Electric-Field Induced Morphological Transitions in Elastic Contact Instability of Soft Solid Films

A soft elastic film, when placed in adhesive proximity with a contactor in a crack-like geometry, spontaneously undergoes a surface instability to form finger patterns with a characteristic wavelength of approximately 4h, where h is the film thickness. We study the morphological evolution and control of this elastic contact instability under the influence of an external electric field. The distinct electric field induced morphological changes, leading to the formation of two-dimensional hexagonally arranged pillars, large-amplitude fingers, and straightening of contact edge, which are studied comprehensively. The conditions for the evolution of morphologically distinct patterns are governed by the film parameters, such as its shear modulus and thickness. A theoretical model and its stability analysis provide an approximate estimate of the critical voltage required for the onset of changes and its scaling with the film parameters (thickness and shear modulus). Further, three-dimensional simulations based on energy minimization are presented to provide important clues regarding the physics of pattern evolution on soft elastic interfaces.     

Effect of the addition of depolymerised ethylene vinyl acetate on the mechanical,thermal, chemical and shrinkage properties of cured unsaturated polyester resins

Unsaturated polyester resins (UPRs) are versatile compounds. However, their major drawback is the high shrinkage exhibited on curing. An attempt was made to reduce the shrinkage of UPRs without affecting other properties. In the present study a commonly used iso‐reactive UPR was modified by the addition of ethylene–vinyl acetate (EVA; subjected to controlled depolymerisation to obtain samples of various molecular weights), and was cured at room temperature. The peak exotherm temperature and gel time were both observed to decrease with an increase in EVA content. The composition incorporating 0.5% of depolymerised EVA1 (highest degree of branching) showed maximum improvement in tensile and flexural properties with the heat deflection temperature and impact properties remaining almost unaffected. A uniform dispersion for the UPR containing 0.5% of EVA1 was observed. Addition of EVA reduced the percentage shrinkage in the modified matrix. Incorporation of depolymerised EVA can be an attractive option for the reduction of shrinkage in UPRs. The advantage of using depolymerised EVA is that generated waste EVA can be depolymerised and reused for this application making it cost effective. Copyright © 2010 Society of Chemical Industry     

An Electronic Circuit System for Time-Reversal of Ultra-Wideband Short Impulses Based on Frequency-Domain Approach

In this paper, a compact and low-cost electronic circuit system is designed for time-reversal of ultra-wideband short impulses (with nanosecond and sub-nanosecond temporal durations). A frequency-domain approach is adopted to avoid high sampling rate in time. Specifically, the proposed system obtains the discrete spectra of input impulses first; then realizes time-reversal in frequency domain; and finally synthesizes the time-reversed impulses using discrete continuous wave elements. This system is composed of common and commercially available circuits, and hence, can embody a system-on-chip implementation. Its performance is verified by circuit-electromagnetic co-simulations using impulses with 3–10-GHz frequency band coverage. Advanced Design System and two full-wave Maxwell's equations solvers are used for circuit and electromagnetic simulations, respectively, and their results are coupled and integrated. In the circuit part, most of nonidealities of realistic circuits are taken into account. It is shown by the simulation results that, although realistic circuits unavoidably introduce errors to time-reversal, such errors do not affect the “focusing” phenomena in the context of electromagnetic wave propagation. As a conclusion, the proposed system can be deployed in practical time-reversal communication and radar applications.      

Optimized Mn and Bi co-doping in SnTe based thermoelectric material:A case of band engineering and density of states tuning

Tin telluride(SnTe)overwhelmingly continues to be studied owing to its promising thermoelectric prop-erties,tunable electronic structure,and its potential as an alternate to toxic lead telluride(PbTe)based materials.In this research,we engineer the electronic properties of SnTe by co-doping Mn and Bi below their individual solubility limit.The First principles density functional theory studies reveal that both Bi and Mn introduce resonance states,thereby increasing the density of states near the Fermi level leading to enhanced Seebeck coefficient.This unique combination of using two resonant dopants to introduce flatter bands is effective in achieving higher performance at lower temperatures manifesting into a large Seebeck value of～91 μV/K at room temperature in the present case.Both elements optimally co-doped results in a very high power factor value of～24.3 μW/cmK2 at 773 K when compared to other high performance SnTe based materials.A zT of～0.93 at 773 K is achieved by tuning the proportion of the co-dopants Mn and Bi in SnTe.The hardness value of pristine SnTe was also seen to increase after dop-ing.As a result,synergistic optimized doping proves to be a suitable means for obtaining thermoelectric materials of superior characteristics without the need for heavy doping.     

