A model has been developed which simulates the deformation of single crystal austenitic stainless steels and captures the effects of hydrogen on stress corrosion cracking. The model is based on the crystal plasticity theory which relates critical resolved shear stress to plastic strain and the strength of the crystal. We propose an analytical representation of hydrogen interactions with the material microstructure during deformation and simulate the effects hydrogen will have on void growth prior to fracture. Changes in the mechanical properties of the crystal prior to fracture are governed by the interaction of hydrogen atoms and ensembles of dislocations as the crystal plastically deforms and is based on the hydrogen enhanced localised plasticity (HELP) mechanism. The effects of hydrogen on void growth are considered by analysing the effect of hydrogen on the mechanical property of material bounding an embedded void. The model presented has been implemented numerically using the User Material (UMAT) subroutine in the finite element software (ABAQUS) and has been validated by comparing simulated results with experimental data. Influencing parameters have been varied to understand their effect and test sensitivities.

A non-local, ordinary state-based, peridynamic elastoplastic model is formulated to numerically simulate the fracture of reinforced concrete materials. Several basic definitions are first discussed to avoid confusion; and then, a detailed derivation of the force vector state is presented, leading to a unified expression of force state for one-, two- and three-dimensional elasticity problems. Furthermore, an ordinary state-based peridynamic (OSB PD) elastoplastic analysis approach is developed for both plastic compressible and incompressible materials, including the constitutive relationship, the yield function, the consistency condition and the plasticity flow rule. The peridynamic predictions of a quasi-static deformation of the steel rods are in good agreement with the analytical solution. Moreover, the OSB PD plasticity is verified by analyzing a square plate with or without a central hole suffering different loading-unloading paths. Finally, a two dimensional reinforced concrete clamped beam subjected to impact loading is simulated with the proposed OSB PD elastoplasticity, demonstrating its capability in capturing the damage characteristics and structural failure behavior. Simulation results show good accuracy of the peridynamics in simulating elastoplastic problems.

Existing numerical schemes used to solve the governing equations for compressible flow suffer from dissipation errors which tend to smear out sharp discontinuities. Hybrid schemes show potential improvements in this challenging problem; however, the solution quality of a hybrid scheme heavily depends on the criterion to switch between the different candidate reconstruction functions. This work presents a new type of switching criterion (or selector) using machine learning techniques. The selector is trained with randomly generated samples of continuous and discontinuous data profiles, using the exact solution of the governing equation as a reference. Neural networks and random forests were used as the machine learning frameworks to train the selector, and it was later implemented as the indicator function in a hybrid scheme which includes THINC and WENO-Z as the candidate reconstruction functions. The trained selector has been verified to be effective as a reliable switching criterion in the hybrid scheme, which significantly improves the solution quality for both advection and Euler equations.

The effect of fluid on the natural frequencies of a vertical rectangular lock gate is investigated. The fluid is assumed to be inviscid and incompressible having an irrotational flow field. The far boundary of fluid domain is truncated near the lock gate structure by solving the Laplace equation using Fourier half range cosine series expansion. The formulation of lock gate structure is governed using Mindlin’s plate theory. The coupled interaction between the fluid domain and the lock gate structure is established using finite element method (FEM) and a computer code is written using FORTRAN. Convergence study and validation of the formulation are carried out to minimise the computational error. The natural frequencies of lock gate coupled with and without fluid are determined for undisturbed and linearised free surface conditions. By varying extent of fluid domain, the effect on the natural frequencies of lock gate is evaluated. The results of natural frequencies obtained may be useful to the designer when the reservoir lock gate structure is exposed to the natural disasters.

This study proposed the application of a novel immersed boundary method (IBM) for the treatment of irregular geometries using Cartesian computational grids for high speed compressible gas flows modelled using the unsteady Euler equations. Furthermore, the method is accelerated through the use of multiple Graphics Processing Units – specifically using Nvidia’s CUDA together with MPI - due to the computationally intensive nature associated with the numerical solution to multi-dimensional continuity equations. Due to the high degree of locality required for efficient multiple GPU computation, the Split Harten-Lax-van-Leer (SHLL) scheme is employed for vector splitting of fluxes across cell interfaces. NVIDIA visual profiler shows that our proposed method having a computational speed of 98.6 GFLOPS and 61% efficiency based on the Roofline analysis that provides the theoretical computing speed of reaching 160 GLOPS with an average 2.225 operations/byte. To demonstrate the validity of the method, results from several benchmark problems covering both subsonic and supersonic flow regimes are presented. Performance testing using 96 GPU devices demonstrates a speed up of 89 times that of a single GPU (i.e. 92% efficiency) for a benchmark problem employing 48 million cells. Discussions regarding communication overhead and parallel efficiency for varying problem sizes are also presented.

