[pt] A superliga a base de níquel 59-23Cr-16Mo foi desenvolvida na década de 90 e tem sido aplicada em indústrias químicas e petroquímicas, bem como em equipamentos de controle ambiental. Esta liga tem apresentado, ocasionalmente, problemas de corrosão por pits em regiões específicas da zona termicamente afetada (ZTA) de juntas soldadas. Com o propósito de estudar os mecanismos atuantes nos processos de precipitação da liga, amostras da mesma foram submetidas a tratamentos de envelhecimento isotérmicos, às temperaturas de 700oC e 900oC, durante intervalos de tempo de 1 a 100 horas. Um estudo da evolução microestrutural do material, a partir da condição de como recebido, foi conduzido através de microscopia ótica, microscopia eletrônica de varredura (MEV), espectroscopia por dispersão de energia de (EDS), difração de elétrons retroespalhados (EBSD), difração de raios-X, microscopia eletrônica de transmissão convencional e de alta resolução. O desempenho mecânico do material, em suas diferentes condições microestruturais, foi avaliado por meio de ensaios de tração uniaxial bem como de micro-dureza. Variações da resistividade elétrica da liga devido a evolução microestrutural foi investigada e o perfil de resistividade elétrica ao longo de uma junta soldada foi levantado. Os resultados obtidos indicaram a presença de reflexões {1, 1/2, 0} nos padrões de difração da maioria das microestruturas em questão. Tais reflexões são características de um estado de ordenação de curto alcance (SRO), e se constituem em evidência da ocorrência de reações de ordem através do mecanismo de empilhamento de planos cristalinos {4,2,0}. Uma vasta população de nanoprecipitados referentes à fase Ni2(Mo,Cr), foi detectada em todas as condições analisadas no presente trabalho. Também foram observados, nas amostras envelhecidas, microprecipitados Ni(Mo,Cr)2, originados a partir de reações de ordem, ocorrendo preferencialmente na área de contornos de grão. O comportamento mecânico do material é associado à precipitação desta fase, a qual governa tanto a transição entre modos de ruptura intragranular para intergranular quanto a degradação da ductilidade da liga. Significativas variações da resistividade elétrica foram detectadas ao longo da ZTA, não associadas à quaisquer alterações microestruturais tendo sido, portanto, atribuídas à variações na quantidade de SRO. / [en] The nickel base superalloy, 59-23Cr-16Mo, was developed in the nineties and has since been used in chemical and petrochemical industries as well as in equipment for environmental control. The alloy has, occasionally, been presenting problems of pit corrosion in the heat affected zones (HAZ) of welded joints. With the purpose of elucidating the mechanisms associated with precipitation processes, specimens were taken from the as-received alloy and submitted to isothermal aging at two different temperatures of 700 and 900oC, for time intervals varying from 1 to 100 hours. A study of the microstructural evolution accompanying the aging treatment was then conducted by means of X-ray diffraction, optical and scanning electron microscopies, making use of the energy dispersion spectroscopy (EDS) and electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) techniques. Conventional and high resolution electron microscopies were also used as additional tools in order to follow the nanoescale precipitation processes. The mechanical behavior of the alloy in its different microstructural conditions was evaluated by means of uniaxial tensile tests as well as by microhardness measurements. Variations in electrical resistivity accompanying microstructure evolution were followed and electrical resistivity of a TIG welded joint was mapped. The results obtained have indicated the presence of {1, 1/2, 0} reflections in the diffraction patterns of the majority of the microstructures in question. Such reflections, which are typical of short range ordered (SRO) state, indicate that the alloy is prone to precipitation mechanisms via ordering reactions, involving atomic stacking on {4,2,0} planes. A large population of nanoprecipitates, referring to the Ni2(Mo,Cr) phase, was detected in all of the microstructural conditions considered in this work. In addition, the aged specimens were also found to contain microscale Ni2(Mo,Cr)2 particles formed at the grain boundaries via ordering reactions occurring preferentially in the grain boundary area. The mechanical behavior of the aged alloy is strongly related to the precipitation of this microscale phase, which governs the ductility level as well as the transition in the fracture mode from intragranular to intergranular. Finally, the electrical resistivity variation within the HAZ was not associated with microstrutural alterations and therefore was attributed to variations in the quantity of the short range ordered structures.

