LOCALIZED FAMILIES OF BENDING WAVES IN A THIN MEDIUM-LENGTH CYLINDRICAL SHELL UNDER PRESSURE

The initial-boundary-value problem for the equations describing motion of a thin, medium-length, non-circular cylindrical shell is examined. The shell edges are not necessarily plane curves, with the conditions of a joint support, a rigid clamp or a free edge being considered as the boundary conditions. The shell is supposed to experience normal internal (or external) dynamic pressure which may be non-uniform in the circumferential direction. It is assumed that the initial displacements and velocities of the points at the shell middle surface are functions decreasing rapidly away from some generatrix. Using the complex WKB method the asymptotic solution of the governing equations is constructed by superimposing localized families (wave packets) of bending waves running in the circumferential direction. The dependence of frequencies, group velocities, amplitudes and other dynamic characteristics upon variable pressure and geometrical parameters of the shell are studied. As an example, the wave forms of motion of a circular cylindrical shell with sloping edges under growing dynamic pressure are considered. The effect of localization of bending vibrations near the longest generator as well as the effects of reflection, focusing and increasing amplitude in the running wave packets are revealed.     

Differential–algebraic equations in multibody system modeling

Numerical methods for the efficient integration of both stiff and nonstiff equations of motion of multibody systems having the form of differential-algebraic equations (DAE) of index 3 are discussed. Linear multi-step ABM and BDF methods are considered for the non-iterational integration of nonstiff DAE. The Park method is proposed for integration of stiff equations. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The force on a lattice defect in an elastic body

It is shown that the force on a lattice defect in an elastic body is, like the force on a disclination in a nematic liquid crystal, a real force which, for equilibrium, must be balanced by an external force applied to the closed surface enclosing the defect.     

Stability and Hopf bifurcation analysis on a simplified BAM neural network with delays

A delay-differential equation modelling a bidirectional associative memory (BAM) neural network with three neurons is investigated. Its dynamics are studied in terms of local analysis and Hopf bifurcation analysis. By analyzing the associated characteristic equation, its linear stability is investigated and Hopf bifurcations are demonstrated. The stability and direction of the Hopf bifurcation are determined by applying the normal form theory and the center manifold reduction. Numerical simulation results are given to support the theoretical predictions.     

Improving motion estimation by accounting for local image distortion

Cardiac elastography is a useful diagnostic technique for detection of heart function abnormalities, based on analysis of echocardiograms. The analysis of the regional heart motion allows assessing the extent of myocardial ischemia and infarction. In this paper, a new two-stage algorithm for cardiac motion estimation is proposed, where the data is taken from a sequence of 2D echocardiograms. The method combines the advantages of block-matching and optical flow techniques. The first stage employs a standard block-matching algorithm (sum of absolute differences) to provide a displacement estimate with accuracy of up to one pixel. At the second stage, this estimate is corrected by estimating the parameters of a local image transform within a test window. The parameters of the image transform are estimated in the least-square sense. In order to account for typical heart motions, like contraction/expansion, translation and rotation, a local affine model is assumed within the test window. The accuracy of the new algorithm is evaluated using a sequence of 500 grayscale B-mode images, which are generated as distorted, but known copies of an original ROI, taken from a real echocardiogram. The accuracy of the motion estimation is expressed in terms of errors: maximum absolute error, root-mean-square error, average error and standard deviation. The errors of the proposed algorithm are compared with these of the known block-matching technique with cross-correlation and interpolation in the sub-pixel space. Statistical analysis of the errors shows that the proposed algorithm provides more accurate estimates of the heart motion than the cross-correlation technique with interpolation in the sub-pixel space.     

Efficient and robust constitutive integrators for single-crystal plasticity modeling

Small-scale deformation phenomena such as subgrain formation, development of texture, and grain boundary sliding require simulations with a high degree of spatial resolution. When we consider finite-element simulation of metal deformation, this equates to thousands or hundreds of thousands of finite elements. Simulations of the dynamic deformations of metal samples require elastic–plastic constitutive updates of the material behavior to be performed over a small time step between updates, as dictated by the Courant condition. Further, numerical integration of physically-based equations is inherently sensitive to the step in time taken; they return different predictions as the time step is reduced, eventually approaching a stationary solution. Depending on the deformation conditions, this converged time step becomes short (10⁻⁹ s or less). If an implicit constitutive update is applied to this class of simulation, the benefit of the implicit update (i.e., the ability to evaluate over a relatively large time step) is negated, and the integration is prohibitively slow. The present work recasts an implicit update algorithm into an explicit form, for which each update step is five to six times faster, and the compute time required for a plastic update approaches that needed for a fully-elastic update. For dynamic loading conditions, the explicit model is found to perform an entire simulation up to 50 times faster than the implicit model. The performance of the explicit model is enhanced by adding a subcycling algorithm to the explicit model, by which the maximum time step between constitutive updates is increased an order of magnitude. These model improvements do not significantly change the predictions of the model from the implicit form, and provide overall computation times significantly faster than the implicit form over finite-element meshes. These modifications are also applied to polycrystals via Taylor averaging, where we also see improved model performance.     

The optical near-field speckles and their first order statistics on the basis of the integral equations of electromagnetic field

Speckle fields are the random light wave distributions produced when the light fields are scattered from random surfaces or a random medium. They appear in many optical phenomena that are related to light propagations[1,2] and have found wide appli-cations in a variety of scientific and technical fields. The examples of the recent impor-tant applications of speckles include the analysis of the movement of the granules[3], the three-dimensional imaging for the microstructures of metal nanocryst…     

Meshfree analysis of softening elastoplastic solids using variational multiscale method

A meshfree multiscale method is presented for efficient analysis of elastoplastic solids. In the analysis of softening elastoplastic solids, standard finite element methods or meshfree methods typically yield mesh-dependent results. The reason for this well-known effect is the loss of ellipticity of the boundary value problem. In this work, the scale decomposition is carried out based on a variational form of the problem. A coarse scale is designed to represent global behavior and a fine scale to represent local behavior. A fine scale region is detected from the local failure analysis of an acoustic tensor to indicate a region where deformation changes abruptly. Each scale variable is approximated using a meshfree method. Meshfree approximation is well-suited for adaptivity. As a method of increasing the resolution, a partition of unity based extrinsic enrichment is used. In particular, fine scale approximations are designed to appropriately represent local behavior by using a localization angle. Moreover, the regularization effect through the convexification of non-convex potential is embedded to represent fine scale behavior. Each scale problem is solved iteratively. The proposed method is applied to shear band problems. In the results of analysis about pure shear and compression problems, straight shear bands can be captured and mesh-insensitive results are obtained. Curved shear bands can also be captured without mesh dependency in the analysis of indentation problem.     

Modeling and simulation of first and second sound in solids

We investigate the propagation of mechanical and thermal waves in solids at cryogenic temperatures. The latter are known as the second sound phenomenon. It occurs, e.g., in dielectric solids and differs greatly from the classical case in which the heat transport proceeds by diffusion. Since Fourier’s law of heat conduction fails for modeling second sound, we apply a non-classical one. During the last two decades, the non-classical thermoelastodynamic theory of Green and Naghdi enjoys steadily growing research activities.