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Metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) provides the means to fabricate complex metallic parts with reduced time to market and material waste and improved design freedom. Industries with strict materials qualifications such as aerospace, biomedical, and automotive are increasingly looking to AM to meet their production needs. However, significant materials-related challenges impede the widespread adoption of these technologies for critical components. In particular, fatigue resistance in as-built parts has proven to be inferior and unpredictable due to the large and variable presence of porosity. This presents a challenge for the qualification of any load bearing part without extensive post-processing, such as Hot Isostatic Pressing, and thorough inspection. Improved understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind defect formation will assist in designing process improvements to minimize or eliminate defects without relying entirely on postprocessing. In this work, the effects of powder, processing parameters, and post-processing on porosity formation in powder-bed metal AM processes are investigated using X-ray microtomography and a newly developed in-situ high speed radiography technique, Dynamic Xray Radiography. High resolution X-ray computed tomography is used to characterize defect morphology, size, and spatial distribution as a function of process and material inputs. Dynamic X-ray Radiography, which enables the in-situ observation of the laser-metal interactions at frame rates on the order of 100 kHz (and faster), is utilized to understand the dynamic behavior and transitions that occur in the vapor depression across process space. Experimental validation of previously held assumptions regarding defect formation as well as new insights into the influence of the vapor cavity on defect formation are presented.

Anomaly detection requires a system that can reliably convert measurements of an object into knowledge about that object. Previously, we have shown that an information-theoretic approach to the design and analysis of such systems provides insight into system performance as it pertains to architectural variations in source fluence, view number/angle, spectral resolution, and spatial resolution.(1) However, this work was based on simulated measurements which, in turn, relied on assumptions made in our simulation models and virtual objects. In this work, we describe our experimental testbed capable of making transmission x-ray measurements. The spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution is sufficient to validate aspects of the simulation-based framework, including the forward models, bag packing techniques, and performance analysis. In our experimental CT system, designed baggage is placed on a rotation stage located between a tungsten-anode source and a spectroscopic detector array. The setup is able to measure a full 360 rotation with 18,000 views, each of which defines a 10 ms exposure of 1,536 detector elements, each with 64 spectral channels. Measurements were made of 1,000 bags that comprise 100 clutter instantiations each with 10 different target materials. Moreover, we develop a systematic way to generate bags representative of our desired clutter and target distributions. This gives the dataset a statistical significance valuable in future investigations.

Submitted by Rafael Santana (rafael.silvasantana@ufpe.br) on 2017-07-10T19:30:23Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Dissertacao - Pedro Negrão.pdf: 2417925 bytes, checksum: 563fc37dbb3bf794487bc4e3c8fc102a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T19:30:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Dissertacao - Pedro Negrão.pdf: 2417925 bytes, checksum: 563fc37dbb3bf794487bc4e3c8fc102a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-29 / CAPES / As argilas compõem um grupo de matérias-primas muito importante devido a suas múltiplas funções industriais. Em especial o caulim, possui propriedades físicas e químicas que possibilitam a sua utilização no processo industrial de uma grande gama de produtos, desde matéria-prima para a indústria cerâmica, de carga e cobertura de papel, entre outras. Esta pesquisa objetivou descrever, através da caracterização mineralógica, análise química, análise granulométrica, ensaios tecnológicos e de plasticidade, as características do material arenocaulinítico sondado no município de Igarassu – PE, ocorrência localizada próxima ao bairro de Nova Cruz 2. O material foi coletado através de sondagem a trado, tendo as amostras passado por análise mineralógica por difração de raios X, análise química por fluorescência de raios X, análise granulométrica, ensaios de plasticidade e foram confeccionados corpos de prova para a realização de ensaios tecnológicos. Os resultados obtidos foram comparados com as características de caulins de outros jazimentos descritos na literatura e com as especificações dos caulins aproveitados industrialmente. / Clays form a group of so important raw materials due to its multiple industrial functions. In particular, the kaolin has physical and chemical properties which allow its use at the industrial process a wide range of products from a raw material for ceramic industry, filler and paper coating, among others. This research aimed to describe through mineralogical characterization, chemical analysis, particle size analysis, technological tests and plasticity characteristics of sandy-kaolinitic materials collected in the city of Igarassu - PE, occurrence located near the Nova Cruz 2. The material was got by auger boring, the samples submitted to a mineralogical analysis through X ray diffraction, chemical analysis through X ray fluorescence, particle size analysis, plasticity tests and was prepared specimens to be performed for the technological tests. The results obtained were compared with the characteristics of kaolin of other deposits described in the literature and with the specifications of kaolin exploited industrially.

Bi-annual report on the activities at the ROssendorf BeamLine (ROBL) at the ESRF in Grenoble. The report contains selected contributions on actual research topics, a list of all scheduled experiments, and short experimental reports.