Matroids capture an abstraction of independence in mathematics, and in doing so, connect discrete mathematical structures that arise in a variety of contexts. A matroid can be defined in several cryptomorphic ways depending on which perspective of a matroid is most applicable to the given context. Among the many important concepts in matroid theory, the concept of matroid duality provides a powerful tool when addressing difficult problems. The usefulness of matroid duality stems from the fact that the dual of a matroid is itself a matroid. In this thesis, we explore a matroid-like object called a flag matroid. In particular, we suggest a notion of duality for flag matroids and we investigate the implications of this notion.

Ionic liquids are organic salts with room temperature melting points. Their unique physicochemical properties make them popular choices in the fields of tribology, energy storage and production, and extractions. Previous studies show that IL’s interfacial volume, extending some nanometers from an adjacent surface, is characterized by the self-assembly of IL molecules into ordered structures. This ordering imparts unique properties which often govern the properties of ILs and affect their application in the aforementioned areas. This thesis describes research conducted to understand the behaviors and interactions of ILs at interfaces, along with investigations of bulk IL structures and transitions in the presence of water. The findings reported will help the scientific community by giving insight into the physical and chemical processes surrounding IL behavior, allowing ILs’ physicochemical properties to be more accurately tailored, via judicious synthesis, to a desired application. Major findings of this work show that the ordered interfacial region may extend up to two orders of magnitude further from the interface than previously thought. Specifically, this thesis shows several examples of reversible IL self-assembly into long-range ordered films that extend up to ~ 2 μm from a surface. This is approximately twelve times the thickness of interfacial region previously reported. Temperature controlled studies on the bulk structure of an IL at its phase transition temperatures aid in understanding the structural arrangement of molecules in the bulk fluid as a function of temperature. Spectroscopic analyses of these bulk studies and the above interfacial systems showed no similarities, indicating that the self-assembled interfacial structures are, in fact, unique. Being hygroscopic in nature, water is the most common impurity found in ILs. Water can affect IL intermolecular forces and the resulting structures in bulk fluids as well as at the interface. One of the chapter of this thesis describes these interactions, and the variably hydrated IL structures for two classes of ILs via spectroscopic and electrochemical techniques. The outcomes of this thesis will aid the community in understanding interfacial and bulk structures of ILs, as well as influences of temperature and water on these structures. The description of extended IL structures provides valuable insights into new design principles for truly task-specific ILs.

Chemical and physical interactions play important roles in surface film formation and fluid slip at the fluid-solid interface. It has been shown that the fluid molecules at this solid interface behave differently than the molecules in the bulk. To investigate fluid film formation and the fluid’s transition between bulk and interfacial regions, a dynamic wetting technique is utilized. This technique allows the formation of variable thickness fluid films. When used in conjunction with vibrational spectroscopy and ellipsometry, direct analysis of variable thicknesses films, spanning the bulk to interfacial transition, can be obtained. Film thickness are predicted using the Landau-Levich model and the Lifshitz model, and comparisons generally agree with experimental results. According to hydrodynamic no slip boundary condition, fluid molecules near a solid surface can have no velocity with respect to the solid substrate. Recent theories state more specifically that, if a fluid comes in contact with an ultra-smooth surface (< 5-7 nm RMS roughness), the no slip boundary condition might be violated. We confirmed violation of the no slip boundary condition in two specific cases for fluid layers on SAM-modified substrates. To understand how the fluid/solid properties affect this condition, an acetophenone and bare silver surface was studied. Our results show that the structure and ordering of fluid molecules within these films are highly dependent on the film’s thickness and confinement. Temperature control wetting studies also corroborate with these results showing that as a frozen film of large thickness approaches the melting point, a molecular reorganization occurs creating a crystalline structure before the film melts into an isotropic bulk structure. Structure dependence on alkyl-chain length was then investigated using a series of trialkylamine fluids. Results show significant changes in the vibrational profile as a function of film thicknesses and rotational velocity as the alkyl-chains increase in length. These are ascribed to changes in primary carbon attached to the nitrogen as a function shearing and the rigidity of the molecule. These results reveal interactions taking place at the solid-liquid interface and have impacts on a broad spectrum of industrial, commercial, and research applications including lubrication and transportation vehicles.

