This study examines the sintering of inkjet printed nanoparticle copper ink in a room environment using a laser as a high speed sintering method. Printed patterns were sintered with increasing laser scanning speed up to 400 mm s(-1). The resistivities of the sintered structures were measured and plotted against the scanning speeds. Increased resistivity seems to correlate with increased scanning speed. A selections of analytical methods was used to study the differences in microstructure and composition of the sintered structures. Based on the results, no discernable difference in the microstructure was noticed between the structures sintered using 20 mm s(-1) to 400 mm s(-1) scanning speeds; only the structure scanned using 5 mm s(-1) speed showed a vastly different microstructure and no resistivity was measurable on this structure. Compositional studies revealed that, apart from the structure scanned with 5 mm s(-1) speed which contained the highest oxygen, the rest of the structures showed a steady oxygen increase with increased scanning speed.

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Summary. This paper presents a numerical and experimental study on the mechanical behavior of plasma shocked rock. The dynamic tensile behavior of plasma shock treated Balmoral Red granite was studied under dynamic loading using the Brazilian disc test and the Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar device. Different heat shocks were produced on the Brazilian disc samples by moving the plasma gun over the sample at different speeds. Microscopy clearly showed that as the duration of the thermal shock increases, the number of the surface cracks and their complexity increases (quantified here as the fractal dimension of the crack patterns) and the area of the damaged surface grows larger as well. At the highest thermal shock duration of 0.80 seconds the tensile strength of the Brazilian disc sample drops by approximately 20%. In the numerical simulations of the dynamic Brazilian disc test, this decrease in tensile strength was reproduced by modeling the plasma shock induced damage using the embedded discontinuity finite element method. The damage caused by the plasma shock was modeled by two methods, namely by pre-embedded discontinuity populations with zero strength and by assuming that the rock strength is lowered and conform to the Weibull distribution. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of the effects of the heat shock, the surface microstructure and mechanical behavior of the studied rock, and a promising numerical model to account for the pre-existing crack distributions in a rock material.

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