Optimization of composite plates with piezoelectric stiffener-actuators under in-plane compressive loads

Stiffeners which are used to strengthen a plate can be constructed of piezoceramic materials and subsequently used as piezo actuators to improve the load carrying capacity of the plate. In the present study, a fibre composite plate with initial imperfections and under in-plane compressive loads is studied with a view towards minimizing its deflection using the piezo actuators and the fibre orientations. Piezoceramic stiffeners are bonded symmetrically on the top and bottom of the plate and deployed as actuators. Two cases of electric fields, namely, the in-phase and out-of-phase voltages are applied to the actuators. The presence of initial deflections leads to deformation under the in-plane compressive loads which should be less than the critical buckling load. Two cases of initial imperfections are considered, and the first one is the deterministic initial deflections which are known a priori and as such they are given as input parameters for the problem. In the second case the initial deflections are uncertain and they have to be obtained according to a given criterion. In the present study they are determined to produce the least favourable initial deflection (largest deflection) at a given point and the solution is obtained by convex modelling. The effect of the actuators, the ply angles and the voltage are studied and their effects on the transverse deflection are investigated. A performance index involving the L₂ norm of the deflections is minimized using the piezo effect and as well as the ply angles the optimal values of which are determined for various problem parameters.     

Group Study of Simulated Driving fMRI Data by Multiset Canonical Correlation Analysis

In this work, we apply a novel statistical method, multiset canonical correlation analysis (M-CCA), to study a group of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets acquired during simulated driving task. The M-CCA method jointly decomposes fMRI datasets from different subjects/sessions into brain activation maps and their associated time courses, such that the correlation in each group of estimated activation maps across datasets is maximized. Therefore, the functional activations across all datasets are extracted in the order of consistency across different dataset. On the other hand, M-CCA preserves the uniqueness of the functional maps estimated from each dataset by avoiding concatenation of different datasets in the analysis. Hence, the cross-dataset variation of the functional activations can be used to test the hypothesis of functional-behavioral association. In this work, we study 120 simulated driving fMRI datasets and identify parietal-occipital regions and frontal lobe as the most consistently engaged areas across all the subjects and sessions during simulated driving. The functional-behavioral association study indicates that all the estimated brain activations are significantly correlated with the steering operation during the driving task. M-CCA thus provides a new approach to investigate the complex relationship between the brain functions and multiple behavioral variables, especially in naturalistic tasks as demonstrated by the simulated driving study.     

IVA using complex multivariate GGD: application to fMRI analysis

Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing - Examples of complex-valued random phenomena in science and engineering are abound, and joint blind source separation (JBSS) provides an effective...     

Design∕Control Optimization of Cross‐Ply Laminates Under Buckling and Vibration

The optimal layer thicknesses and optimal feedback control function are determined for a symmetric, cross‐ply laminate. The objectives of the optimization are to maximize the biaxial buckling load (design objective) and to minimize the dynamic response to external disturbances (control objective) subject to a constraint on the expenditure of control energy. The design∕control problem is formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem by employing a performance index that combines the design and control objectives in a weighted sum. Numerical results are given for a laminate made of an advanced composite material. Comparisons of controlled and uncontrolled laminates as well as optimally designed and nonoptimal laminates indicate the benefits of treating the design and control problems in unified formulation. The implications of solving these two problems are discussed. The values of optimal design and control variables are given for a number of problem parameters.     

Minimum stress design of transversely isotropic sandwich plates based on higher-order theory

The minimum stress design of thick laminated sandwich plates is given based on a higher-order theory of plates which includes the effects of the normal and shear deformation. The surface layers are made of a transversely isotropic composite material and the results are given for isotropic and transversely isotropic core layers which can model a variety of materials including honcycomb. The theory is implemented using dedicated symbolic computation routines developed in the C programming language. The analysis is incorporated into an optimization algorithm to determine the optimal thicknesses of the surface layers for the minimum stress deisgn of three-layered sandwich plates. Numerical results are given for plates under sinusoidal loading and the effects of various input parameters are investigated. The stress behaviour which cannot be studied using a classical theory or a shear deformable theory only is indicated.     

Maximum Principle for Optimal Boundary Control of Vibrating Structures with Applications to Beams

A maximum principle is derived for open-loop boundary control of one dimensional structures undergoing transverse vibrations. The optimal control law is obtained using a maximum principle and the applicability of the results to the boundary control of vibrating beams is demonstrated. The method of solution involves the transformation of the original problem into one with homogeneous boundary conditions for a general set of boundary forces and torques. An adjoint variable is introduced and used in the formulation of a Hamiltonian function which in turn leads to the derivation of the maximum principle. The effectiveness of the proposed control mechanism is illustrated numerically and it is shown that the implementation of the optimal boundary control using one force actuator can lead to substantial decrease in the dynamic response of a vibrating beam.     

Optimal design of symmetrically laminated plates for minimum deflection and weight

The minimum deflection and weight designs of laminated composite plates are given. The finite element method using Mindlin plate theory is used in conjunction with optimisation routines in order to obtain the optimal designs. Various boundary conditions are considered and results are given for varying aspect ratios and for different loading types. Comparative results are presented for minimum weight priority design as an alternative to minimum deflection/minimum weight priority design to investigate the effect of priority on the deflection and weight.     

Integrated MAP equalization and coding for optical-fiber-communication systems

In this paper, an integrated maximum a posteriori equalization and turbo product coding (IMAP-TPC) scheme for optical-fiber-communication systems (OFCS) is proposed. The scheme uses a probabilistic characterization of the electrical current in the presence of intersymbol interference (ISI) and noise to compensate their effects and improve the bit error rate. In the new IMAP-TPC scheme, TPC decoding is integrated with a symbol-by-symbol MAP detector. The MAP detector calculates the log-likelihood ratio of a received symbol using the conditional probability-density information and, hence, obtains a much more accurate reliability measure than the traditional measure used in the TPC decoder. The TPC was generated by serial concatenation of two Bose, Chaudhuri, and Hocquenghem codes with low overhead, which is a structure similar to a recently proposed hardware implementation of TPC decoder for optical systems. Simulation results with all-order polarization mode dispersion and amplified spontaneous emission noise demonstrate both the practicality and the effectiveness of the IMAP-TPC scheme for OFCS.     

Quantification and segmentation of brain tissues from MR images: aprobabilistic neural network approach

This paper presents a probabilistic neural network based technique for unsupervised quantification and segmentation of brain tissues from magnetic resonance images. It is shown that this problem can be solved by distribution learning and relaxation labeling, resulting in an efficient method that may be particularly useful in quantifying and segmenting abnormal brain tissues where the number of tissue types is unknown and the distributions of tissue types heavily overlap. The new technique uses suitable statistical models for both the pixel and context images and formulates the problem in terms of model-histogram fitting and global consistency labeling. The quantification is achieved by probabilistic self-organizing mixtures and the segmentation by a probabilistic constraint relaxation network. The experimental results show the efficient and robust performance of the new algorithm and that it outperforms the conventional classification based approaches     

Variational Principles for Vibrating Carbon Nanotubes Conveying Fluid,Based on the Nonlocal Beam Model

Variational principles are derived in order to facilitate the investigation of the vibrations and stability of single and double-walled carbon nanotubes conveying a fluid, from a linear time-dependent partial differential equation governing their displacements. The nonlocal elastic theory of Euler-Bernoulli beams takes small-scale effects into account. Hamilton’s principle is obtained for double-walled nano-tubes conveying a fluid. The natural and geometric boundary conditions identified are seen to be coupled and time-dependent due to nonlocal effects.