An efficient and robust localization scheme on massively distributed systems

A parallel localization scheme is presented to enable solution transfers between unstructured grids. The scheme relies on neighbor walks to reduce the number of candidate elements that are visited to find the enclosing element. An advancing front method efficiently allows a subset of nodes to efficiently sweep through the grid, progressively reducing search spaces. The algorithm is parallelized permitting solution transfers over arbitrary grid decompositions. A hierarchical localization process helps prevent the neighbor walk algorithm from failing when encountering the boundaries of a concave domain by localizing the boundaries before the interior of the domain is localized. Random selections of the next step interrupt cyclic loops that may occur during a neighbor walk. The complexity of the search algorithm is verified over parallel decompositions and is effectively independent of the number of partitions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A quasi-conforming triangular laminated composite shell element based on a refined first-order theory

A quasi-conforming triangular laminated shell element based on a refined first-order shear deformation theory is presented. The Hu-Washizu variational principle, involving strain and displacement fields as variables, with stresses being considered as Lagrange multipliers, is used to develop the laminate composite shell element. Both strains and displacements are discretized in the element, while displacements alone are discretized at the boundary. The inter-element C ¹ continuity is satisfied a posteriori in a weak form. Due to the importance of rotations and shear deformation in the geometrically non-linear analyses of shells, 7 degrees of freedom per node are chosen, viz. three displacements, two first-derivatives in the in-plane directions of the out-of-plane displacement, and two transverse shear strains at each node. To consider the effect of transverse shear deformation on the global behavior of the laminated composite shell, the Reissner-Mindlin first-order theory, with shear correction factors of Chow and Whitney, is adopted. The transverse shear stresses are obtained through the integration of the 3-D equilibrium equations; and the warping induced by transverse shear is considered in the calculation of the in-plane stresses to improve their accuracy. Numerical examples show that the element has good convergence properties and leads to highly accurate stresses.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Dynamic Information Dissemination

Dissemination and delivery of rapidly changing information to large user communities remains a challenge on the Web. Consequently, we need techniques to disseminate such data as efficiently as possible. To this end, researchers are focusing on new approaches to building efficient, resilient, and scalable content-distribution networks.     

Performance analysis of Virtual Mobility Domain scheme vs. IPv6 mobility protocols

The population of mobile users seeking connectivity to the Internet has been growing over the years, spurred by the capabilities of handsets and the increasing rich Internet content and services. Mobility management to enable efficient Internet access for users on the move is thus gaining significance. IETF has standardized several protocols such as Mobile IPv6, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6, and Proxy Mobile IPv6 to provide mobility management on the IP network. With future Internet design initiatives gaining momentum, it is important that these initiatives consider mobility management as an integral part of the design. In this article, we introduce the concept of Virtual Mobility Domain and describe the main features and key strengths of Virtual Mobility Domain that are designed to provide mobility management in a newly proposed tiered Internet architecture. Instead of IP addressing, the proposed Virtual Mobility Domain uses a tiered-addressing scheme to identify a mobile node with a single address regardless of its location. The tiered addressing provides a dynamic address length which brings less signaling overhead and scalable management. We also propose a collaborative network-based mobility management mechanism to provide low-latency handoffs and less processing-overhead on the mobile node compared to the IPv6-based protocols. The proposed mobility scheme unifies inter and intra-domain mobility management by introducing common anchor cloud concept which provides a distributed management and seamless mobility experience. We present comparative qualitative and quantitative performance analysis of Virtual Mobility Domain and aforementioned IPv6-based mobility protocols for Intra-AS roaming support. We examine handoff latency and signaling overhead performance of each protocol based on numerical results retrieved from analytical models and OPNET modeler based simulations. The results from a comparative performance study show the potential for more efficient mobility management under the proposed Internet architecture.     

Sharc: managing CPU and network bandwidth in shared clusters

We argue the need for effective resource management mechanisms for sharing resources in commodity clusters. To address this issue, we present the design of Sharc-a system that enables resource sharing among applications in such clusters. Sharc depends on single node resource management mechanisms such as reservations or shares, and extends the benefits of such mechanisms to clustered environments. We present techniques for managing two important resources-CPU and network interface bandwidth-on a cluster-wide basis. Our techniques allow Sharc to 1) support reservation of CPU and network interface bandwidth for distributed applications, 2) dynamically allocate resources based on past usage, and 3) provide performance isolation to applications. Our experimental evaluation has shown that Sharc can scale to 256 node clusters running 100,000 applications. These results demonstrate that Sharc can be an effective approach for sharing resources among competing applications in moderate size clusters.