In this study, a peridynamic material model for a polycrystalline ice is utilised to investigate its fracture behaviour under dynamic loading condition. First, the material model was validated by considering a single grain, double grains and polycrystalline structure under tension loading condition. Peridynamic results are compared against finite element analysis results without allowing failure. After validating the material model, dynamic analysis of a polycrystalline ice material with two pre-existing cracks under tension loading is performed by considering weak and strong grain boundaries with respect to grain interiors. Numerical results show that the effect of microstructure is significant for weak grain boundaries. On the other hand, for strong grain boundaries, the effect of microstructure is insignificant. The evaluated results have demonstrated that peridynamics can be a very good alternative numerical tool for fracture analysis of polycrystalline ice material.

The mechanical characterization of rocks is important in engineering design and analysis of rock-related structures. In the current researches, rocks are classified as heterogeneous materials with anisotropic behavior, and advanced methods such as combined experimental-numerical approach are developed to characterize the behavior of rocks. In this study, the nanoindentation experiment in conjunction with the generalized means method is used to determine the Young’s modulus and hardness of eight different polycrystalline granite rocks. In the first step, the Young’s modulus and hardness of granites’ constituents are determined through nanoindentation tests on pure granite minerals. Then, the properties of granites are determined using generalized means method by considering the mechanical properties of minerals, their volume fractions and an empirical constant called the microstructural coefficient. Accurate results with less than 3% error are obtained for 62.5% of the granite samples. The generalized means is introduced as a simple and effective method to characterize the mechanical properties of heterogeneous polycrystalline rocks.

In this paper, a rectangular aerostatic bearing with multiple supply holes is optimised with a multiobjective optimisation approach. The design variables taken into account are the supply holes position, their number and diameter, the supply pressure, while the objective functions are the load capacity, the air consumption and the stiffness and damping coefficients. A genetic algorithm is applied in order to find the Pareto set of solutions. The novelty with respect to other optimisations which can be found in literature is that number and location of the supply holes is completely free and not associated to a pre-defined scheme. A vector x associated with the supply holes location is introduced in the design parameters and given in input to the optimizer.

Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and its approaches are powerful techniques in signal processing especially for the diagnosis of rotating machinery running in non-stationary regime. We are interested in this paper to the dynamic behavior of a defected one stage gearbox equipped with an elastic coupling and loaded under acyclism regime generated by a combustion engine. Actually, we adopt an approach to the EMD method called Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN) as a technique to perform the diagnosis of the studied system. Since the obtained signals are modulated, all obtained Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) are modulated and are processed and shown by the Wigner-Ville distributions (WVD) as well as the spectrum of their envelope in order to detect defects such as cracked tooth defect in the wheel of the spur gearbox and eccentricity defect in the gear.

This paper is intended for dealing with the peristaltic flow of an electrically conducting Williamson nanofluid in a tapered asymmetric channel through a porous medium with heat and mass transfer. In the current paper, temperature-dependent electrical conductivity formulation was introduced for the first time in peristaltic literature. The flow is pervaded by an oblique uniform magnetic field. The present investigation includes the influences of thermal radiation, Joule heat, viscous dissipation, Hall Current, 1st order chemical reaction, and Dofour and Soret numbers. Current problem is reformulated under the molds of low Reynolds number and long wavelength approximation. Afterwards, semi analytical solutions have been evaluated for the distributions of velocity, temperature, nanoparticle concentrations as well as longitudinal pressure gradient. Solutions can be obtained by using multi-step differential transform method (MS-DTM), a reliable and powerful technique that improve accuracy and overcome drawbacks raised in using the standard differential transform method (DTM). Detailed comparisons have been made at different values of 𝑥 through graphs by Ms-DTM. The graphically results were prepared to visualize the effects of various physical parameters of interest. The semi-analytical results had shown that, as the thermal radiation increases, the nanoparticles diameter and concentration of fluid increase (thermal radiation is a decreasing function in temperature when the temperature decreases the diameter of the nanoparticles increases i.e. the volume of nanoparticle and its concentration increases and become more effective near to tumor tissues). Consequently, it can be used as agents for radiation therapy, generate localized raises in radiation doses and selectively target tumor cells for localized damage (Radiotherapy of oncology).

