectious Bovine Rhinotracheitis Virus), GPV (Goat Pox Virus), SbV (Sindbis Virus) and VSV (Vesicular Stomatitis Virus) were investigated in our experiments.Host cells infected with IBRV, GPV, SbV and VSV respectively were fixed with 1-5% glutaraldehyde in Hank's buffer when the cytopathic effects appeared in 50-70% of the cells, then the specimens were treated respectively with different conventional methods of EM sample preparation: 1) ultrathin sectioning, 2) negative staining,3) freeze etching, 4) surface replica, 5) whole mount or SEM observations. All the samples were examined under JEM-200CX TEM or JSM-35CF SEM.