Pattern discrimination and firing behavior of cold receptor model aided with noise

A method for characterizing and identifying firing patterns of neural spike trains is presented. Three characteristic variables defined at sequential moments, including two formal derivatives and the integration of the counting process, are introduced to reflect the temporal patterns of a spike train. This paper also examines how noise interacts with encoding mechanisms of neuronal stimulus in a cold receptor. From ISI series and bifurcation diagrams it is shown that there are considerable differences in interval distributions and impulse patterns caused by purely deterministic simulations and noisy simulations. The ISI-distance can be used as an effective and powerful way to measure the noise effects on spike trains quantitatively. It is found that spike trains observed in cold receptors can be more strongly affected by noise for low temperatures than for high temperatures in some aspects; meanwhile, spike train has greater variability with the noise intensity increasing.     

Hybrid mesh adaptation applied to industrial numerical combustion

This paper presents an anisotropic mesh adaptation method applied to industrial combustion problems. The method is based on a measure of the distance between two Riemannian metrics called metric non‐conformity. This measure, which can be used to build a cost function to adapt meshes comprising several types of mesh elements, provides the basis for a generic mesh adaptation approach applicable to various types of physical problems governed by partial differential equations. The approach is shown to be applicable to industrial combustion problems, through the specification of a target metric computed as the intersection of several Hessian matrices reconstructed from the main variables of the governing equations. Numerical results show that the approach is cost effective in that it can drastically improve the prediction of temperature and species distributions in the flame region of a combustor while reducing computational cost. The results can be used as a basis for pollutant prediction models. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A vectorial algorithm with finite element method for prediction of powder segregation in metal injection molding

The design of the mold and the choice of the injection parameters for metal injection molding (MIM) is required to maintain homogeneity of the filled mixture. However, powder segregation is unavoidable in MIM because of the significant difference in densities of the metallic powder and the polymer binder. To achieve an effective prediction of segregation effect, a biphasic model based on mixture theory is employed. The viscous behaviors of each phase and the interaction coefficient between the flows of the two phases should be determined. The solution of two coupled Navier–Stokes equations results in a tremendous computation effort. The previous development of an explicit algorithm makes the biphasic simulation much faster than that of the classic methods. However, it is strongly desired to reduce or even eliminate the numerous global solutions for pressure fields at each time step. Hence, a new vectorial algorithm is proposed and developed to perform the simulation only by vectorial operations. It provides the anticipated efficiency in the simulation of biphasic modeling, and the advantage to use the classic elements of equal‐order interpolations. Some results produced by the two algorithms are compared with the experimental values to validate the new vectorial algorithm. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interlayer shear strength of single crystalline graphite

Reported values(0.2 MPa-7.0 GPa) of the interlayer shear strength(ISS) of graphite are very dispersed.The main challenge to obtain a reliable value of the ISS using conventional measuring methods was the unavailability of sufficiently large single crystalline graphite.Here we present a novel experimental method to measure the ISS,and obtain the value as ～0.14 GPa.Our result can serve as an important basis for understanding mechanical behavior of graphite or graphene-based materials.     

Existence of Surface Waves and Band Gaps in Periodic Heterogeneous Half-spaces

We find a sufficient condition for the existence of surface (Rayleigh) waves based on the Rayleigh-Ritz variational method. When specialized to a homogeneous half-space, the sufficient condition recovers the known criterion for the existence of subsonic surface waves. A simple existence criterion in terms of material properties is obtained for periodic half-spaces of general anisotropic materials. Further, we numerically compute the dispersion relation of the surface waves for a half-space of periodic laminates of two materials and demonstrate the existence of surface wave band gaps.