A coupled immersed boundary‐lattice Boltzmann method with smoothed point interpolation method for fluid‐structure interaction problems

The immersed boundary‐lattice Boltzmann method has been verified to be an effective tool for fluid‐structure interaction simulation associated with thin and flexible bodies. The newly developed smoothed point interpolation method (S‐PIM) can handle the largely deformable solids owing to its softened model stiffness and insensitivity to mesh distortion. In this work, a novel coupled method has been proposed by combining the immersed boundary‐lattice Boltzmann method with the S‐PIM for fluid‐structure interaction problems with large‐displacement solids. The proposed method preserves the simplicity of the lattice Boltzmann method for fluid solvers, utilizes the S‐PIM to establish the realistic constitutive laws for nonlinear solids, and avoids mesh regeneration based on the frame of the immersed boundary method. Both two‐ and three‐dimensional numerical examples have been carried out to validate the accuracy, convergence, and stability of the proposed method in consideration of comparative results with referenced solutions.     

Protein-Mediated Suppression of Rolling Circle Amplification for Biosensing with an Aptamer-Containing DNA Primer

We report a method to detect proteins via suppression of rolling circle amplification (RCA) by using an appropriate aptamer as the linear primer (denoted as an aptaprimer) to initiate RCA. In the absence of a protein target, the aptaprimer is free to initiate RCA, which can produce long DNA products that are detected via binding of a fluorescent intercalating dye. Introduction of a target causes the primer region within the aptamer to become unavailable for binding to the circular template, inhibiting RCA. Using SYBR Gold or QuantiFluor dyes as fluorescent probes to bind to the RCA reaction product, it is possible to produce a generic protein-modulated RCA assay system that does not require fluorophore- or biotin-modified DNA species, substantially reducing complexity and cost of reagents. Based on this modulation of RCA, we demonstrate the ability to produce both solution and paper-based assays for rapid and quantitative detection of proteins including platelet derived growth factor and thrombin.     

An efficient iterative method for finding common fixed point and variational inequalities in Hilbert spaces

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding a common solution to a fixed point problem involving demi-contractive operator and a variational inequality with monotone and Lipschitz continuous mapping in real Hilbert spaces. Inspired by the projection and contraction method and the hybrid descent approximation method, a new and efficient iterative method for solving the problem is introduced. Strong convergence theorem of the proposed method is established under standard and mild conditions. Our scheme generalizes and extends some of the existing results in the literature, and moreover, its computational effort is less per each iteration compared with related works.     

带阀点效应水火联合调度问题的一种半定凸松弛求解法

水火联合调度问题是电力系统中一类复杂的优化问题。合理安排调度周期内的水火电出力,确定一个最优发电计划,可以带来巨大的经济效益。在实际系统中,汽轮机调汽阀开启时出现的拔丝现象会使机组耗量特性产生阀点效应。忽略阀点效应,在一定程度上降低求解的精度。本文考虑带阀点效应的水火联合调度问题。该问题非凸非光滑,且带有非线性约束,直接使用确定性全局优化方法求解是相当困难的。本文使用高效的半定规划求解此问题。首先用耗量特性函数的初始周期代替其余有限的周期,并对其进行二次拉格朗日插值拟合。再通过引进0-1变量,得到整个耗量特性函数的近似,进而把问题松弛为半定规划模型。最后,采用凸规划应用软件包CVX求解一个仿真算例,得到一个近似全局最优解。     

Validating additive correction schemes against gradient-based extrapolations

The use of additive correction schemes to obtain structures and vibrational frequencies of increasingly larger molecules is becoming more common. Such approaches, based on the cubic extrapolation formula applied directly to the quantity of interest, have been successfully validated only at the highest levels of computational accuracy: for coupled cluster methods with comparably large basis sets. Here, a systematic validation of geometries and vibrational frequencies is carried out, including more affordable and relevant levels of theory, such as the Møller-Plesset perturbation theory applied with smaller basis sets. Comparisons of such additive schemes against the more rigorous gradient-based extrapolation are presented. The cbs () routine of the open-source quantum-chemistry package Psi4 has been extended for this purpose. The results confirm that geometries and frequencies of covalently bound species obtained with additive correction schemes are in an excellent agreement with the results of gradient-based extrapolations. However, when applied to systems involving noncovalent interactions, the errors due to such schemes are significantly larger. In general, we propose the application of gradient-based extrapolations, as they incur no extra cost compared to additive schemes.