Bending and free vibration analysis of isotropic and multilayered plates and shells by using a new accurate higher-order shear deformation theory

Bending and free vibration analysis of multilayered plates and shells by using a new accurate higher order shear deformation theory (HSDT) is presented. It is one of the most accurate HSDT available in the literature, mainly because new non-polynomial shear strain shape functions (combination of exponential and trigonometric) used in the present theory are richer than polynomial functions, and free surface boundary conditions can be guaranteed a priori. The present HSDT is able to reproduce Touratier’s HSDT as special case. The governing equations and boundary conditions are derived by employing the principle of virtual work. These equations are then solved via Navier-type, closed form solutions. Bending and dynamic results are presented for cylindrical and spherical shells and plates for simply supported boundary conditions. Panels are subjected to sinusoidal, distributed and point loads. Results are provided for thick to thin as well as shallow and deep shells. The present results are compared with the exact three-dimensional elasticity theory and with several other well-known HSDT theories. The present HSDT is found to be more precise than other several existing ones for analyzing the bending and free vibration of isotropic and multilayered composite shell and plate structures.     

An Electrostatic Lens for Focusing Charged Particles in a Mass Spectrometer

The ability to transmit particles into the ablation region of an aerosol mass spectrometer determines in part the lower size limit for particles that can be analyzed. A large fraction of small particles (< 100 nm) are lost due to processes such as Brownian diffusion that broaden the particle beam. In this work, electrostatic focusing is used to overcome the limits of aerodynamic focusing in the analysis of nanometer-sized particles by aerosol mass spectrometry. A simple tube lens is used to focus charged particles into the ablation laser beam path. The diameter of the focused beam is smaller than the fundamental aerodynamic limit imposed by Brownian motion. Measured enhancements of the hit rate for particles between 21 and 33 nm diameter are between 3 and 6. These values are lower limits for the true enhancements. The lens is also energy selective and can be used to select the mass (size) of the particles being analyzed.     

Migration of bullet in the spinal canal: a case report

As the spinal canal expands at T10 level naturally, it has been thought that the migration of a bullet within the spinal canal above this level is prevented and the migration of a bullet may only occur between T10 and S1 level. Here, a very rare case of a bullet traversing the length of the spinal canal is reported.     

Maximum‐likelihood maximum‐entropy constrained probability density function estimation for prediction of rare events

This work addresses the problem of estimating complete probability density functions (PDFs) from historical process data that are incomplete (lack information on rare events), in the framework of Bayesian networks. In particular, this article presents a method of estimating the probabilities of events for which historical process data have no record. The rare‐event prediction problem becomes more difficult and interesting, when an accurate first‐principles model of the process is not available. To address this problem, a novel method of estimating complete multivariate PDFs is proposed. This method uses the maximum entropy and maximum likelihood principles. It is tested on mathematical and process examples, and the application and satisfactory performance of the method in risk assessment and fault detection are shown. Also, the proposed method is compared with a few copula methods and a nonparametric kernel method, in terms of performance, flexibility, interpretability, and rate of convergence. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 60: 1013–1026, 2014     

Performance analysis of two stage combined heat pump system based on thermoeconomic optimization criterion

A thermoeconomic performance analysis based on a new kind of optimization criterion has been performed for a two stage endoreversible combined heat pump cycle model. The optimal performances and design parameters that maximize the objective function (heating load per unit total cost) are investigated. The optimal temperatures of the working fluids, the optimum performance coefficient, the optimum specific heating load and the optimal distribution of the heat exchanger areas are determined in terms of technical and economical parameters. The effects of the economical parameter on the global and optimal performances have been discussed.     

Dynamic risk analysis using alarm databases to improve process safety and product quality: Part II—Bayesian analysis

Part II presents step (iii) of the dynamic risk analysis methodology; that is, a novel Bayesian analysis method that utilizes near‐misses from distributed control system (DCS) and emergency shutdown (ESD) system databases—to calculate the failure probabilities of safety, quality, and operability systems (SQOSs) and probabilities of occurrence of incidents. It accounts for the interdependences among the SQOSs using copulas, which occur because of the nonlinear relationships between the variables and behavior‐based factors involving human operators. Two types of copula functions, multivariate normal and Cuadras–Augé copula, are used. To perform Bayesian simulation, the random‐walk, multiple‐block, Metropolis–Hastings algorithm is used. The benefits of copulas in sharing information when data are limited, especially in the cases of rare events such as failures of override controllers, and automatic and manual ESD systems, are presented. In addition, product‐quality data complement safety data to enrich near‐miss information and to yield more reliable results. Step (iii) is applied to a fluidized‐catalytic‐cracking unit (FCCU) to show its performance. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2012     