A mathematical method is developed to predict surge and instability inception in a centrifugal compressor map based on Greitzer and Moore model. The method uses phase plane and Jacobian matrix to determine stable and unstable zone of centrifugal compressor and to extract limit cycle in unstable zone. In order to evaluate accuracy of analytical method, a compressor test rig facility is designed and tested in order to be compared with theoretical results. Accurate Honeywell piezoelectric pressure transducers are used to measure time averaged pressure at inlet and outlet ducts of the compressor. In order to record the flow fluctuation precisely, hot wire sensors are installed in entrance and exit of impeller. The results represent instability inception near true stall point but different from measured data. The discrepancy mostly originates from inlet and outlet ducts which causes measure stall point of compressor deviates from true one. An analytical method which is able to predict surge and instability in a compressor is highly significant for instrumentation and controlling of system.

This paper introduces a new approach to calculate stress intensity factors based on a combination of Displacement Extrapolation Method and Peridynamic Theory. After obtaining the displacement field from Peridynamic Theory, by appropriately selecting nodes at the crack tip region and their displacements yield stress intensity factors at the crack tips. To demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach, three different benchmark problems are considered including plate with a central crack, plate with an edge crack and plate with a slanted crack. Results evaluated from the current approach are compared against analytical and finite element analysis results, and good agreement is obtained between three different approaches. This shows that coupled Displacement Extrapolation Method and Peridynamic Theory approach can be an alternative method to calculate stress intensity factors.

Direct numerical simulations have been applied to simulate flows with polymer additives. FENE-P (finite-extensible-nonlinear-elastic-Peterlin) dumbbell model solving for the conformation tensor is adopted to investigate the influence of the polymer on the flowfield. Boundary treatments of the conformation tensor on the flowfield are examined first, where boundary condition based on the linear extrapolation scheme provides more accurate results with second-order accurate error norms. Further simulations of the turbulent channel flow at different Weissenberg numbers are also conducted to investigate the influence on drag reduction. Drag reduction increases in tandem with the increase of Weissenberg number and the increase saturates at Weτ~200, where the drag reduction is close to the maximum drag reduction (MDR) limit. At the regime of y+ > 5, the viscous layer thickens with the increase of the Weissenberg number showing a departure from the traditional log-law profile, and the velocity profiles approach the MDR line at high Weissenberg number. The Reynolds stress decreases in tandem with the increase of Weτ, whereas the levels of laminar stress and polymer stress act adversely. However, as the Weissenberg number increases, the proportion of the laminar stress in the total stress increases, and this contributes to the drag reduction of the polymer flow.

The concept of the fixed wing Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) has received increasing interest over the past few decades, with the principal aim of carrying out the surveillance missions. The design of the flapping wing MAVs still is in infancy stage. On the other hand, there has been increasing interest over the flow control using plasma actuators in worldwide. The aim of this research is to study the flow control of a flapping airfoil with and without plasma actuation in OpenFOAM. The OpenFOAM CFD platform has been used to develop our own plasma solver. For the plasma induced turbulence in the flow regime, k-ε turbulence model was adopted to address the interaction between plasma and fluid flows. For the plasma-fluid interaction, we use reduced-order modelling to solve the plasma induced electric force. A two dimensional NACA0012 flapping airfoil without plasma actuation study has been benchmarked with previous published literature. We have not only focused on the active flow control but also analyzed the important parameter reduced frequency at different values, those are 0.1, 0.05 and 0.025. Reduced frequency (κ) is very important parameter of an airfoil in the unsteady motion. Our major contribution is testing the several reduced frequencies with the plasma actuation. The positive and beneficial effects of the plasma actuator for all cases have been observed. From the observed results, the flapping with plasma actuation at reduced frequency of 0.1 showed the 14.285 percent lift improvement and the 16.19 percent drag reduction than the flapping without plasma actuation at the respective dynamic stall angles. The maximum lift coefficient is increased with the increase in reduced frequency. In overall, plasma actuators are effective in the flow control of a flapping airfoil. In future, the combination of the flapping with plasma actuators will be a promising application to boast the maneuverability of MAVs.

