Shape distortions induced by convective effect on hot object in visible, near infrared and infrared bands

The goal of this study is to examine the perturbation induced by the convective effect (or mirage effect) on shape measurement and to give an estimation of the error induced. This work explores the mirage effect in different spectral bands and single wavelengths. A numerical approach is adopted and an original setup has been developed in order to investigate easily all the spectral bands of interest with the help of a CCD camera (Si, 0.35–1.1 μm), a near infrared camera (VisGaAs, 0.8–1.7 μm) or infrared cameras (8–12 μm). Displacements due to the perturbation for each spectral band are measured and finally some hints about how to correct them are given.     

A Study of Microscale Gas Trapping Using Etched Silicon Micromodels

Immobilization and trapping of carbon dioxide (CO₂) enhances the security of geological storage. Trapping mechanisms have been characterized in four groups: structural, residual, dissolution, and mineralization. While structural trapping acts immediately when injection starts and is well investigated, the contribution of residual and dissolution trapping increases over storage time and these contributions need to be better understood for better predictions. This paper focuses on an experimental pore-scale investigation of residual and capillary trapping. CO₂?Cwater imbibition experiments were conducted in micromodels whose homogenous pore space is geometrically and topologically similar to Berea sandstone. Microvisual data, photographs and video footage, describes the trapping mechanism and, especially, the disconnection and shrinkage of the CO₂ phase. Results show that depending on the flow rate of the imbibing water different trapping mechanisms are observed. Lower flow rates, comparable to the trailing edge of a CO₂ plume, lead to more snap-off events and greater trapped residual saturation, whereas rates comparable to the near wellbore area during enhanced sequestration showed displacement of gas bubbles and greater dissolution that ultimately leads to very low or zero gas saturations. Furthermore, complete dissolution events showed that homogenous as well as heterogeneous dissolution occurs. Whereas the latter is subdivided into microbubble formation and dissolution on crevices or pore roughness, the former occurs without the influence of pore walls. Based on the observations we suggest that the type of rock and its roughness as well as the fines present at the CO₂ brine interface are important factors determining the dissolution mechanism.     

High-order Large Eddy Simulations of Confined Rotor-Stator Flows

In many engineering and industrial applications, the investigation of rotating turbulent flow is of great interest. In rotor-stator cavities, the centrifugal and Coriolis forces have a strong influence on the turbulence by producing a secondary flow in the meridian plane composed of two thin boundary layers along the disks separated by a non-viscous geostrophic core. Most numerical simulations have been performed using RANS and URANS modelling, and very few investigations have been performed using LES. This paper reports on quantitative comparisons of two high-order LES methods to predict a turbulent rotor-stator flow at the rotational Reynolds number Re(=?Ωb ²/ν)?=4 × 10⁵. The classical dynamic Smagorinsky model for the subgrid-scale stress (Germano et al., Phys Fluids A 3(7):1760–1765, 1991) is compared to a spectral vanishing viscosity technique (Séverac & Serre, J Comp Phys 226(2):1234–1255, 2007). Numerical results include both instantaneous data and post-processed statistics. The results show that both LES methods are able to accurately describe the unsteady flow structures and to satisfactorily predict mean velocities as well as Reynolds stress tensor components. A slight advantage is given to the spectral SVV approach in terms of accuracy and CPU cost. The strong improvements obtained in the present results with respect to RANS results confirm that LES is the appropriate level of modelling for flows in which fully turbulent and transition regimes are involved.     

Electrophoresis of sheared polyelectrolytes

ABSTRACT

A shear flow breaks the spherical symmetry of a flexible polymer, which has some interesting consequences for the electrophoresis of polyelectrolytes. In addition to introducing a chain-length dependence of the electrophoretic velocity, there is also the possibility of migration of the molecule perpendicular to the direction of coaxial gradients in pressure and electric potential. This has been shown to produce a rapid and highly localised concentration of DNA within a microfluidic capillary, with a number of potential applications to on-chip preparation and analysis of genomic DNA. In this paper, dedicated to Prof. Daan Frenkel, I will describe a calculation of the electrophoretic motion of a long polyelectrolyte under a coaxial flow and electric field.     

Ultrafast X‐ray imaging of laser–metal additive manufacturing processes

The high‐speed synchrotron X‐ray imaging technique was synchronized with a custom‐built laser‐melting setup to capture the dynamics of laser powder‐bed fusion processes in situ. Various significant phenomena, including vapor‐depression and melt‐pool dynamics and powder‐spatter ejection, were captured with high spatial and temporal resolution. Imaging frame rates of up to 10 MHz were used to capture the rapid changes in these highly dynamic phenomena. At the same time, relatively slow frame rates were employed to capture large‐scale changes during the process. This experimental platform will be vital in the further understanding of laser additive manufacturing processes and will be particularly helpful in guiding efforts to reduce or eliminate microstructural defects in additively manufactured parts.     

