<div>Understanding grain growth in dielectric ceramics is essential to controlling the electrical and mechanical properties necessary to produce ceramic capacitors and sensors. The effect of alloying barium titanate with strontium titanate on the equilibrium crystal shape was investigated in order to determine possible impacts on grain growth. The equilibrium crystal shape was studied through three experimental methods to identify possible changes in grain boundary energy or anisotropy with changing composition.</div><div>The first method was by imaging intergranular pores to observe faceting behavior and relative interfacial energies. Intergranular pores were reconstructed to determine the relative surface energies of the identified facets. The second method was to perform atomic force microscopy on surface facets to collect topography data. The topography data was combined with orientation data obtained by EBSD analysis from the same region, and used to calculate the normal vector of the surface facets. These datasets were plotted in a stereographic projection to study the faceting anisotropy. The third method involved collecting EBSD orientation data and images of surface faceting behavior. The surface faceting behavior of each grain was categorized by type of facet and plotted on a stereographic projection at the corresponding orientation. This allowed for the analysis of faceting transitions and the differentiation of faceted and continuous regions of the equilibrium crystal shape. The analysis of faceting behavior across compositions has implications on grain growth of the barium titanate/strontium titanate system.</div>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Laurence Senelick. Submitted to the Dept. of Drama. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-188). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

<p dir="ltr">We investigate the surface diffusion flow of smooth curves with anisotropic surface energy.</p><p dir="ltr">This geometric flow is the H−1-gradient flow of an energy functional. It preserves the area</p><p dir="ltr">enclosed by the evolving curve while at the same time decreases its energy. We show the</p><p dir="ltr">existence of a unique local in time solution for the flow but also the existence of a global in</p><p dir="ltr">time solution if the initial curve is close to the Wulff shape. In addition, we prove that the</p><p dir="ltr">global solution converges to the Wulff shape as t → ∞. In the current setting, the anisotropy</p><p dir="ltr">is not too strong so that the Wulff shape is given by a smooth curve. In the last section, we</p><p dir="ltr">formulate the corresponding problem when the Wulff shape exhibits corners.</p>

Metal hydrides are promising candidates for H2 storage, but high stability and poor kinetics are the important challenges which have to be solved for vehicular applications. Most of recent experimental reports for improving thermodynamics of metal hydrides have been focused on lowering reaction enthalpies of a metal hydride by mixing other compounds. However, finding out metal hydride mixtures satisfying favorable thermodynamics among a large number of possible metal hydride mixtures is inefficient and thus a systematic approach is required for an efficient and rigorous solution. Our approaches introduced in this thesis allow a systematic screening of promising metal hydrides or their mixtures from all possible metal hydrides and their mixtures. Our approaches basically suggest two directions for improving metal hydride thermodynamics. First, our calculations for examining the relation between the particle size of simple metal hydrides and thermodynamics of their decomposition reactions provide that the relation would depend on the total surface energy difference between a metal and its hydride form. It ultimately suggests that we will be able to screen metal hydride nanoparticles having favorable thermodynamics from all possible metal hydrides by examining the total surface differences. Second, more importantly, we suggest that our thermodynamic calculations combined with the grand canonical linear programming method and updated database efficiently and rigorously screen potential promising bulk metal hydrides and their mixtures from a large collection of possible combinations. The screened promising metal hydrides and their mixtures can release H2 via single step or multi step. Our additional free energy calculations for a few selected promising single step reactions and their metastable paths show that we can identify the most stable free energy paths for any selected reactant mixtures. In this thesis, we also demonstrate that a total free energy minimization method can predict the possible evolution of impurity other than H2 for several specified mixtures. However, it is not ready to predict reaction thermodynamics from a large number of compounds.

Cette thèse porte sur le modèle d'Ising dilué, dans la région de transition de phase. Le modèle d'Ising est un modèle classique de la mécanique statistique ; il a la particularité de présenter deux phases distinctes à basse température, ce qui a motivé, entre autres, son utilisation pour l'étude rigoureuse de la coexistence de phases. Notre objectif était d'étendre la description du phénomène de coexistence de phases au cas du milieu aléatoire, c'est-à-dire au modèle d'Ising dilué, lorsque la température et la dilution sont suffisamment faibles pour que deux phases d'aimantation opposées apparaissent.<br /><br />La thèse comporte quatre chapitres. Dans un premier chapitre, nous adaptons les travaux de Pisztora au cas du milieu aléatoire et établissons une procédure de renormalisation compatible avec la dilution. Dans un second chapitre, nous étudions en détail la tension superficielle de ce modèle, pour la mesure de Gibbs correspondant à un milieu fixé, et pour la mesure moyennée. Nous caractérisons la limite à basse température de chacune de ces quantités et décrivons les formes des cristaux correspondants. Nous montrons que les déviations inférieures de la tension superficielle ont un coût surfacique et donnons une borne inférieure sur la fonction de taux à l'aide de méthodes de concentration de la mesure. Dans un troisième chapitre, nous décrivons le phénomène de coexistence de phases, sous la mesure Gibbs et sous la mesure moyennée. Dans un quatrième et dernier chapitre, nous concluons la thèse avec une application à la dynamique de Glauber, et montrons que l'autocorrélation décroît au plus vite comme une puissance inverse du temps.