From 1993 the Lafarge group became a world firm. 1993 is indeed the starting point of a sustained growth which led the group to be the world leader for cement and aggregates. Thanks to an excellent control of production costs and to high rates of investment, the group was able to maintain a high...

TiC and TiB2 reinforced iron based metal matrix composite (MMC) coating was synthesized on mild carbon steel by laser cladding employing B4C, ferrotitanium, and FeCrSiB mixed powders. The microstructure and chemical composition were analyzed by means of SEM, EPMA, and XRD. Results show that the...

Sulfonated ultra-thin proton-exchange polymer membrane carrying pyridine groups was made from a plasma polymerization of styrene, 2-vinylpyridine, and trifluoromethanesulfonic acid by after-glow capacitively coupled discharge technique. Pyridine groups tethered to the polymer backbone acts as a...

We apply the Rayleigh method to derive a formulation yielding the effective dielectric tensor of a periodic composite consisting of an array of elliptical cylinders placed in a matrix of unit dielectric constant. We consider two types of composites having this structure: dilute noncritical and...

We derive the first dynamic correction to the effective refractive index for a square array of cylinders (of finite or infinite refractive index), subject to a low-frequency incident radiation. This correction also imposes constraints on the wave number region for which the Lorentz-Lorenz...

In the current work, kenaf fibers reinforced epoxy (KFRE) composite was developed. Adhesive wear and frictional characteristics of KFRE were investigated under wet contact conditions at different fiber orientations, considering different applied loads (50–200 N) and sliding distances (0–30...

The article considers a possibility of making composite materials from metal nickel and super-hard materials. It shows that such a product is available in the world market, but there is no information on technology of manufacture of such a product in open literature. It sets the issue of...

In this paper, a new method for fabricating Ni80Fe20/Cu composite wires is presented. A series of samples were prepared by alternating the rotating direction of the Cu wire during RF magnetron sputtering. In order to keep the overall coating thickness of all the samples constant, the alternating...

A review of structural health monitoring methods, including residual cure strain monitoring is presented for the wind turbine blade industry. A comparison is presented for dielectric, acoustic, ultrasonic, thermal and fibre optic monitoring methods. This review highlights the need for further...