Papers by Author: R. Elliott

Abstract: During operation mechanical structures can experience large vibration amplitudes. One of the challenges encountered in gas-turbine blade design is avoiding high-cycle fatigue failure usually caused by large resonance stresses driven by aeroelastic excitation. A common approach to control the amplitude levels relies on increasing friction damping by incorporating underplatform dampers (UPD). An accurate prediction of the dynamics of a blade-damper system is quite challenging, due to the highly nonlinear nature of the friction interfaces and detailed validation is required to ensure that a good modelling approach is selected. To support the validation process, a newly developed experimental damper rig will be presented, based on a set of newly introduced non-dimensional parameters that ensure a similar dynamic behaviour of the test rig to a real turbine blade-damper system. An ini- tial experimental investigation highlighted the sensitivity of the measured response with regards to settling and running in of the damper, and further measurements identified a strong dependence of the nonlinear behaviour to localised damper motion. Numerical simulations of the damper rig with a simple macroslip damper model were performed during the preliminary design, and a comparison to the measured data highlighted the ability of the basic implicit model to capture the resonance frequencies of the system accuratelyю

Abstract: We study (through computer simulation) the variation of the band gap as a function of sizes and shapes of small Silicon (Si) dots using pseudo-potential approach. We have used empirical pseudo-potential Hamiltonian and a plane wave basis expansion and a basic tetrahedral structure. It is found that the gap decreases for increasing dot size. Furthermore, the band gap increases as much as 0.13eV on passivation the surface of the dot with hydrogen. So both quantum confinement and surface passivation determine the optical and electronic properties of Si quantum dots. Visible luminescence is probably due to radiative recombination of electrons and holes in the quantum confined nanostructures. The effect of passivation of the surface dangling bonds by hydrogen atoms and the role of surface states on the gap energy as well as on the HOMO-LUMO states has also been examined. We have investigated the entire energy spectrum starting from the very low lying ground state to the very high lying excited states for silicon dots having 5, 18, 17 and 18 atoms. The results for the size dependence of the HOMO-LUMO gap and the wave functions for the bonding-antibonding states are presented and the importance of the confinement and the role of hydrogen passivation on the confinement are also discussed.