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Kevlar–nanotube composite fibers of high strength and toughness are demonstrated. Commercially available Kevlar fibers are soaked in a suspension of nanotubes in the solvent N‐methylpyrrolidone, resulting in swelling of the fibers, and allowing the nanotubes to diffuse into the interior of the fiber (see image). The resulting composites are stronger and tougher than the original Kevlar fibers.

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Data envelopment analysis is used in this study to provide measures of the e¤ciency of individual credit unions in the Australian state of Victoria in the period 1992^5. The resulting measures are consistent with those reported in comparable studies. There is no evidence that over the period of the study, the`average' credit union moved closer to the e¤cient frontier. E¤ciency measures are analysed according to the bond of association and the results are consistent with the proposition that a tighter bond will tend to reduce operating costs. In the period of the study there &CIRIEC 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers,

Kevlar coated carbon nanotubes have been used as additives to polyvinylchloride, resulting in composites with improved mechanical properties demonstrating up to 50% and 70% increases in tensile strength and Young's modulus respectively at very low nanotube loading levels.

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Abstract-State-of-the-art System-on-Chip (SoC) consists of hundreds of processing elements, while trends in design of the next generation of SoC point to integration of thousand of processing elements, requiring high performance interconnect for high throughput communications. Optical on-chip interconnects are currently considered as one of the most promising paradigms for the design of such next generation MultiProcessors System on Chip (MPSoC). They enable significantly increased bandwidth, increased immunity to electromagnetic noise, decreased latency, and decreased power. Therefore, defining new architectures taking advantage of optical interconnects represents today a key issue for MPSoC designers. Moreover, new design methodologies, considering the design constraints specific to these architectures are mandatory. In this paper, we present a contention-free new architecture based on optical network on chip, called Optical Ring Network-on-Chip (ORNoC). We also show that our network scales well with both large 2D and 3D architectures. For the efficient design, we propose automatic wavelength-/waveguide assignment and demonstrate that the proposed architecture is capable of connecting 1296 nodes with only 102 waveguides and 64 wavelengths per waveguide.