The emergence of Indochina in the French imagination was articulated in both representational and institutional modes. Representation involves the transmission of colonial ideals through more obtuse means; that is, through literary texts, travelogues, exhibitions, film and advertising. However, these textual sites feed from and invest in a material situation, which was the institutional arm of colonialism. Indochina was institutionally articulated in cartographic maps and surveys, in the new social spaces of cities and towns, in architectural and technological forms, through social technologies of discipline and welfare and in cultural and religious organisations. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, across a number of textual sites, the representation and institutionalisation of Otherness through the politics of space in the French colony of Indochina, Indochine in this sense becomes a spatial discourse. The French constructed a mental and physical space for Indochina by blanketing and suffocating the original cultural landscape, which in fact had to be ignored for this process to occur. What actually became manifest as a result of this projection stemmed from the French imagination. Just as the French manipulated space, language also underwent the same process of reduction. The Vietnamese script was latinised to make it more 'useable' and ‘accessible’. Through christening the union of Indochina; initiating a comprehensive writing reform; and renaming the streets in the colonial cities, the French used language us another tool for 'making transparent'. Furthermore, the colonial powers established a communication and transport network throughout the colony in an attempt to materialise their fictive (artificial) vision of a unified French Indochinese space. The accessibility and design of these different modes of transport reflected the gendered, racial and class divisions inherent in the colonial establishment. At the heart of representing and institutionalising Indochina was the desire to control and contain. This characterised French imperial ordering of space in the city and the rural areas. In rural areas land was divided into small parcels and alienated to individuals or worked into precise grids for the rubber plantation. In urban centres the native quarter was clearly demarcated from the European quarter which functioned as its modern, progressive Other. The rationale behind this segregation was premised on European, nineteenth century discourses of race, class, gender and hygiene. Influenced by Darwinian and neo-Lamarkian theories of race, this biological discourse identified the 'working class', 'women' and 'the native' as not only biologically but also culturally inferior. They were perceived as a potential, degenerative threat to the biological, cultural and industrial development of the nation. In the colonial context, space was thus ordered and domesticated to control the native population. Coextensively, the literature which springs from such a structure will be tainted by the same ideas, and thus the spaces it formulates within the readers mind feed on and reinforce this foundation. Examples of gender and indigenous narratives which contest this imaginative, transparent topography are analysed throughout this thesis. They provide instances of struggle and resistance which undermine the ideal/stereotypical level of architectural and planned space and delineate an alternative insight into colonial spatial and social relations. The fictional accounts of European women and indigenous writers both challenge and reaffirm the fixity of some of these idealised colonial boundaries. In various literary, historical, political, architectural and cinematic discourses Indochina has been und continues to be depicted as a modern city and exotic Utopia. Informed by the mood of nostalgia, exotic images of Indochina have resurfaced in contemporary French culture. France's continued desire to create, control and maintain an Indochinese space in the French public imagination reinforces the multi-layered, interconnected and persistent nature of colonial discourse.

World Wide Web search engines process millions of queries per day from users all over the world. Efficient query evaluation is achieved through the use of an inverted index, where, for each word in the collection the index maintains a list of the documents in which the word occurs. Query processing may also require access to document specific statistics, such as document length; access to word statistics, such as the number of unique documents in which a word occurs; and collection specific statistics, such as the number of documents in the collection. The index maintains individual data structures for each these sources of information, and repeatedly accesses each to process a query. A by-product of a web search engine is a list of all queries entered into the engine: a query log. Analyses of query logs have shown repetition of query terms in the requests made to the search system. In this work we explore techniques that take advantage of the repetition of user queries to improve the accuracy or efficiency of text search. We introduce an index organisation scheme that favours those documents that are most frequently requested by users and show that, in combination with early termination heuristics, query processing time can be dramatically reduced without reducing the accuracy of the search results. We examine the stability of such an ordering and show that an index based on as little as 100,000 training queries can support at least 20 million requests. We show the correlation between frequently accessed documents and relevance, and attempt to exploit the demonstrated relationship to improve search effectiveness. Finally, we deconstruct the search process to show that query time redundancy can be exploited at various levels of the search process. We develop a model that illustrates the improvements that can be achieved in query processing time by caching different components of a search system. This model is then validated by simulation using a document collection and query log. Results on our test data show that a well-designed cache can reduce disk activity by more than 30%, with a cache that is one tenth the size of the collection.