Elucidation of the Mechanism of Enhanced Insulin Uptake and Release from pH Responsive Hydrogels

Summary: Environmentally responsive hydrogels composed of poly(methacrylic acid-g-ethylene glycol) (P(MAA-g-EG)) have shown promise for oral insulin delivery due to their pH responsive complexation behavior. A series of hydrogel formulations were polymerized with varying amounts of crosslinker and varying monomer volume fraction. The mesh size of the network depended primarily on pH, varying from 8.0 to 27.2 nm. Insulin loading efficiency varied directly with crosslink density, ranging from 42.7 to 84.9% of available insulin loaded into the hydrogels. The release of insulin was performed with each polymer formulation at 5 pH levels ranging from 2.7 to 6.8. Insulin release was less than 20% for all formulations tested with insulin for the duration of the 3 hour release study for all pH levels considered except when the pH was 6.8, at which point the release occurred as a burst. Loading studies performed with insulin glargine, an insulin analog with an increased pI, showed the same trends as native insulin. However, the release of insulin glargine only occurred at a pH level above that of the pI of the protein. These results indicate that hydrogen bonds and ionic interactions between the protein and P(MAA-g-EG) may strongly influence its loading and release behavior in vitro.     

The Critical Fugacity for Surface Adsorption of Self-Avoiding Walks on the Honeycomb Lattice is {1+\sqrt{2}}

In 2010, Duminil-Copin and Smirnov proved a long-standing conjecture of Nienhuis, made in 1982, that the growth constant of self-avoiding walks on the hexagonal (a.k.a. honeycomb) lattice is ${\mu=\sqrt{2+\sqrt{2}}}$ . A key identity used in that proof was later generalised by Smirnov so as to apply to a general O(n) loop model with ${n\in [-2,2]}$ (the case n = 0 corresponding to self-avoiding walks). We modify this model by restricting to a half-plane and introducing a surface fugacity y associated with boundary sites (also called surface sites), and obtain a generalisation of Smirnov’s identity. The critical value of the surface fugacity was conjectured by Batchelor and Yung in 1995 to be ${y_{\rm c}=1+2/\sqrt{2-n}}$ . This value plays a crucial role in our generalized identity, just as the value of the growth constant did in Smirnov’s identity. For the case n = 0, corresponding to self-avoiding walks interacting with a surface, we prove the conjectured value of the critical surface fugacity. A crucial part of the proof involves demonstrating that the generating function of self-avoiding bridges of height T, taken at its critical point 1/μ, tends to 0 as T increases, as predicted from SLE theory.     

Effect of surface corrugation on low temperature phases of adsorbed (p-H2)7: A quantum path integral Monte Carlo study

By using path integral Monte Carlo simulations coupled to Replica Exchange algorithms, various phases of (p-H₂)₇ physically adsorbed on a model graphite surface were identified at low temperatures. At T=0.5 K$T=0.5\text{K}$, the expected superfluid phase was observed for flat and slightly corrugated surfaces. At intermediate and high corrugations, a “supersolid” phase in C_7/16 registry and a solid phase in C_1/3 registry were observed, respectively. At higher temperatures, the superfluid is converted to a fluid and the “supersolid” to a solid.     

Decomposition of in vivo spatially offset Raman spectroscopy data using multivariate analysis techniques

The decomposition of spatially offset Raman spectra for complex multilayer systems, such as biological tissues, requires advanced techniques such as multivariate analyses. Often, in such situations, the decomposition methods can reach their limits of accuracy well before the limits imposed by signal‐to‐noise ratios. Consequently, more effective reconstruction methods could yield more accurate results with the same data set. In this study we process spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) data with three different multivariate techniques (band‐target entropy minimization (BTEM), multivariate curve resolution and parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC)) and compare their performance when analysing a spectrally challenging plastic model system and an even more challenging problem, the analysis of human bone transcutaneously in vivo. For the in vivo measurements, PARAFAC's requirement of multidimensional orthogonal data is addressed by recording SORS spectra both at different spatial offsets and at different anatomical points, the latter providing added dimensionality through the variation of skin/soft tissue thickness. The BTEM and PARAFAC methods performed the best on the plastic system with the BTEM more faithfully reconstructing the major Raman bands and PARAFAC the smaller more heavily overlapped features. All three methods succeeded in reconstructing the bone spectrum from the transcutaneous data and gave good figures for the phosphate‐to‐carbonate ratio (within 2% of excised human tibia bone); the PARAFAC gave the most accurate figure for the mineral‐to‐collagen ratio (20% less than excised human tibia bone). Previous studies of excised bones have shown that certain bone diseases (such as osteoarthritis, osteoporosis and osteogenesis imperfecta) are accompanied by compositional abnormalities that can be detected with Raman spectroscopy, the utility of a technique which could reconstruct bone spectra accurately is manifest. The results have relevance on the use of SORS in general. © 2014 Crown copyright. Journal of Raman Spectroscopy published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.