Microscale and mesoscale discrete models for dynamic fracture of structures built of brittle material

In this work we present the discrete models for dynamic fracture of structures built of brittle materials. The models construction is based on Voronoi cell representation of the heterogeneous structure, with the beam lattice network used to model the cohesive and compressive forces between the neighboring cells. Each lattice component is a geometrically exact shear deformable beam which can describe large rigid body motion and the most salient fracture mechanisms. The latter can be represented through the corresponding form of the beam constitutive equations, which are derived either at microscale with random distribution of material properties or at a mesoscale with average deterministic values. The proposed models are also placed within the framework of dynamics, where special attention is paid to constructing the lattice network mass matrix as well as the corresponding time-stepping schemes. Numerical simulations of compression and bending tests is given to illustrate the models performance.     

FDTD simulation of 30 /spl mu/m diameter polymer micro-ring

Numerical results on polymer surrounded by an air micro-ring coupled to waveguides are presented. The FDTD method predicts a filter width of 1.4 nm and an extraction efficiency of almost 80% for a gap of 0.15 /spl mu/m.     

A code tagging approach to software product line development

Software product line engineering seeks to systematise reuse when developing families of similar software systems so as to minimise development time, cost and defects. To realise variability at the code level, product line methods classically advocate usage of inheritance, components, frameworks, aspects or generative techniques. However, these might require unaffordable paradigm shifts for developers if the software was not thought at the outset as a product line. Furthermore, these techniques can be conflicting with a company’s coding practices or external regulations. These concerns were the motivation for the industry–university collaboration described in this paper in which we developed a minimally intrusive coding technique based on tags. The approach was complemented with traceability from code to feature diagrams which were exploited for automated configuration. It is supported by a toolchain and is now in use in the partner company for the development of flight-grade satellite communication software libraries.     

Electrochemistry at capped platinum nanoparticle Langmuir Blodgett films: A study of the influence of platinum amount and of number of LB layers

Platinum nanoparticles (n-Pt), over-grafted with 2-thiophenecarbonyl chloride are assembled on gold electrodes, by the Langmuir Blodgett (LB) technique using behenic acid (BHA) as promoting agent. These layers are electrochemically active without any preliminary activation. The [Fe(CN)₆]^3−/4− redox couple was used as electrochemical probe. This paper reports on the influence of the number of deposited LB layers, and the n-Pt density on the electrochemical response. n-Pt density was modified by the change of the “BHA/n-Pt” ratio. Cyclic voltammograms of “[Fe(CN)₆]^3−/4−” were observed whatever the coating conditions. As soon as the first layer was deposited the electrochemical response was associated to the n-Pt coverage, its response slightly increased up to a steady state for five or seven layers. As expected, the increase of the Pt density favored the increase of the current density. XPS analysis performed before and after electrochemical cycling showed that 4-mercaptoaniline capped platinum nanoparticles, and their over grafting were chemically and electrochemically stable. Analysis of influence of the number or the n-Pt density of the layers showed that the electrochemically active part of LB electrodes was provided by the last layer plus a part of the underlying one.     

Supporting multiple perspectives in feature-based configuration

Feature diagrams have become commonplace in software product line engineering as a means to document variability early in the life cycle. Over the years, their application has also been extended to assist stakeholders in the configuration of software products. However, existing feature-based configuration techniques offer little support for tailoring configuration views to the profiles of the various stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, yet formal and flexible, mechanism to leverage multidimensional separation of concerns in feature-based configuration. We propose a technique to specify concerns in feature diagrams and to generate automatically concern-specific configuration views. Three alternative visualisations are proposed. Our contributions are motivated and illustrated through excerpts from a real web-based meeting management application which was also used for a preliminary evaluation. We also report on the progress made in the development of a tool supporting multi-view feature-based configuration.     

A tabu search with an oscillation strategy for the discriminant analysis problem

This article proposes a tabu search approach to solve a mathematical programming formulation of the linear classification problem, which consists of determining an hyperplane that separates two groups of points as well as possible in ?^m. The tabu search approach proposed is based on a non-standard formulation using linear system infeasibility. The search space is the set of bases defined on the matrix that describes the linear system. The moves are performed by pivoting on a specified row and column. On real machine learning databases, our approach compares favorably with implementations based on parametric programming and irreducible infeasible constraint sets. Additional computational results for randomly generated instances confirm that our method provides a suitable alternative to the mixed integer programming formulation that is solved by a commercial code when the number of attributes m increases.     

The MORPHEUS Heterogeneous Dynamically Reconfigurable Platform

Reconfigurable computing offers a wide range of low cost and efficient solutions for embedded systems. The proper choice of the reconfigurable device, the granularity of its processing elements and its memory architecture highly depend on the type of application and their data flow. Existing solutions either offer fine grain FPGAs, which rely on a hardware synthesis flow and offer the maximum degree of flexibility, or coarser grain solutions, which are usually more suitable for a particular type of data flow and applications. In this paper, we present the MORPHEUS architecture, a versatile reconfigurable heterogeneous System-on-Chip targeting streaming applications. The presented architecture exploits different reconfigurable technologies at several computation granularities that efficiently address the different applications needs. In order to efficiently exploit the presented architecture, we implemented a complete software solution to map C applications to the reconfigurable architecture. In this paper, we describe the complete toolset and provide concrete use cases of the architecture.     

Variational implicit surface meshing

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to mesh implicit surfaces which produces meshes both with a good triangle aspect ratio as well as a good approximation quality. The number of vertices of the output mesh is defined by the end-user. For this goal, we perform a two-stage processing: an initialization step followed by an iterative optimization step. The initialization step consists in capturing the surface topology and allocating the vertex budget. The optimization algorithm is based on a variational vertices relaxation and triangulation update. In addition a gradation parameter can be defined to adapt the mesh sampling to the curvature of the implicit surface. We demonstrate the efficiency of the approach on synthetic models as well as real-world acquired data, and provide comparisons with previous approaches.