Swelling and shrinking of a polyelectrolyte gel induced by a salt solution

The stability of a polyelectrolyte gel in solution results from a delicate balance between several competing thermodynamic forces, viz.

A new form of the coherency energy in pseudoelasticity

In some previous papers [1], [2] pseudoelasticity in tensile experiments has been treated thermodynamically under the assumption that the relevant constitutive ingredients are

A rod-airfoil experiment as a benchmark for broadband noise modeling

A low Mach number rod-airfoil experiment is shown to be a good benchmark for numerical and theoretical broadband noise modeling. The benchmarking approach is applied to a sound computation from a 2D unsteady-Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (U-RANS) flow field, where 3D effects are partially compensated for by a spanwise statistical model and by a 3D large eddy simulation. The experiment was conducted in the large anechoic wind tunnel of the Ecole Centrale de Lyon. Measurements taken included particle image velocity (PIV) around the airfoil, single hot wire, wall pressure coherence, and far field pressure. These measurements highlight the strong 3D effects responsible for spectral broadening around the rod vortex shedding frequency in the subcritical regime, and the dominance of the noise generated around the airfoil leading edge. The benchmarking approach is illustrated by two examples:

Closed trans-scale statistical microdamage mechanics

Damage and failure due to distributed microcracks or microvoids are on the challenging frontiers of solid mechanics. This appeals strongly to tools not yet fully developed in continuum damage mechanics, in particular to irreversible statistical thermodynamics and a unified macroscopic equations of mechanics and kinetic equations of microstructural transformations. This review provides the state of the art in statistical microdamage mechanics.

Analytical solutions of 2D cresting models using the hodograph method

Three new applications of the hodograph method to the problem of gas and water cresting towards horizontal wells are presented:

Microscale Synthetic Schlieren

We develop the axisymmetric Synthetic Schlieren technique to study the wake of a microscale sphere settling through a density stratification. A video-microscope was used to magnify and image apparent displacements of a micron-sized random-dot pattern. Due to the nature of the wake, density gradient perturbations in the horizontal greatly exceed those in the vertical, requiring modification of previously developed axisymmetric techniques. We present results for 780 and 383 μm spheres, and describe the limiting role of noise in the system for a 157 μm sphere. This technique can be instrumental in understanding a range of ecological and environmental oceanic processes on the microscale.

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Visualization of fan-spreading in two-phase jet flows

Flow visualizations obtained in a two-phase jet flow with 80 m particles at a mass loading of 5% revealed the following.

Two- and three-dimensional flows in nearly rectangular cavities driven by collinear motion of two facing walls

Two- and three-dimensional flows in nearly cuboidal cavities are investigated experimentally. A tight cavity is formed in the gap between two long and parallel cylinders of large radii by adding rigid top, bottom, and end walls. The cross-section perpendicular to the axes of the cylinders is nearly rectangular with aspect ratio Γ. The axial aspect ratio Λ > 10 is large to suppress end-wall effects. The fluid motion is driven by independent and steady rotation of the cylinders about their axes which defines two Reynolds numbers Re _1,2. Stability boundaries of the nearly two-dimensional steady flow have been determined as functions of Re _1,2 for Γ = 0.76 and Γ = 1. Up to six different three-dimensional supercritical modes have been identified. The critical thresholds for the onset of most of the three-dimensional modes, three of which have been observed for the first time, agree well with corresponding linear-stability calculations. Particular attention is paid to the flow for Γ = 1 under symmetric and parallel wall motion. In that case the basic flow consists of two mirror symmetric counter-rotating parallel vortices. They become modulated in span-wise direction as the driving increases. Detailed LDV measurements of the supercritical three-dimensional velocity field and the bifurcation show an excellent agreement with numerical simulations.

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Derivation of a new free energy for biological membranes

A new free energy for thin biomembranes depending on chemical composition, degree of order and membranal-bending deformations is derived in this paper. This is a result of constitutive and geometric assumptions at the three-dimensional level. The enforcement of a new symmetry group introduced in (Deseri et al., in preparation) and a 3D--2D dimension reduction procedure are among the ingredients of our methodology. Finally, the identification of the lower order term of the energy (i.e. the membranal contribution) on the basis of a bottom-up approach is performed; this relies upon standard statistical mechanics calculations. The main result is an expression of the biomembrane free energy density, whose local and non-local counterparts are weighted by different powers of the bilayer thickness. The resulting energy exhibits three striking aspects:

Lyapunov stable penalty methods for imposing holonomic constraints in multibody system dynamics

This paper presents stability and convergence results on a novel approach for imposing holonomic constraints for a class of multibody system dynamics. As opposed to some recent techniques that employ a penalty functional to approximate the Lagrange multipliers, the method herein defines a penalized dynamical system using penalty-augmented kinetic and potential energies, as well as a penalty dependent constraint violation dissipation function. In as much as the governing equations are not typically cocreive, the usual convergence criteria for linear variational boundary value problems are not directly applicable. Still numerical simulations by various researchers suggest that the method is convergent and stable. Despite the fact that the governing equations are nonlinear, the theoretical convergence of the formulation is guaranteed if the multibody system is natural and conservative. Likewise, stability and asymptotic stability results for the penalty formulation are derived from well-known stability results available from classical mechanics. Unfortunately, the convergence theorem is not directly applicable to dissipative multibody systems, such as those encountered in control applications. However, it is shown that the approximate solutions of a typical dissipative system converge to a nearby collection of trajectories that can be characterized precisely using a Lyapunov/Invariance Principle analysis. In short, the approach has many advantages as an alternative to other computational techniques:

On J-integrals in the plane fracture

In this paper,we discuss J-integrals near modelsⅠandⅡcrack tips for the plates oflinear-elastic isotropic homogeneous material and orthotropic composite material,usingthe theories of complex function and calculus,and obtain the result as follows:(1)The various J-integrals are transformed into standard form of line integrals withrespect to coordinates:J=∫_rP(x,y)dx Q(x,y)dy(2)Independence of path of the various J-integrals is proved.(3)Computing formulae of J-integrals are derived.     

Optimal control of a spacecraft with a solar sail

Analysis of the results indicates that:

Variational optical flow estimation for particle image velocimetry

We introduce a novel class of algorithms for evaluating PIV image pairs. The mathematical basis is a continuous variational formulation for globally estimating the optical flow vector fields over the whole image. This class of approaches has been known in the field of image processing and computer vision for more than two decades but apparently has not been applied to PIV image pairs so far. We pay particular attention to a multi-scale representation of the image data so as to cope with the quite specific signal structure of particle image pairs. The experimental evaluation shows that a prototypical variational approach competes in noisy real-world scenarios with three alternative approaches especially designed for PIV-sequence evaluation. We outline the potential of the variational method for further developments.The publications of the CVGPR Group are listed under .

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