Optimization of flow in additively manufactured porous columns with graded permeability

Chemical engineering systems often involve a functional porous medium, such as in catalyzed reactive flows, fluid purifiers, and chromatographic separations. Ideally, the flow rates throughout the porous medium are uniform, and all portions of the medium contribute efficiently to its function. The permeability is a property of a porous medium that depends on pore geometry and relates flow rate to pressure drop. Additive manufacturing techniques raise the possibilities that permeability can be arbitrarily specified in three dimensions, and that a broader range of permeabilities can be achieved than by traditional manufacturing methods. Using numerical optimization methods, we show that designs with spatially varying permeability can achieve greater flow uniformity than designs with uniform permeability. We consider geometries involving hemispherical regions that distribute flow, as in many glass chromatography columns. By several measures, significant improvements in flow uniformity can be obtained by modifying permeability only near the inlet and outlet.     

Modelling of chromatic contrast for retrieval of wallpaper images

Colour remains one of the key factors in presenting an object and, consequently, has been widely applied in retrieval of images based on their visual contents. However, a colour appearance changes with the change of viewing surroundings, the phenomenon that has not been paid attention yet while performing colour‐based image retrieval. To comprehend this effect, in this article, a chromatic contrast model, CAMcc, is developed for the application of retrieval of colour intensive images, cementing the gap that most of existing colour models lack to fill by taking simultaneous colour contrast into account. Subsequently, the model is applied to the retrieval task on a collection of museum wallpapers of colour‐rich images. In comparison with current popular colour models including CIECAM02, HSI and RGB, with respect to both foreground and background colours, CAMcc appears to outperform the others with retrieved results being closer to query images. In addition, CAMcc focuses more on foreground colours, especially by maintaining the balance between both foreground and background colours, while the rest of existing models take on dominant colours that are perceived the most, usually background tones. Significantly, the contribution of the investigation lies in not only the improvement of the accuracy of colour‐based image retrieval but also the development of colour contrast model that warrants an important place in colour and computer vision theory, leading to deciphering the insight of this age‐old topic of chromatic contrast in colour science. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 361–373, 2015     

Creating the brain and interacting with the brain: an integrated approach to understanding the brain

In the past two decades, brain science and robotics have made gigantic advances in their own fields, and their interactions have generated several interdisciplinary research fields. First, in the ‘understanding the brain by creating the brain’ approach, computational neuroscience models have been applied to many robotics problems. Second, such brain-motivated fields as cognitive robotics and developmental robotics have emerged as interdisciplinary areas among robotics, neuroscience and cognitive science with special emphasis on humanoid robots. Third, in brain–machine interface research, a brain and a robot are mutually connected within a closed loop. In this paper, we review the theoretical backgrounds of these three interdisciplinary fields and their recent progress. Then, we introduce recent efforts to reintegrate these research fields into a coherent perspective and propose a new direction that integrates brain science and robotics where the decoding of information from the brain, robot control based on the decoded information and multimodal feedback to the brain from the robot are carried out in real time and in a closed loop.     

PDC钻头水力结构优化设计研究

在PDC钻头工作过程中，钻井液对钻头体表面的冲洗、冷却和润滑是保证钻头正常工作的一个非常重要的条件。对PDC钻头而言，水力结构（主要是中心水眼和冠部水道）设计的重要性尤其突出。以前,对钻头水力系统研究只能通过实验的方法进行,研究周期长、成本高、结构调整不方便，而数值模拟的方法在几年前还不成熟，甚至静态的复杂结构流场问题基本无法解决。为此，在提出PDC钻头水力结构优化设计原则的基础上，对PDC钻头的三维流场进行了数值模拟。模拟中考虑了钻头的喷嘴布置位置、直径、数量以及切削齿对流场的影响。计算结果表明，原设计在喷嘴布置位置和喷射角度上存在不足，以此为基础进行了水力结构的优化设计。文中的研究成果成功地应用在新型钻头水力结构的设计中，研究方法为PDC钻头水力结构优化分析奠定了理论基础。     

