Three-Dimensional Simulations of RESET Operation in Phase-Change Random Access Memory with Blade-Type Like Phase Change Layer by Finite Element Modeling

An optimized device structure for reducing the RESET current of phase-change random access memory （PCRAM） with blade-type like （BTL） phase change layer is proposed. The electrical thermal analysis of the BTL cell and the blade heater contactor structure by three-dimensional finite element modeling are compared with each other during RESET operation. The simulation results show that the programming region of the phase change layer in the BTL cell is much smaller, and thermal electrical distributions of the BTL cell are more concentrated on the TiN/GST interface. The results indicate that the BTL cell has the superiorities of increasing the heating efficiency, decreasing the power consumption and reducing the RESET current from 0.67mA to 0.32mA. Therefore, the BTL cell will be appropriate for high performance PCRAM device with lower power consumption and lower RESET current.

Increasing Ventilation by Passive Strategies: Analysis of Indoor Air Circulation Changes through the Utilization of Microclimate Elements

A demand for renewable alternatives that would be able to deal with the problems related to well-being is directly linked to the world’s growing needs to save energy and reduce environmental costs. For a project implementation addressing these issues, it is essential to know the climatic conditions of the target area. Taking natural ventilation, climatic factors, and renewable alternatives as important sources of comfort, in this work, passive strategies, through the utilization of microclimate elements as well as the location of outside obstacles, were imposed on an initial and specific project. The objective was to introduce obstacles which could interfere in the field of external wind and evaluate whether this outside intervention is able to make changes in indoor air circulation. The wind fields for the studied cases were obtained by computational simulations, and their consequences were analyzed to attain thermal comfort. The method adopted to obtain the wind fields was a Petrov-Galerkin type method, which is a stabilized mixed finite element method of the Navier-Stokes equations considering the incompressibility and formulated in primitive variables, velocity and pressure. The obtained results point to the solutions that promote the increase or decrease of the wind-field intensity.

Cultivation of Students' Creative Thinking through Building Models

To comply with the strategic goal of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation",universities and col eges adjusted the discipline cultivation objective to be cultivation of innovational and enterprising talents.Innovational and enterprising talents are inseparable from creative thinking,while the cultivation of creative thinking is the basis of cultivation of innovational and enterprising talents.This paper discussed cultivation of students' creative thinking through making building models in basic course of architectural design.Besides,it analyzed the relation between making of building models and creative thinking from divergent thinking,multi-directional thinking,element changing thinking,conversion thinking,and reverse thinking.It is expected to cultivate students' creative thinking through building models,to lay a solid foundation for architectural design courses,and to provide more architectural designers with more solid foundation and creative thinking.

Entirety transformation mechanism and topological-type synthesis for heavy-duty gripping devices

Force closure and stability problems exist in heavy gripping devices.Based on a typical gripping device for forging operations, the workpiece and the gripping device are innovatively considered as a single mechanism in this paper,and its global topological configuration is obtained.The changing element method is used to establish the optimized topology geometry of the gripping device by decreasing the degrees of freedom of the gripping mechanism and improving the force closure performance. Therefore,a new idea for the innovative design of heavy-duty forging gripping devices is provided.As the effect of revolute joint friction on loading capacity of the gripping device cannot be ignored,a unified mechanical equation including friction in terms of the topological adjacency matrix is established to analyze the force closure performance and calculate the loading capacity.The conclusions are provided by experiments.