Pit your wits against young minds!

This column is a place for those bits of contagious mathematics that travel from person to person in the community, because they are so elegant, suprising, or appealing that one has an urge to pass them on. Contributions are most welcome.     

Atomistic phenomena in dense fluid shock waves

The shock structure problem is one of the classical problems of fluid mechanics and at least for non-reacting dilute gases it has been considered essentially solved. Here we present a few recent findings, to show that this is not the case. There are still new physical effects to be discovered provided that the numerical technique is general enough to not rule them out a priori. While the results have been obtained for dense fluids, some of the effects might also be observable for shocks in dilute gases.     

Approximation of transient temperatures in complex geometries using fractional derivatives

It is shown that time-dependent temperatures in a transient, conductive system can be approximately modeled by a fractional-order differential equation, the order of which depends on the Biot number. This approximation is particularly suitable for complex shapes for which a first-principles approach is too difficult or computationally time-consuming. Analytical solutions of these equations can be written in terms of the Mittag-Leffler function. The approximation is especially useful if a suitable fractional-order controller is to be designed for the system.     

Damage and fracture evaluation of granular composite materials by digital image correlation method

This paper presents the applications of digital image correlation technique to the mesoscopic damage and fracture study of some granular based composite materials including steelfiber reinforced concrete, sandstone and crystal-polymer composite. The deformation fields of the composite materials resulted from stress localization were obtained by the correlation computation of the surface images with loading steps and thus the related damage prediction and fracture parameters were evaluated. The correlation searching could be performed either directly based on the gray levels of the digital images or from the wavelet transform (WT) coefficients of the transform spectrum. The latter was developed by the authors and showed higher resolution and sensitivity to the singularity detection. Because the displacement components came from the rough surfaces of the composite materials without any coats of gratings or fringes of optical interferometry, both surface profiles and the deformation fields of the composites were visualized which was helpful to compare each other to analyze the damage of those heterogeneous materials. The project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10125211 and 10072002), the Scientific Committee of Yunnan Province for the Program of Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete, and the Institute of Chemical Materials, CAEP at Mianyang     

Apparatus for High-Resolution Solid Hydrogen Matrix Isolation Spectroscopy and Its Application

Apparatus integrating a Fourier transform-infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer and a mid-infrared difference frequency generation (DFG) laser spectrometer was built for the study of the matrix isolation spectrum in solid molecular hydrogen. A 3-cm-long molecular hydrogen crystal was grown in a liquid-helium Dewar, and its infrared absorption spectrum in the 1-5 μm region was recorded to test the system. The W₀(0) (ν=0←0, J=6←0) line around 2410 cm⁻¹ of solid hydrogen was investigated with the DFG laser spectroscopy. High-resolution matrix isolation spectrum of CO² co-deposited with hydrogen on a BaF₂ cold plate at liquid-helium temperature was studied.