Galaxies are astronomically large systems that consist of vast amounts of stars, and in between there exists the interstellar medium. This medium consists of clouds of gas which play an important role in a galaxy’s history and formation. With the right conditions a region can experience a period of star formation which we measure with a Star Formation Rate (SFR). The lifecycle of stars can create outbursts of hot gas which collapse back into the galaxy over time to contribute more to the interstellar medium. The gas is hot enough to release X-rays which we can detect with orbiting space observatories such as NASA’s Chandra Telescope. By studying these hot, high energy regions we can relate them to other known properties of galaxies to give us insight on the processes of merging systems. Using archival data from Chandra we measured the spatial extent of the soft diffuse X-ray-emitting hot interstellar gas in a sample of 49 local merging galaxies. The galaxies or galaxy pairs are classified by merger stage based on their morphology. The stages range from post-merger remnants to premerger pairs in which two separate regions could be identified. After processing the data, we made initial estimates of the regions based on their optical extent. X-ray counts were extracted and background counts from the nearby sky were subtracted for calibration. An iterative procedure was used to produce and modify elliptical radial profiles by size and position angle until a good fit was found. The best fit radius was defined as the point where the background subtracted counts decreased to less than twice the uncertainty. With an accurate estimate of the region sizes, we infer a third dimension to find the volumes of the regions. The inferred volumes were used to calculate electron densities and total masses of the hot interstellar gas. Relationships among hot, molecular, and atomic gas were investigated and plotted to determine any trends. Our results show a strong correlation between the volume of hot gas and SFR. Another strong trend was between volume and X-ray luminosity. The SFR is correlated with the ratio of hot to cold gas. Galaxies with higher SFRs have proportionally more hot gas relative to the cold gas. These relationships show that major mergers have regions of starbursts which expel hot gas, and the more numerous the young stars, the larger the volume of hot gas. Future research in this area can reveal more about the process of merging and the evolution of galaxies.

Using 8 micron infrared images from the Spitzer telescope we determine the half-light radius (the radius that contains half of the total light) for a sample of 49 nearby merging and merged pairs of galaxies. We compared this with other properties of the galaxies including a) the mass of X-ray emitting hot gas Mx(gas), b) the star formation rate (SFR), c) the large scale environment the galaxies reside in, and d) the chemical composition of the galaxies. Our goal is to better understand the processes that produce hot gas in galaxies

The main focus of this thesis is on the phase retrieval problem. This problem has a broad range of applications in advanced imaging systems, such as X-ray crystallography, coherent diffraction imaging, and astrophotography. Thanks to its broad applications and its mathematical elegance and sophistication, phase retrieval has attracted researchers with diverse backgrounds. Formally, phase retrieval is the problem of recovering a signal 𝔁 ∈ ℂⁿ from its phaseless linear measurements of the form |𝛼ᵢ∗𝔁| + 𝜖ᵢ where sensing vectors 𝛼ᵢ, 𝑖 = 1, 2, ..., 𝓶, are in the same vector space as 𝔁 and 𝜖ᵢ denotes the measurement noise. Finding an effective recovery method in a practical setup, analyzing the required sample complexity and convergence rate of a solution, and discussing the optimality of a proposed solution are some of the major mathematical challenges that researchers have tried to address in the last few years. In this thesis, our aim is to shed some light on some of these challenges and propose new ways to improve the imaging systems that have this problem at their core. Toward this goal, we focus on the high-dimensional setting where the ratio of the number of measurements to the ambient dimension of the signal remains bounded. This regime differs from the classical asymptotic regime in which the signal's dimension is fixed and the number of measurements is increasing. We obtain sharp results regarding the performance of the existing algorithms and the algorithms that are introduced in this thesis. To achieve this goal, we first develop a few sharp concentration inequalities. These inequalities enable us to obtain sharp bounds on the performance of our algorithms. We believe such results can be useful for researchers who work in other research areas as well. Second, we study the spectrum of some of the random matrices that play important roles in the phase retrieval problem, and use our tools to study the performance of some of the popular phase retrieval recovery schemes. Finally, we revisit the problem of structured signal recovery from phaseless measurements. We propose an iterative recovery method that can take advantage of any prior knowledge about the signal that is given as a compression code to efficiently solve the problem. We rigorously analyze the performance of our proposed method and provide extensive simulations to demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance.

Title: Microstructure and properties of multiferroic complex oxide thin films prepared by pulsed laser deposition method Author: Petr Machovec Department: Department of Condensed Matter Physics Supervisor: RNDr. Milan Dopita, Ph.D., Department of Condensed Matter Physics Abstract: In the frame of this thesis, structure, microstructure, and real structure of multiferroic epitaxial layers of LuFeO3 were studied by means of X-ray reflectivity and X-ray diffraction. In theoretical part the theory of X-ray scattering on crystalline layers is described. Standard description of X-ray reflectivity on series of rough layers is presented. Moreover, a model of X-ray scattering on mosaic layer is described. For experimental part of the work three samples were prepared by pulsed laser deposition method. First sample on sapphire substrate (Al2O3), second on platinum layer deposited on sapphire substrate and third on yttrium stabilized zirconia substrate. From the X-ray reflectivity curves the parameters such as layer thickness, interface roughness, surface roughness and material density, were determined. By analysing measured reciprocal space maps, lattice parameters and mosaic model parameters, such as mean mosaic block size, mosaic block size distribution, mosaic block misorientation and residual microstrain, were...

The objective of this work is the synthesis of highly functionalized hybrid organic/inorganic materials by the polycondensation of bis[3-(trimethoxysilyl) propyl]amine in the presence of surfactants. High contents of amine groups were achieved by carrying out the syntheses without an inorganic cross-linker. The silsesquioxanes obtained had a mesoporous structure. The stability of their porous system in the absence of an inorganic cross-linker was enhanced by the precursor's bridged structure. The material structures were studied by FT-IR spectroscopy, Porosimetry, X-Ray Diffraction and Small Angle X-Ray Scattering methods. A material prepared in the presence of dodecylamine as a template had a higher surface area and narrower pore size distribution while the use of sodium dodecyl sulfate resulted in the formation of mesopores with a wide size distribution. Surface amine groups in silsesquioxanes were accessible for adsorption of small molecules of acidic nature.