Simulation of transmission electron microscope images of biological specimens

We present a new approach to simulate electron cryo‐microscope images of biological specimens. The framework for simulation consists of two parts; the first is a phantom generator that generates a model of a specimen suitable for simulation, the second is a transmission electron microscope simulator. The phantom generator calculates the scattering potential of an atomic structure in aqueous buffer and allows the user to define the distribution of molecules in the simulated image. The simulator includes a well defined electron–specimen interaction model based on the scalar Schrödinger equation, the contrast transfer function for optics, and a noise model that includes shot noise as well as detector noise including detector blurring. To enable optimal performance, the simulation framework also includes a calibration protocol for setting simulation parameters. To test the accuracy of the new framework for simulation, we compare simulated images to experimental images recorded of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) in vitreous ice. The simulated and experimental images show good agreement with respect to contrast variations depending on dose and defocus. Furthermore, random fluctuations present in experimental and simulated images exhibit similar statistical properties. The simulator has been designed to provide a platform for development of new instrumentation and image processing procedures in single particle electron microscopy, two‐dimensional crystallography and electron tomography with well documented protocols and an open source code into which new improvements and extensions are easily incorporated.     

State-led Urban Regeneration in Istanbul: Power Struggles between Interest Groups and Poor Communities

From the early 2000s, urban policy-makers in Turkey have promoted ‘urban regeneration’ as the main tool to transform low-income housing areas, along with former industrial estates, disused port facilities and so on, into modern living, working, shopping and entertainment areas. The intention has been to boost land and property values by transforming both the physical appearance and the sociocultural and class composition of selected sites. But while the impact, the rationale and the outcomes of urban regeneration in Turkey are broadly similar to those reported in the substantial global literature on ‘urban regeneration’, a case-study approach shows that a number of crucial context-specific factors have shaped the assumption and responses of key players and collective actors. These in turn have determined how ‘regeneration policies’ are finally translated into practice. This article illustrates this point by describing a particular recent case study in Istanbul: the Tozkoparan Regeneration Project.     

An efficient algorithm for community detection in complex weighted networks

Community detection decomposes large-scale, complex networks “optimally” into sets of smaller sub-networks. It finds sub-networks that have the least inter-connections and the most intra-connections. This article presents an efficient community detection algorithm that detects community structures in a weighted network by solving a multi-objective optimization problem. The whale optimization algorithm is extended to enable it to handle multi-objective optimization problems with discrete variables and to solve the problems on parallel processors. To this end, the population's positions are discretized using a transfer function that maps real variables to discrete variables, the initialization steps for the algorithm are modified to prevent generating unrealistic connections between variables, and the updating step of the algorithm is redefined to produce integer numbers. To identify the community configurations that are Pareto optimal, the non-dominated sorting concept is adopted. The proposed algorithm is tested on the Tennessee Eastman process and several benchmark community-detection problems.     

Adaptive Receiver Structures for Fiber Communication Systems Employing Polarization-Division Multiplexing

Polarization-division multiplexing (PDM) is emerging as a promising technique for increasing data rates without increasing symbol rates. However, the distortion effects of the fiber transmission medium poses severe barriers for the implementation of this technological alternative. Especially, due to the fiber-induced polarization fluctuation orthogonally transmitted PDM signals are mixed at the receiver input. Therefore, a receiver compensation structure needs to be implemented to recover the original orthogonal transmitted components from their mixtures at the end of the fiber channel. This is in fact the focus of this article where a receiver algorithm is based on a recently proposed blind source separation scheme exploiting magnitude boundedness of digital communication signals. Through the use of this scheme, new receiver algorithms for recovering the original polarization signals in an adaptive manner are proposed. The key feature of these algorithms is that they can achieve high separation performance while maintaining the algorithmic complexity in a fairly low level that is suitable for implementation in optical fiber communication receivers. The performance of these algorithms are illustrated through some simulation examples.