Extreme values for characteristic radii of a Poisson-Voronoi Tessellation

A homogeneous Poisson-Voronoi tessellation of intensity γ is observed in a convex body W. We associate to each cell of the tessellation two characteristic radii: the inradius, i.e. the radius of the largest ball centered at the nucleus and included in the cell, and the circumscribed radius, i.e. the radius of the smallest ball centered at the nucleus and containing the cell. We investigate the maximum and minimum of these two radii over all cells with nucleus in W. We prove that when \(\gamma \rightarrow \infty \) , these four quantities converge to Gumbel or Weibull distributions up to a rescaling. Moreover, the contribution of boundary cells is shown to be negligible. Such approach is motivated by the analysis of the global regularity of the tessellation. In particular, consequences of our study include the convergence to the simplex shape of the cell with smallest circumscribed radius and an upper-bound for the Hausdorff distance between W and its so-called Poisson-Voronoi approximation.     

Convex spectral functions and approximate intertwining relationships

We consider approximate intertwining relationships, and show that the standard solution, which involves the pseudoinverse, remains a solution for a large class of discrepancy measures, namely the class of all $\mathbb{R }$ -valued convex spectral functions.     

Spectral Convex Functions of Operators and Approximate Intertwining Relationships

We develop theoretical tools for the analysis of convex spectral functions of non-symmetric operators on Hilbert spaces. The obtained results are applied to an optimization problem arising from the theory of inverse problems, which involves the notion of intertwining relationship.     

Energy harvesting through arterial wall deformation: A FEM approach to fluid–structure interactions and magneto-hydrodynamics

Engineers are confronted with the energy demand of active medical implants in patients with increasing life expectancy. Scavenging energy from the patient’s body is envisioned as an alternative to conventional power sources. Joining in this effort towards human-powered implants, we propose an innovative concept that combines the deformation of an artery resulting from the arterial pressure pulse with a transduction mechanism based on magneto-hydrodynamics. To overcome certain limitations of a preliminary analytical study on this topic, we demonstrate here a more accurate model of our generator by implementing a three-dimensional multiphysics finite element method (FEM) simulation combining solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, electric and magnetic fields as well as the corresponding couplings. This simulation is used to optimize the generator with respect to several design parameters. A first validation is obtained by comparing the results of the FEM simulation with those of the analytical approach adopted in our previous study. With an expected overall conversion efficiency of 20% and an average output power of 30 μW, our generator outperforms previous devices based on arterial wall deformation by more than two orders of magnitude. Most importantly, our generator provides sufficient power to supply a cardiac pacemaker.     

Externally definable sets and dependent pairs

We prove that externally definable sets in first order NIP theories have honest definitions, giving a new proof of Shelah’s expansion theorem. Also we discuss a weak notion of stable embeddedness true in this context. Those results are then used to prove a general theorem on dependent pairs, which in particular answers a question of Baldwin and Benedikt on naming an indiscernible sequence.