一种二元域上的快速计算哈希函数

论文从映射的角度,将哈希函数分为三类:严格哈希函数、计算哈希函数和实用哈希函数。在此基础上,根据二元域上二次方程x2 x c=0的部分不可解的性质,构造了一种计算哈希函数,它满足单向性和一一对应性,同时具有运算速度快的优点。     

Bezier曲线树

本文提出Ｂｅｚｉｅｒ样条曲线树结构用以高效地实现对曲边几何体的各种几何运算。对任意一条Ｂｅｚｉｅｒ样条曲线，用ｄｅＣａｓｔｅｌｊａｕ算法进行分割后，将分割结果用一平衡二叉树来存储。此后，对于该曲线所作的各种几何运算可以一种逼近等级的方式来进行。先以粗糙的逼近来进行计算，必要时增加精密度，从而提高各种运算的效率。     

Age of acquisition: Its neural and computational mechanisms.

The acquisition of new skills over a life span is a remarkable human ability. This ability, however, is constrained by age of acquisition (AoA); that is, the age at which learning occurs significantly affects the outcome. This is most clearly reflected in domains such as language, music, and athletics. This article provides a perspective on the neural and computational mechanisms underlying AoA in language acquisition. The authors show how AoA modulates both monolingual lexical processing and bilingual language acquisition. They consider the conditions under which syntactic processing and semantic processing may be differentially sensitive to AoA effects in second-language acquisition. The authors conclude that AoA effects are pervasive and that the neural and computational mechanisms underlying learning and sensorimotor integration provide a general account of these effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Numerical Study of a Modified Time-Stepping θ-Scheme for Incompressible Flow Simulations

In [Turek (1996). Int. J. Numer. Meth. Fluids 22, 987–1011], we had performed numerical comparisons for different time stepping schemes for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations. In this paper, we present the numerical analysis in the context of the Navier–Stokes equations for a modified time-stepping θ-scheme which has been recently proposed by Glowinski [Glowinski (2003). In: Ciarlet, P. G., and Lions, J. L. (eds.), Handbook of Numerical Analysis, Vol. IX, North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 3–1176]. Like the well-known classical Fractional-Step-θ-scheme which had been introduced by Glowinski [Glowinski (1985). In Murman, E. M. and Abarbanel, S. S. (eds.), Progress and Supercomputing in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Birkh?user, Boston MA; Bristeau et al. (1987). Comput. Phys. Rep. 6, 73–187], too, and which is still one of the most popular time stepping schemes, with or without operator splitting techniques, this new scheme consists of 3 substeps with nonequidistant substepping to build one macro time step. However, in contrast to the Fractional-Step-θ-scheme, the second substep can be formulated as an extrapolation step for previously computed data only, and the two remaining substeps look like a Backward Euler step so that no expensive operator evaluations for the right hand side vector with older solutions, as for instance in the Crank–Nicolson scheme, have to be performed. This modified scheme is implicit, strongly A-stable and second order accurate, too, which promises some advantageous behavior, particularly in implicit CFD simulations for the nonstationary Navier–Stokes equations. Representative numerical results, based on the software package FEATFLOW [Turek (2000). FEATFLOW Finite element software for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations: User Manual, Release 1.2, University of Dortmund] are obtained for typical flow problems with benchmark character which provide a fair rating of the solution schemes, particularly in long time simulations.Dedicated to David Gottlieb on the occasion of his 60th anniversary     

On the complexity of simulating space-bounded quantum computations

This paper studies the space-complexity of predicting the long-term behavior of a class of stochastic processes based on evolutions and measurements of quantum mechanical systems. These processes generalize a wide range of both quantum and classical space-bounded computations, including unbounded error computations given by machines having algebraic number transition amplitudes or probabilities. It is proved that any space s quantum stochastic process from this class can be simulated probabilistically with unbounded error in space O(s), and therefore deterministically in space O(s²).