I was impressed to see the systematic release of coursework into the public domain by MIT. A large amount of course material, lecture notes, exam questions and answers has been made available with a creative commons license and it available to take and modify for non-commercial uses [please check license issues yourself if you intend to do this]. The material covers many subject areas and a total of 1800 courses.
Tata motors dream of a “1 Lakh car” was realised earlier this month when the revealed their new “Nano” car.
I believe that production has yet to start, I would be interested to know the price of the previous small cars when they where released. Such as the original ‘mini’ and the other ‘peoples car’ the Volkswagen Beatle.
Top Gear presenter and journalist Jeremy Clarkson became the victim of identity theft after complaining in his newspaper column of the unnecessary fuss after the loss of 2 cds containing bank details by the governments child benefit agency.
In the article he published his bank details and gave information about how readers could find his home address, he claimed that all people would be able to do with the details would be to deposit money in his bank account.
But after checking his bank statement he found that a direct debit had been set up donating £500 pounds to the charity Diabetes UK. The bank says that the data protection act stops them from finding out who set up the direct debit, and they won’t be able to prevent it from happening again.
Google maps displayed the results of the Iowa Caucus’ (part of the process to decide the candidates for the U.S. president) live on their website, you can see the final results here:
Election results.
Barrack Obama and John Edwards both received more support than the much touted Hilary Clinton - looking at the number of votes cast the three are about equal with not much competition after that. Mike Huckabee did very well in the republican voting, followed by Romney, Thompson, McCain and Ron Paul (polled around 10% but won one county despite being largely ignored by the main stream media and not iinvited to a final debate in Iowa). Rudy Giuliani must be disappointed to have received less than 5% of the vote.
Jmol is an opensource software for 3D visualisation of molecules, it’s written in Java, it runs as a applet and there are some nice demo’s on the projects homepage.
http://jmol.sourceforge.net/
Calculates equilibrium between ferrite austenite cementite and liquid phases and outputs a brief results and results in mole fractions and then a graph to screen.
:Script By Sourabh Chatterjee May 2006
mu
def sys ‘Fe,C,Mn,Si,Al,P,Mo,Cu’ source plus sub_sgte !
class abs p(*) !
class nor p(bcc_a2,fcc_a1,cementite,liquid) !
set w 100 !
set w(2) 0.36 w(3) 1.96 w(4) 0.5 w(5) 2.0 w(6) 0.022 w(7) 0 w( 
0.52 !
step temp 1573 1873 10 !
com pri ea_st_re !
compute print brief print mole !
compute print graphic !
plot go !
I went to see Air and they were awesome.
The special guests were “Au Revoir Semone” an indie pop combo hailing from New York, the band members are Erika Forster, Annie Hart and Heather D’Angelo.
:example by Mathew Peet Nov07
multiphase
define system ‘Fe,Mn,C’ source tcfe !
:using tcfe database - other options are sol, ssol, plus, pluss, sub_sgte etc
set w 100 !
:set total weight of system to 100 kg
set w(1) undefined w(2) 1 w(3) 0.1 !
:this means 1 weight percent manganese and 0.1 weight percent carbon
:iron is calculated as the balance
classify absent phase(*) !
classify normal phase(BCC_A2,FCC_A1) !
:in this calculation we want to allow only ferrite and austenite phases
step temp 973 1373 20 !
:we want to calculate the equilibrium for this system
:from around 700 to 1100 centigrade
compute print mole_fraction_table !
:we want the calculation to produce the results as a table of mole fractions
Writing the results to a file
To output the fraction of the phase to a file we can use something like;
compute print graphics_output !
ordinate mass fraction_of_phases !
units temperature celsius !
plot tabulate spreadsheet !
Mtdata will then tell us where the file “def1.gtb” is written. This file can then be opened in your spreadsheet software or plotted using gnuplot, etc.
Plotting the output with gnuplot
The file is output as a spreadsheet with comma delimiters. If we want to plot this in gnuplot, it’s useful to switch these to spaces. This can be done with the following incantation;
sed 's/,/ /g' def1.gtb > file.ssv
The following is the commands needed in gnuplot to produce a suitable graph. This can either be written in gnuplot used interactively, or placed in a file and executed as a script.
Copy the following to a text file, for example called plot_mtdata.gnu, and run the script with the command gnuplot plot_mtdata.gnu in this case we will produce a graph in postscript format, although other formats are also available in gnuplot.
#example by Mathew Peet Nov07
set term postscript enhanced eps 22
set title “Equilibrium between austenite and ferrite for Fe-1Mn-0.1C Wt. \%”
set xlabel “TEMPERATURE / ^oC”
set ylabel “CONSTITUENTS / Wt. \%”
set output “graph.eps”
plot “file.ssv” using 1:($2*100) title “BCC” w lp, \
“file.ssv” using 1:($3*100) title “FCC” w lp
This should produce a graph something like this (converted to jpg using ‘convert graph.eps graph.jpg” command in linux)
Here is an example macro for use with thermodynamics software mtdata. This script sets up a stepped calculation of equilibrium for a steel composition, it then output a text file of the mass fraction of each phase. Reading the script is made difficult by the use of contracted version of the commands. The first command selects the multiphase modules could have been written ‘mu’ rather than ‘multiphase’. The next command starts ‘def sys…’ is the same as ‘define system’. Note most commands end with an exclamation mark, this is the way to tell mtdata you really mean what you typed.