In this research, we consider production/inventory management decisions of a rmthat sells its product in two market segments during a nite planning horizon. In thebeginning of each period, the rm makes a decision on how much to produce basedon the production capacity and the current on-hand inventory available. After theproduction is made at the beginning of the period, the rm rst satises the stochasticdemand from customers in its primary market. Any primary market demand thatcannot be satised is lost. After satisfying the demand from the primary market, ifthere is still inventory on hand, all or part of the remaining products can be sold ina secondary market with ample demand at a lower price. Hence, the second decisionthat the rm makes in each period is how much to sell in the secondary market, orequivalently, how much inventory to carry to the next period.The objective is to maximize the expected net revenue during a nite planninghorizon by determining the optimal production quantity in each period, and theoptimal inventory amount to carry to the next period after the sales in primary andsecondary markets. We term the optimal inventory amount to be carried to the nextperiod as \economic retention quantity". We model this problem as a nite horizonstochastic dynamic program. Our focus is to characterize the structure of the optimalpolicy and to analyze the system under dierent parameter settings. Conditioning on given parameter set, we establish lower and upper bounds on the optimal policyparameters. Furthermore, we provide computational tools to determine the optimalpolicy parameters. Results of the numerical analysis are used to provide furtherinsights into the problem from a managerial perspective.

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an increasing coupling of N (N >= 2) synchronous dynamics on S-Zd (PCA). Increasing means the coupling preserves stochastic ordering. We first present our main construction theorem in the case where S is totally ordered; applications to attractive PCAs are given. When S is only partially ordered, we show on two examples that a coupling of more than two synchronous dynamics may not exist. We also prove an extension of our main result for a particular class of partially ordered spaces.

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) is a fundamental NP-complete problem of determining whether there exists an assignment of variables which makes a Boolean formula evaluate to True. SAT is a convenient representation for many naturally occurring optimization and decisions problems such as planning and circuit verification. SAT is most commonly solved by a form of backtracking search which systematically explores the space of possible variable assignments. We show that the order in which variable polarities are assigned can have a significant impact on the performance of backtracking algorithms. We present several ways of transforming SAT instances into non-linear objective functions and describe three value-ordering methods based on iterative optimization techniques. We implement and test these heuristics in the widely-recognized MiniSAT framework. The first approach determines polarities by applying Newton's Method to a sparse system of non-linear objective functions whose roots correspond to the satisfying assignments of the propositional formula. The second approach determines polarities by minimizing an objective function corresponding to the number of clauses conflicting with each assignment. The third approach determines preferred polarities by performing stochastic gradient descent on objective functions sampled from a family of continuous potentials. The heuristics are evaluated on a set of standard benchmarks including random, crafted and industrial problems. We compare our results to five existing heuristics, and show that MiniSAT equipped with our heuristics often outperforms state-of-the-art SAT solvers.

In this research, we consider production/inventory management decisions of a rmthat sells its product in two market segments during a nite planning horizon. In thebeginning of each period, the rm makes a decision on how much to produce basedon the production capacity and the current on-hand inventory available. After theproduction is made at the beginning of the period, the rm rst satises the stochasticdemand from customers in its primary market. Any primary market demand thatcannot be satised is lost. After satisfying the demand from the primary market, ifthere is still inventory on hand, all or part of the remaining products can be sold ina secondary market with ample demand at a lower price. Hence, the second decisionthat the rm makes in each period is how much to sell in the secondary market, orequivalently, how much inventory to carry to the next period.The objective is to maximize the expected net revenue during a nite planninghorizon by determining the optimal production quantity in each period, and theoptimal inventory amount to carry to the next period after the sales in primary andsecondary markets. We term the optimal inventory amount to be carried to the nextperiod as \economic retention quantity". We model this problem as a nite horizonstochastic dynamic program. Our focus is to characterize the structure of the optimalpolicy and to analyze the system under dierent parameter settings. Conditioning on given parameter set, we establish lower and upper bounds on the optimal policyparameters. Furthermore, we provide computational tools to determine the optimalpolicy parameters. Results of the numerical analysis are used to provide furtherinsights into the problem from a managerial perspective.