Great research efforts to investigate the glass-forming ability (GFA) in alloys have been made, leading to an observation that a pinpoint composition produces the best glass-forming characteristics. The reason for this observation is still unknown, limiting the development of bulk metallic glasses (MGs) with a relatively large size. In this work, systematic experimental measurements coupled with calculations were performed to address this issue using the NiNb binary alloy system. It is found that the atomic-level packing efficiency and the clusters-level regularity parameters strongly contribute to their GFA. In particular, the best glass former found in a pinpoint composition possesses the local maximum of the atomic-packing efficiency and the highest degree of the cluster regularity. This work provides an understanding of GFA from atomic and cluster levels and will shed light on the development of more MGs with relatively large critical casting sizes.

We consider Monte Carlo methods for the classical nonlinear filtering problem. The first method is based on a backward pathwise filtering equation and the second method is related to a backward linear stochastic partial differential equation. We study convergence of the proposed numerical algorithms. The considered methods have such advantages as a capability in principle to solve filtering problems of large dimensionality, reliable error control, and recurrency. Their efficiency is achieved due to the numerical procedures which use effective numerical schemes and variance reduction techniques. The results obtained are supported by numerical experiments.

This paper aims to investigate the failure probability of short high-strength concrete tied columns using the Monte Carlo technique. The random variables considered in this study are the strength of concrete, the strength of steels, the cross-section dimensions, the location of the steel reinforcement, the variability of strength model and the loads. The results show that the failure probabilities of high-strength concrete columns designed according to the ACI Code are relatively high. The current ACI Code may not be conservative for design of short high-strength concrete tied columns.