There are a number of interesting applications where modeling elastic and/or viscoelastic materials is fundamental, including uses in civil engineering, the food industry, land mine detection and ultrasonic imaging. Here we provide an overview of the subject for both elastic and viscoelastic materials in order to understand the behavior of these materials. We begin with a brief introduction of some basic terminology and relationships in continuum mechanics, and a review of equations of motion in a continuum in both Lagrangian and Eulerian forms. To complete the set of equations, we then proceed to present and discuss a number of specific forms for the constitutive relationships between stress and strain proposed in the literature for both elastic and viscoelastic materials. In addition, we discuss some applications for these constitutive equations. Finally, we give a computational example describing the motion of soil experiencing dynamic loading by incorporating a specific form of constitutive equation into the equation of motion.

In this paper, a simplified lattice Boltzmann method (SLBM) without evolution of the distribution function is developed for simulating incompressible viscous flows. This method is developed from the application of fractional step technique to the macroscopic Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations recovered from lattice Boltzmann equation by using Chapman-Enskog expansion analysis. In SLBM, the equilibrium distribution function is calculated from the macroscopic variables, while the non-equilibrium distribution function is simply evaluated from the difference of two equilibrium distribution functions. Therefore, SLBM tracks the evolution of the macroscopic variables rather than the distribution function. As a result, lower virtual memories are required and physical boundary conditions could be directly implemented. Through numerical test at high Reynolds number, the method shows very nice performance in numerical stability. An accuracy test for the 2D Taylor-Green flow shows that SLBM has the second-order of accuracy in space. More benchmark tests, including the Couette flow, the Poiseuille flow as well as the 2D lid-driven cavity flow, are conducted to further validate the present method; and the simulation results are in good agreement with available data in literatures.

In this work we investigate the pricing of swing options in a model where the underlying asset follows a jump diffusion process. We focus on the derivation of the partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) which will be applied to swing contracts and construct a novel pay-off function from a tree-based pay-off matrix that can be used as initial condition in the PIDE formulation. For valuing swing type derivatives we develop a theta implicit-explicit finite difference scheme to discretize the PIDE using a Gaussian quadrature method for the integral part. Based on known results for the classical theta-method the existence and uniqueness of solution to the new implicit-explicit finite difference method is proven. Various numerical examples illustrate the usability of the proposed method and allow us to analyse the sensitivity of swing options with respect to model parameters. In particular the effects of number of exercise rights, jump intensities and dividend yields will be investigated in depth.

In this paper, we propose a finite element method for the elasticity problems which have displacement discontinuity along the material interface using uniform grids. We modify the immersed finite element method introduced recently for the computation of interface problems having homogeneous jumps [20, 22]. Since the interface is allowed to cut through the element, we modify the standard Crouzeix-Raviart basis functions so that along the interface, the normal stress is continuous and the jump of the displacement vector is proportional to the normal stress. We construct the broken piecewise linear basis functions which are uniquely determined by these conditions. The unknowns are only associated with the edges of element, except the intersection points. Thus our scheme has fewer degrees of freedom than most of the XFEM type of methods in the existing literature [1,8,13]. Finally, we present numerical results which show optimal orders of convergence rates.

Similarity solution is investigated for the synchronous grouting of shield tunnel under the vertical non-axisymmetric displacement boundary condition in the paper. The synchronous grouting process of shield tunnel was simplified as the cylindrical expansion problem, which was based on the mechanism between the slurry and stratum of the synchronous grouting. The stress harmonic function on the horizontal and vertical ground surfaces is improved. Based on the virtual image technique, stress function solutions and Boussinesq's solution, elastic solution under the vertical non-axisymmetric displacement boundary condition on the vertical surface was proposed for synchronous grouting problems of shield tunnel. In addition, the maximum grouting pressure was also obtained to control the vertical displacement of horizontal ground surface. The validity of the proposed approach was proved by the numerical method. It can be known from the parameter analysis that larger vertical displacement of the horizontal ground surface was induced by smaller tunnel depth, smaller tunnel excavation radius, shorter limb distance, larger expansion pressure and smaller elastic modulus of soils.

A spectral Jacobi-collocation approximation is proposed for Volterra delay integro-differential equations with weakly singular kernels. In this paper, we consider the special case that the underlying solutions of equations are sufficiently smooth. We provide a rigorous error analysis for the proposed method, which shows that both the errors of approximate solutions and the errors of approximate derivatives decay exponentially in L∞ norm and weighted L2 norm. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate our error analysis.

Mass migration of cells (via wave motion) plays an important role in many biological processes, particularly chemotaxis. We study the existence of travelling wave solutions for a chemotaxis model on a microscopic scale. The interaction between nutrients and chemoattractants are considered. Unlike previous approaches, we allow for diffusion of substrates, degradation of chemoattractants and cell growth (constant and linear growth rate). We apply asymptotic methods to investigate the behaviour of the solutions when cells are highly sensitive to extracellular signalling. Explicit solutions are demonstrated, and their biological implications are presented. The results presented here extend and generalize known results.

This paper introduces two novel conformal structure-preserving algorithms for solving the coupled damped nonlinear Schrödinger (CDNLS) system, which are based on the conformal multi-symplectic Hamiltonian formulation and its conformal conservation laws. The proposed algorithms can preserve corresponding conformal multi-symplectic conservation law and conformal momentum conservation law in any local time-space region, respectively. Moreover, it is further shown that the algorithms admit the conformal charge conservation law, and exactly preserve the dissipation rate of charge under appropriate boundary conditions. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the conformal properties and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms during long-time numerical simulations and validate the analysis.

In order to overcome the possible singularity associated with the Point Interpolation Method (PIM), the Radial Point Interpolation Method (RPIM) was proposed by G. R. Liu. Radial basis functions (RBF) was used in RPIM as basis functions for interpolation. All these radial basis functions include shape parameters. The choice of these shape parameters has been and stays a problematic theme in RBF approximation and interpolation theory. The object of this study is to contribute to the analysis of how these shape parameters affect the accuracy of the radial PIM. The RPIM is studied based on the global Galerkin weak form performed using two integration technics: classical Gaussian integration and the strain smoothing integration scheme. The numerical performance of this method is tested on their behavior on curve fitting, and on three elastic mechanical problems with regular or irregular nodes distributions. A range of recommended shape parameters is obtained from the analysis of different error indexes and also the condition number of the matrix system. All resulting RPIM methods perform very well in term of numerical computation. The Smoothed Radial Point Interpolation Method (SRPIM) shows a higher accuracy, especially in a situation of distorted node scheme.

We propose some new weighted averaging methods for gradient recovery, and present analytical and numerical investigation on the performance of these weighted averaging methods. It is shown analytically that the harmonic averaging yields a superconvergent gradient for any mesh in one-dimension and the rectangular mesh in two-dimension. Numerical results indicate that these new weighted averaging methods are better recovered gradient approaches than the simple averaging and geometry averaging methods under triangular mesh.