:Macro file to calculate equilibrium phase fractions
:Mathew Peet and Hala Salman Hasan 20th June 2007
multiphase
def sys ‘Fe,C,Si,Mn,Cr,Mo,Co,Al’ source plus sub_sgte !
:this is a comment
:uncomment following line to use tcfe database instead
:def sys ‘Fe,C,Si,Mn,Cr,Mo,Co,Al’ source tcfe !
classify absent phase(*) !
classify normal phase(FCC_A1,BCC_A2,M23C6,M6C,cementite,m7c3) !
classify misc(FCC_A1) 1 !
set w 100 !
set w(2) 0.78 w(3) 1.6 w(4) 2.02 w(5) 1.01 w(6) 0.24 w(7) 3.87 w( 1.37 !
step temp 773 1373 5 !
:this line is a comment
:following 3 lines output a spreadsheet of phase fractions with temperature
com pri gra !
ord mass phase !
plot tabu spread !
:uncomment line/ type following to see compositions of phases
:compute print brief print mol !
Example output of the above calculation was archived.
Ey By Gum, It’s not like the old days…
He’s a video about the student learning experience that was recently featured by youtube.
Columbium is an alternative name for Niobium. In steels niobium is a common microalloying element, that is added in small which then have a large influence on the resulting mechanical properties.
Strong carbide formers can be used for microalloying to form small precipitates, that is vanadium, niobium, titanium, often used in combination. These elements combine with carbon and nitrogen to make carbides. nitrides and carbonitrides. Vanadium and niobium carbides and nitrides can easily combine together, this may be bacause they have the same crystal structure and similar lattice paramaters.
Looking through some literature recently I was surprised to find a paper on microalloying which had used both niobium and columbium, in different amounts. The paper has 5 authors and is published in Scripta Materialia Influence of short austenitising times on the fracture behaviour or a microalloyed automotive spring steel by Wise, Spice, Davidson, Heitmann and Krauss. Scripta Materialia, 44, 2001, 299-304.
`I found’ another tool for making graphs, called rlplot, this uses a spreadsheet like gui interface. If automation isn’t necessary and you don’t need the flexibility this may be a good alternative to gnuplot for one off publication quality graphs. rlplot can export graphs to eps and svg formats.
Data can be imported from csv file and saved as a workbook. Graphs can also be saved.
It’s possible to make all sorts of graphs that aren’t really simple or possible to make with gnuplot. Like the infamous Pi charts.
http://mathewpeet.org/images/pi.svg
My first rlplot graph
rlplot is made using qt so I expect it can be available on windows or mac aswell as in linux.
Introducing the great new game Crystallographic Hangman.
I’m linking to these mp3’s of podcasts here so that they can be aggregated into the RSS feed. If you have software for listening to podcasts you can point it at the RSS feed for the site or for categories Podcasts or pt-podcasts.
Podcast: Stretch Flangeability
Podcast: Cracking of martensite
I made three new podcasts with Prof. Harry Bhadeshia on his latest papers on transformation texture, the new delta-Trip steels and on prediction of Hot Strength of ferritic steels.
The work on transformation texture is from Saurabh Kundu’s thesis were Patel and Cohen’s model has been shown to correctly predict the orientation relationship between ferrite and austenite after martensitic transformation. It’s shown that variants are selected by free energy differences that can be calculated depending on the orientation.
The delta-Trip steels were developed as a result of the prediction of neural networks, were after the neural network was made computer optimisation was used to try and maximise the mechanical properties. This work was done with Saurabh Chatterjee in collaboration with Murugananth Marimuthu. Both Saurabh Kundu and Saurabh Chatterjee completed their PhD’s at Cambridge while visiting from Tata Steel, Murugananth Marimuthu is a previous member of the phase transformations group, and has now also joined Tata Steel’s research and development section.
The work on Hot Strength of ferritic steels is the part of Radu Dmitriu’s topic of research. A neural network model of the hot-strength of ferritic steels. It was observed from the neural network that the strength is expected to suddenly start to decrease at 800 Kelvin, which can has been explained to be due to changes in the mobility of dislocations.
Addendum
According to wordpress documentation these links should get added to the rss feed of this bainite blog as enclosures.
Podcast: Transformation Texture
Subcribing to RSS Feed of this webpage should get you all the podcasts, or for Podcasts Only
Subscibe to RSS Feed for posts I remember to add to Podcasts category
This phase diagram should be of interested inhow to make a diamond using temperature and pressure.
Diagram from Jan M. Zazula, LHC project note 78/97, Jan 1997.
Superman can reach the pressure and temperature needed to make a diamond by compressing coal in his hand, and heating using lasers from his eyes.
Abstract
In this work we have produced a bread and butter pudding.
The amount of ingredients have been halved from previous work.
The taste was exceptional.
Introduction
Bread and Butter pudding is a traditional British desert, extremely suitable for the cold winter. However with the prevailing sedentary lifestyle and increasing obesity, expert advice is to reduce consumption of cholesterol and fats. Here our approach is to reduce the total amount of all the ingredients, but keep their proportions the same.
Experimental Materials
Oven capable of 170′C
2 inch deep dish
3 Slices well buttered bread
30 g Sultanas
2 Eggs
25 g Sugar
300 ml Milk
Experimental Methods
Preheat oven to 170′C,
remove crusts from bread, place in 3 inch deep dish,
heat milk, mix eggs and sugar.
Conclusions
The taste was exceptionally good, even though the total amount of ingredients and calories were half that of previous recipes.
 | Rich on Dividing a line |
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 | Daniel on Some effects of Alloying eleme… |
