Electron beam curing of composites is a nonthermal, nonautoclave curing process offering the following advantages compared to conventional thermal curing: substantially reduced manufacturing costs and curing times; improvements in part quality and performance; reduced environmental and health concerns; and improvements in material handling. In 1994 a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), sponsored by the Department of Energy Defense Programs and 10 industrial partners, was established to advance electron beam curing of composites. The CRADA has successfully developed hundreds of new toughened and untoughened resins, offering unlimited formulation and processing flexibility. Several patent applications have been filed for this work. Composites made from these easily processable, low shrinkage material match the performance of thermal cured composites and exhibit: low void contents comparable to autoclave cured composites (less than 1%); superb low water absorption values in the same range as cyanate esters (less than 1%); glass transition temperatures rivaling those of polyimides (greater than 390 C); mechanical properties comparable to high performance, autoclave cured composites; and excellent property retention after cryogenic and thermal cycling. These materials have been used to manufacture many composite parts using various fabrication processes including hand lay-up, tow placement, filament winding, resin transfer molding and vacuum assisted …

We study budget constrained optimal network upgrading problems. Such problems aim at finding optimal strategies for improving a network under some cost measure subject to certain budget constraints. A general problem in this setting is the following. We are given an edge weighted graph G = (V, E) where nodes represent processors and edges represent bidirectional communication links. The processor at a node v {element_of} V can be upgraded at a cost of c(v). Such an upgrade reduces the delay of each link emanating from v. The goal is to find a minimum cost set of nodes to be upgraded so that the resulting network has the best performance with respect to some measure. We consider the problem under two measures, namely, the weight of a minimum spanning tree and the bottleneck weight of a minimum bottleneck spanning tree. We present approximation and hardness results for the problem. Our results are tight to within constant factors. We also show that these approximation algorithms can be used to construct good approximation algorithms for the dual versions of the problems where there is a budget constraint on the upgrading cost and the objectives are minimum weight spanning tree and minimum bottleneck weight …