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Characteristics of Tm:YAG ceramic for high efficient 2-μm lasers are analyzed. Efficient diode end-pumped continuous-wave and Q-switched Tm:YAG ceramic lasers are demonstrated. At the absorbed pump power of 53.2W, the maximum continuous wave (cw) output power of 17.2 W around 2016 nm was obtained with the output transmission of 5%. The optical conversion efficiency is 32.3%, corresponding to a slope efficiency of 36.5%. For Q-switched operation, the shortest width of 69 ns was achieved with the pulse repetition frequency of 500 Hz and single pulse energy of 20.4 mJ, which indicates excellent energy storage capability of the Tm:YAG ceramic.

Abstract The molten droplet fragmentation dominated by hydrodynamic mechanisms is the key process at the stage of pressure propagation in the process of the fuel–coolant interaction (FCI) which may occur during the course of a severe accident in a light water reactor (LWR). However, due to complication of the process, hydrodynamic fragmentation cannot be described by a particular mechanism, and there is no sufficient experimental studies under high pressure shock condition for this kind of fragmentation evaluation. In this paper, a multi-phase thermal hydraulic code with the Volume of Fluid Method (VOF) is developed, Continuum surface force (CSF) model is employed to compute the surface tension. The breakup process of a molten droplet under sudden accelerations is numerically analyzed to investigate the mechanism of fragmentation in vapor explosion. The results show that the breakup process experiences two stages: deformation and disintegration, which agrees with the simulation by Duan et al. (2003) using Moving Particle Semi-implicit (MPS) method. It is found that an increase in intensity of pressure pulse will accelerate the completion of breakup process and the dimensionless breakup time from the simulation is not strongly affected by Bond number ( Bo ). The simulation results suggest that the deformation imposed by the external hydrodynamic pressure distribution should be the dominant factor in breakup process for molten droplets in liquid–liquid system simulated in this paper.

Safety and Security Science

Abstract In this work, we propose an acoustic energy harvesting metamaterial consisting of an array of silicone rubber pillars and a PZT patch deposited on an ultrathin aluminum plate with several holes based on locally resonant mechanism. The resonance is formed by removing four pillars, drilling a few of holes and attaching the PZT patch on the aluminum plate. The strain energy originating from an incident acoustic wave is centralized in the resonant region, and the PZT patch is used to convert the elastic strain energy into electrical power. Numerical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed millimeter-scale harvester with holes obviously improves the effect of acoustic energy harvesting while performing at the subwavelength scale for sonic low-frequency environment (less than 1150 Hz). In addition, the experimental results demonstrate that the maximum output voltage and power of the proposed acoustic energy harvesting system with 16 holes of 2 mm radius are 3 and 10 times higher than those without holes at the resonant mode for 2 Pa of incident acoustic pressure. Both the number and size of holes have a significant effect on the performance of acoustic energy harvesting. The advantages of the proposed structure are easy-to-machine and full of practicality, and it can be used in broad applications for low-frequency acoustic energy harvesting.

AbstractNiNb2O6‐BaTiO3 ceramics were prepared using a solid‐state reaction method, and the effects of the addition of NiNb2O6 on the dielectric properties and energy‐storage characteristics of BaTiO3 were investigated systematically. We used XRD to show that the obtained NiNb2O6‐BaTiO3 ceramics possess a single perovskite structure. The addition of NiNb2O6 improves the energy density efficiency and leads to a decrease of the dielectric loss to less than 1 %. Moreover, optimum performances of the BaTiO3 ceramics can be achieved by the addition of 1.0 mol % NiNb2O6, at which content the obtained ceramic satisfies the X7R specification. The addition of NiNb2O6 stabilizes the crystalline lattice, which enhances the temperature stability of the dielectric properties accordingly.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the dimensionalities of high dimensional datasets in a variety of research areas. For example, biological macromolecules, such as proteins, exhibit many degrees of freedom, allowing them to adopt intricate structures and exhibit complex functions by undergoing large conformational changes. Therefore, molecular simulations of and experiments on proteins generate a large number of structure variations in high dimensional space. PCA and many PCA-related methods have been developed to extract key features from such structural data, and these approaches have been widely applied for over 30 years to elucidate macromolecular dynamics. This review mainly focuses on the methodological aspects of PCA and related methods, and their applications for investigating protein dynamics.

Three inducers were designed to avoid cavitation instabilities. This was accomplished by avoiding the interaction of tip cavity with the leading edge of the next blade. The first one was designed with extremely larger leading edge sweep, the second and third ones were designed with smaller incidence angle by reducing the inlet blade angle or increasing the design flow rate, respectively. The inducer with larger design flow rate has larger outlet blade angle to obtain sufficient pressure rise. The inducer with larger sweep could suppress the cavitation instabilities in higher flow rates more than 95% of design flow coefficient, owing to weaker tip leakage vortex cavity with stronger disturbance by backflow vortices. The inducer with larger outlet blade angle could avoid the cavitation instabilities at higher flow rates, owing to the extension of the tip cavity along the suction surface of the blade. The inducer with smaller inlet blade angle could avoid the cavitation instabilities at higher flow rates, owing to the occurrence of the cavity first in the blade passage and its extension upstream. The cavity shape and suction performance were reasonably simulated by three dimensional CFD computations under the steady cavitating condition, except for the backflow vortex cavity. The difference in the growth of cavity for each inducer is explained from the difference of the pressure distribution on the suction side of the blades.