Although the whip is a common tool that has been used for thousands of years, there have been very few studies on its dynamic behavior. With the advance of modern technology, designing and building soft- body robot whips has become feasible. This paper presents a study on the modeling and experimental testing of a robot whip. The robot whip is modeled using a Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model (PRBM). The PRBM consists of a number of pseudo-rigid-links and pseudo-revolute-joints just like a multi-linkage pendulum. Because of its large number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and inherited underactuation, the robot whip exhibits prominent transient chaotic behavior. In particular, depending on the initial driving force, the chaos may start sooner or later, but will die down because of the gravity and air damping. The dynamic model is validated by experiments. It is interesting to note that with the same amount of force, the robot whip can generate a velocity more than 3 times and an acceleration up to 43 times faster than that of its rigid counterpart. This gives the robot whip some potential applications, such as whipping, wrapping and grabbing. This study also helps to develop other soft-body robots that involve nonlinear dynamics.

This paper investigates the electromechanical behavior of functionally graded piezoelectric composite beams containing axially functionally graded (AFG) beam and piezoelectric actuators subjected to electrical load. The mechanical properties of the AFG beam are assumed to be graded along the axial direction. Employing the electromechanical coupling theory and load simulation method, the expression for the simulation load of the piezoelectric actuators is obtained. Based on Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and the obtained simulation load, the differential governing equation of the piezoelectric composite beams subjected to electrical load is derived. The integration-by-parts approach is utilized to solve the differential governing equation, and the expression for the deflection of the piezoelectric composite beams is obtained. The accuracy of the proposed method is validated by the finite element method. The bending response of the functionally graded piezoelectric composite beams is investigated through the proposed method. In the numerical examples, the effects of electrical load, actuator thickness, AFG beam thickness and AFG beam length on the electromechanical behavior of the functionally graded piezoelectric composite beams are studied.

Silicon carbide (SiC) is ideally suitable as a sensor material in harsh environments. Despite the brittleness in the macroscopic scale, plasticity in SiC is observed at small component length-scales. Previous nanoindentation based study combining experiment and numerical approaches of single-crystal 6H-SiC has shown that slip activation is rather complex, and that non-basal slip could potentially dominate the plastic deformation behaviour. In this study, we investigated the local deformation response evolution of shear strain directly under and in the vicinity of the indenter tip. The results show the pyramidal slip families contribute significantly to the deformation process.

Numerical simulations of convective fluid flow and heat transfer in a channel containing heated blocks with slot-jet behind the blocks are performed. The finite volume method with the simple algorithm is adopted and Ansys Fluent © CFD commercial code is used. The effect of slot-jet on flow structure and heat transfer modification is examined. The incidence of influent parameters such as slot-jet position, relative inlet slot-jet velocity and Reynolds number value has been explored. The results show that both the main inlet velocity as well as the relative slot-jet velocity in addition to the slot position modifies the flow field, temperature contours and heat transfer rate.

Icing on aircraft can drastically reduce aerodynamic performance and lead to serious accidents. Therefore, prediction of the accreted ice shape and area and its effects on aerodynamic performance is crucial during the design phase of an aircraft. However, numerical simulations based on conventional grid-based methods such as the finite volume method cannot accurately reproduce the complex ice shapes, which involve horn growth, feather growth, air voids, and severe surface roughness. In the present study, instead of the grid-based method, a hybrid grid- and particle-based method was newly proposed and applied to the icing problem on a NACA0012 airfoil. The explicit moving particle semi-implicit method was employed as the particle-based method due to its short computing time. The numerical simulations effectively reproduced feather-shaped ice, air voids, and surface roughness. Finally, by computing the flow around the iced airfoil, it was confirmed that flow separation around the leading edge occurred due to the ice layer, which resulted in a thicker boundary layer and wake and an increase in the drag coefficient of approximately 70% after a residence time of only 60 seconds.