In the present investigation, the effect of kinetic energy of different materials of the same-sized solid particles is examined on copper as target material using slurry pot tester. Quartz, Silicon carbide and Alumina are the impacting solid particles used for conducting trials. It is understood that the kinetic energy and stress concentration of impacting particles on target surface are responsible for material removal from the target surface, also the effect of erodent property like its shape and density is more dominant at shallow impact angles compared to higher impact angles. However, it is reported in literature that the exponent of velocity varies from 1.87 to 4.00 for ductile materials. Thus, different materials with the same-sized solid particles at constant kinetic energy were used to conduct the experiments. It is observed that for three different materials mass loss for the same mean particle size is nearly constant at 90°orientation angle but variation is found in 30°orientation angle. Further, the SEM micrographs of these solid particles show that alumina have sharp edges and angular nature. Silicon carbide is sub-angular in nature while quartz is blocky in nature. SEM micrographs of eroded surfaces show that at shallow impact angles the material is mainly removed by the platelet mechanism and material is displaced in the direction of flow. Also it is observed that increasing the velocity for quartz particle increases the crater length as compared to other two materials. Erosion wear was found more when alumina are used as the impacting particle due to their angular nature. At normal impact, indentation craters with rim are observed with significance increase in crater size when quartz is used as impacting particles.

Hand gestures are powerful means of communication among humans and sign language is the most natural and expressive way of communication for dump and deaf people. In this work, real-time hand gesture system is proposed. Experimental setup of the system uses fixed position low-cost web camera with 10 mega pixel resolution mounted on the top of monitor of computer which captures snapshot using Red Green Blue [RGB] color space from fixed distance. This work is divided into four stages such as image preprocessing, region extraction, feature extraction, feature matching. First stage converts captured RGB image into binary image using gray threshold method with noise removed using median filter [medfilt2] and Guassian filter, followed by morphological operations. Second stage extracts hand region using blob and crop is applied for getting region of interest and then “Sobel” edge detection is applied on extracted region. Third stage produces feature vector as centroid and area of edge, which will be compared with feature vectors of a training dataset of gestures using Euclidian distance in the fourth stage. Least Euclidian distance gives recognition of perfect matching gesture for display of ASL alphabet, meaningful words using file handling. This paper includes experiments for 26 static hand gestures related to A-Z alphabets. Training dataset consists of 100 samples of each ASL symbol in different lightning conditions, different sizes and shapes of hand. This gesture recognition system can reliably recognize single-hand gestures in real time and can achieve a 90.19% recognition rate in complex background with a “minimum-possible constraints” approach

No abstract

Normally all manufacturing and fabrication processes introduce residual stresses in a component. These stresses exist even after all service or external loads have been removed. Residual stresses have been studied elaborately in the past and even in depth research have been done to determine their magnitude and distribution during different manufacturing processes. But very few works have dealt with the study of residual stresses formation during the casting process. Even though these stresses are less in magnitude, they still result in crack formation and subsequent failure in later phases of the component usage. In this work, the residual stresses developed in a shifter during casting process are first determined by finite element analysis using ANSYS® Mechanical APDL, Release 12.0 software. Initially the analysis was done on a simple block to determine the optimum element size and boundary conditions. With these values, the actual shifter component was analyzed. All these simulations are done in an uncoupled thermal and structural environment. The results showed the areas of maximum residual stress. This was followed by the geometrical optimization of the cast part for minimum residual stresses. The resulting shape gave lesser and more evenly distributed residual stresses. Crack compliance method was used to experimentally determine the residual stresses in the modified cast part. The results obtained from the measurements are verified by finite element analysis findings. Highlights This paper focus on analytical, numerical and experimental design optimization of shifter. Performed design optimization by finite element analysis and experimental of live industrial problem. The results can applicable as a basis of design and optimization of new type of the automotive parts. The results of the current work present the actual behavior of induced stresses.

Early fault detection and diagnosis for medium-speed diesel engines are important to ensure reliable operation throughout the course of their service. This work presents an investigation of the diesel engine combustion-related fault detection capability of crankshaft torsional vibrations. Proposed methodology state the way of early fault detection in the operating six-cylinder diesel engine. The model of six cylinders DI Diesel engine is developed appropriately. As per the earlier work by the same author the torsional vibration amplitudes are used to superimpose the mass and gas torque. Further mass and gas torque analysis is used to detect fault in the operating engine. The DFT of the measured crankshaft's speed, under steady-state operating conditions at constant load shows significant variation of the amplitude of the lowest major harmonic order. This is valid both for uniform operating and faulty conditions and the lowest harmonic orders may be used to correlate its amplitude to the gas pressure torque and mass torque for a given engine. The amplitudes of the lowest harmonic orders (0.5, 1, and 1.5) of the gas pressure torque and mass torque are used to map the fault. A method capable to detect faulty cylinder of operating Kirloskar diesel engine of SL90 Engine-SL8800TA type is developed, based on the phases of the lowest three harmonic orders.

Now a days reduction of gear noise and resulting vibrations has received much attention of the researchers. The internal excitation caused by the variation in tooth mesh stiffness is a key factor in causing vibration. Therefore to reduce gear noise and vibrations several techniques have been proposed in recent years. In this research the experimental work is carried out to study the effect of planet phasing on noise and subsequent resulting vibrations of Nylon-6 planetary gear drive. For this purpose experimental set-up was built and trials were conducted for two different arrangements (i.e., with phasing and without phasing) and it is observed that the noise level and resulting vibrations were reduced by planet phasing arrangement. So from the experimental results it is observed that by applying the meshing phase difference one can reduce planetary gear set noise and vibrations.

No abstract

Metal expansion bellows are a mechanical device for absorbing energy or displacement in structures. It is widely used to deal with vibrations, thermal expansion, and the angular, radial, and axial displacements of components. The main objective of this paper is to perform numerical analysis to find various characteristics of stresses in U-shaped metal expansion bellows as per the requirement of vendor and ASME standards. In this paper, extensive analytical and numerical study is carried out to calculate the different characteristics of stresses due to internal pressure varying from 1 MPa to 2 MPa in U-shaped bellows. Finite element analysis by using Ansys14 is performed to find the characteristics of U-shaped metal expansion bellows. Finally, the results of analytical analysis and finite element method (FEM) show a very good agreement. The results of this research work could be used as a basis for designing a new type of the metal bellows.