Iron flux inside the International Space Station is measured to be lower than predicted

Iron abundance in cosmic rays impinging on astronauts in space habitats is of paramount importance when calculating the radiation risk for human space exploration. The concurrent high relative abundance of iron in Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) and iron ability to produce damages at cellular and molecular levels, together with recent radiobiology results suggests iron as a major candidate to be studied in order to produce accurate radiation hazard assessments. Iron may be in fact responsible for a large percentage of cancer risk during a long interplanetary voyage, and therefore deserves a specific attention. We built a simple model based on CREME96 for the radiation in the International Space Station (ISS) and tested it against recently performed measurements with the ALTEA and Alteino particle detectors. While we can report a good agreement between 50m and 250 keV/μm (very good for several peaks such as Si, Mg, S) we show an overestimation by this model of iron abundances of about 25–80% when compared to the measurements. New analysis on previously published work, supporting this result, are also reported.Reasons for this overestimation are discussed, they are likely to be related to the not detailed enough transport through the multiplicity of the ISS shielding and to the often used simplification of “aluminum equivalent shielding”. The iron sources in LEO, possibly not yet accurate enough when transported in Low Earth Orbit, can also play a role. New concurrent measurements (inside–outside the ISS) are suggested to help resolving this issue.     

Topology optimization of 3D shell structures with porous infill

This paper presents a 3D topology optimization approach for designing shell structures with a porous or void interior. It is shown that the resulting structures are significantly more robust towards load perturbations than completely solid structures optimized under the same condi-tions. The study indicates that the potential benefit of using porous structures is higher for lower total volume fractions. Compared to earlier work dealing with 2D topology opti-mization, we found several new effects in 3D problems. Most notably, the opportunity for designing closed shells signifi-cantly improves the performance of porous structures due to the sandwich effect. Furthermore, the paper introduces improved filter boundary conditions to ensure a completely uniform coating thickness at the design domain boundary.     

Assessment of high-resolution methods for numerical simulations of compressible turbulence with shock waves

Flows in which shock waves and turbulence are present and interact dynamically occur in a wide range of applications, including inertial confinement fusion, supernovae explosion, and scramjet propulsion. Accurate simulations of such problems are challenging because of the contradictory requirements of numerical methods used to simulate turbulence, which must minimize any numerical dissipation that would otherwise overwhelm the small scales, and shock-capturing schemes, which introduce numerical dissipation to stabilize the solution. The objective of the present work is to evaluate the performance of several numerical methods capable of simultaneously handling turbulence and shock waves. A comprehensive range of high-resolution methods (WENO, hybrid WENO/central difference, artificial diffusivity, adaptive characteristic-based filter, and shock fitting) and suite of test cases (Taylor–Green vortex, Shu–Osher problem, shock-vorticity/entropy wave interaction, Noh problem, compressible isotropic turbulence) relevant to problems with shocks and turbulence are considered. The results indicate that the WENO methods provide sharp shock profiles, but overwhelm the physical dissipation. The hybrid method is minimally dissipative and leads to sharp shocks and well-resolved broadband turbulence, but relies on an appropriate shock sensor. Artificial diffusivity methods in which the artificial bulk viscosity is based on the magnitude of the strain-rate tensor resolve vortical structures well but damp dilatational modes in compressible turbulence; dilatation-based artificial bulk viscosity methods significantly improve this behavior. For well-defined shocks, the shock fitting approach yields good results.     

Lipases,liposomes and lipid-prodrugs

Colloidal and interfacial phenomena lie at the core of drug formulation, drug delivery, as well as drug binding and action at diseased sites, e.g., in cancer therapy. We review a class of liposome-based drug-delivery systems whose design and functional properties are intimately controlled by the stability of sub-micron structures, lipid-bilayer interfaces, and interfacially activated enzymes that can be exploited to target and deliver drugs. Moreover these drugs can themselves be special lipid molecules in the form of lipid prodrugs that both form the liposomal carrier as well as the substrate for endogenously upregulated lipases that turn the prodrugs into potent drugs precisely at the diseased site.