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This article deals with the dissimilar joining of two different grade Cr-Mo steel (2.25Cr-1Mo: P22 and modified 9Cr-1Mo: P91) for power plant application. The dissimilar butt-welded joint was produced for conventional V groove design by using the gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) process with the application of an ERNiCrMo-3 Ni-based super alloy filler. A microstructure characterization was performed to measure the inhomogeneity in the microstructure and element diffusion across the interface in a welded joint. The experiments were also performed to evaluate the mechanical properties of the dissimilar welded joint in as-welded (AW) and post-weld heat treatment (PWHT) conditions. An acceptable level of the mechanical properties was obtained for the AW joint. After PWHT, a significant level of the element diffusion across the interface of the weld metal and P22 steel was observed, resulting in heterogeneity in microstructure near the interface, which was also supported by the hardness variation. Inhomogeneity in mechanical properties (impact strength and hardness) was measured across the weldments for the AW joint and was reduced after the PWHT. The tensile test results indicate an acceptable level of tensile properties for the welded joint in both AW and PWHT conditions and failure was noticed in the weak region of the P22 steel instead of the weld metal.

Dielectric elastomers are active materials that undergo large deformations and change their instantaneous moduli when they are actuated by electric fields. By virtue of these features, composites made of soft dielectrics can filter waves across frequency bands that are electrostatically tunable.To date, to improve the performance of these adaptive phononic crystals, such as the width of these bands at the actuated state, metaheuristics-based topology optimization was used. However, the design freedom offered by this approach is limited because the number of function evaluations increases exponentially with the number of design variables. Here, we go beyond the limitations of this approach, by developing an efficient gradient-based topology optimization method for maximizing the width of the band gaps in an exemplary case study. We employ a finite element formulation of the governing equations, and use the properties of each element as the design variables. In order to iteratively update the design variables, we employ gradient-based optimization, namely the Method of Moving Asymptotes. We carry out and implement fully analytical sensitivity analysis for computing the gradient of the objective function with respect to each one of the design variables. The numerical results of the method developed here demonstrate prohibited frequency bands that are indeed wider that those that were generated using metaheuristics-based topology optimization, while the computational cost to identify them is reduced by orders of magnitude.

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