Newtonian reference materials withv < 1 mm2/s and their application in extending the range of capillary viscometers

Several newtonian liquids with kinematic viscosities below about 1 mm²/s are investigated in order to find out if the commonly used purity specifications are sufficient to qualify the liquids as viscosity standards which can be used to determine the kinetic energy correction of glas capillary viscometers.     

The application of evolutionary and maximum entropy algorithms to photoelastic spectral analysis

Over the past 10 years, spectral analysis has been shown to have the potential to be a reliable means of automating photoelasticity. However, the four methods of analyzing the spectra that have previously been proposed are slow and, in some cases, inaccurate. This paper describes three new methods for spectral analysis based on the maximum entropy method, a genetic algorithm and a memetic algorithm. Thirty-five spectra for known fringe orders were recorded and used in testing the four existing methods and the three new ones. It was found that the new methods were all considerably faster than the existing methods, although less accurate than the best existing method. By combining the maximum entropy method with either the genetic algorithm or the memetic algorithm, spectra could be analyzed up to 30 times as fast as they could with any of the existing methods and with comparable accuracy.     

Theory of capillary viscometers taking into account surface tension effects

The constants of the working equation of capillary viscometers of gravity flow type are no true instrument constants owing to its dependence on the surface tension of the fluid. We have calculated numerically this dependence in the case of Ostwald-Rankine and Ubbelohde type viscometers. In the case of Ubbelohde viscometer with suspended level it is possible to make the surface tension errors lower than 0.01% by suitable choice of the radius of curvature of the suspended level. This radius is calculated for many practical cases.     

Maximum entropy principle in relativistic radiation hydrodynamics II: Compton and double Compton scattering

Recently [1], a procedure has been proposed in order to close the set of the moment equations of relativistic radiative fluid dynamics. In particular explicit expressions for the moments of the bremsstrahlung and Thomson scattering source terms have been given. In this work, as anticipated in [1], we shall treat in a systematic way Comptonization and double Compton scattering too. Numerical results relative to the Compton cooling of hot electrons are shown. Received November 14, 2001 / Published online June 4, 2002 RID="a" ID="a" e-mail: mascali@dmi.unict.it Communicated by Ingo Müller, Berlin     

Processing the capillary viscometry data of fluids with yield stress

The capillary viscometer is used to measure the shear stress-shear rate relationship of a wide range of purely viscous fluids. It is however not considered as an appropriate instrument for obtaining the yield stress and the post-yield behaviour of fluids that have a yield stress. This is partly because conventional methods of processing the capillary viscometry data of purely viscous fluids cannot be applied to similar data of fluids with yield stress. The unavoidable experimental noise in the capillary data, particularly at low shear rates, also makes it difficult to obtain a reliable estimate of the yield stress from capillary data. In this investigation the problem of converting the capillary viscometry data of yield stress fluids into a shear stress-shear rate curve and a yield stress is formulated as a Volterra integral equation of the first kind. This is an ill-posed problem i.e. noise in the data will be amplified by inappropriate methods of data processing. A method, based on Tikhonov regularisation that takes into account the ill-posed nature of the problem, is then developed to solve this problem for fluids with yield stress. The performance of this method is assessed by applying it to a set of “synthetic” capillary viscometry data with added random noise and to a set of experimental data for a concentrated suspension of TiO₂ taken from the literature. In both cases Tikhonov regularisation was able to extract the complete shear properties of these fluids from capillary viscometry data alone. Received: 22 November 1999/Accepted: 17 December 1999     

A numerical method of K-S entropy calculation for a strange attractor

Based directly on the original definition of K-S entropy, a new algorithm for calculating K-S entropy from chaotic time series is developed by using some techniques of coding and code operation. The project supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China     

A modified finite element method for determining equilibrium capillary surfaces of liquids with specified volumes

This paper describes a modified finite element method (MFEM) for determining the static equilibrium shape of the capillary surface of a liquid with a prescribed volume constrained by rigid boundaries with arbitrary shapes. It is assumed that the liquid is in static equilibrium under the influence of surface tension, adhesion, and gravity forces. This problem can be solved by employing the conventional FEM; however, a major difficulty arises due to the presence of the volume (integral) constraint and usually requires the use of the Lagrange multiplier method, the sequential unconstrained minimization technique, or the augmented Lagrange multiplier method. With the MFEM, the space variables defining the equilibrium surfaces (or curves) are expanded in terms of parametric interpolation functions, which are designed such that the boundary conditions and the integral constraint equation are automatically satisfied during each iteration of a direct numerical search process. Hence, there is no need to include Lagrange multipliers and/or penalty factors and the problem can be treated more simply as one involving unconstrained optimization. This investigation indicates that the MFEM is more efficient and reliable than the other methods. Results are presented for several case study problems involving liquid solder drops. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characteristic lengths and maximum entropy estimation from probe signals in the ellipsoidal bubble regime

The bubble size, surface and volume distributions in two and three phase flows are essential to determine energy and mass transfer processes. The traditional approaches commonly use a conditional probability density function of chord-lengths to calculate the bubble size distribution, when the bubble size, shape and velocity are known. However, the approach used in this paper obtains the above distributions from statistical relations, requiring only the moments inferred from the measurements given by a sampling probe. Using image analysis of bubbles injected in a water tank, and placing an ideal probe on the image, a sample of bubble diameter, shape factor and velocity angle are obtained. The samples of the bubble chord-length are synthetically generated from these variables. Thus, we propose a semi-parametric approach based on the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) distribution estimation subjected to a number of moment constraints avoiding the use of the complex backward transformation. Therefore, the method allows us to obtain the distributions in close form. The probability density functions of the most important length scales (D, D₂₀, D₃₀, D₃₂), obtained applying the semi-parametric approach proposed here in the ellipsoidal bubble regime, are compared with experimental measurements.     

随机温度场的渐近-最大熵分析

针对具有随机参数的稳态温度场分析,利用拉普拉斯多维积分的渐近展开及函数的泰勒级数展开等方法,求得了节点温度响应的原点矩近似解析表达式。在最大熵原理基础上,获得了节点温度响应的概率密度函数。算例将该方法与Monte-Carlo模拟法进行比较,表明该方法具有较好的精度,且在参数变异性较大时也能获得较满意的结果。     

Ill-posed problems in rheology

Experimental data are always noisy and often incomplete. This leads to ambiguities if one wants to infer from the data some functions, which are related to the measured quantity through an integral equation of the first kind. In rheology many of such so-called ill-posed problems appear. Two techniques to treat such problems, the regularization method and the maximum entropy method, are applied to the determination of the relaxation spectrum from data of small oscillatory shear flow. With simulated data from a reference spectrum it is discussed how the inferred spectrum depends on the region, in which data are available. It turns out that information about the asymptotic behavior of the measured quantity can be of great help in determining the full spectrum also from incomplete data.Dedicated to Prof. Dr. J. Meissner on the occasion of his 60th birthday.