71,741 research outputs found
Development of Stresses in Cohesionless Poured Sand
The pressure distribution beneath a conical sandpile, created by pouring sand
from a point source onto a rough rigid support, shows a pronounced minimum
below the apex (`the dip'). Recent work of the authors has attempted to explain
this phenomenon by invoking local rules for stress propagation that depend on
the local geometry, and hence on the construction history, of the medium. We
discuss the fundamental difference between such approaches, which lead to
hyperbolic differential equations, and elastoplastic models, for which the
equations are elliptic within any elastic zones present .... This displacement
field appears to be either ill-defined, or defined relative to a reference
state whose physical existence is in doubt. Insofar as their predictions depend
on physical factors unknown and outside experimental control, such
elastoplastic models predict that the observations should be intrinsically
irreproducible .... Our hyperbolic models are based instead on a physical
picture of the material, in which (a) the load is supported by a skeletal
network of force chains ("stress paths") whose geometry depends on construction
history; (b) this network is `fragile' or marginally stable, in a sense that we
define. .... We point out that our hyperbolic models can nonetheless be
reconciled with elastoplastic ideas by taking the limit of an extremely
anisotropic yield condition.Comment: 25 pages, latex RS.tex with rspublic.sty, 7 figures in Rsfig.ps.
Philosophical Transactions A, Royal Society, submitted 02/9
Common Arc Method for Diffraction Pattern Orientation
Very short pulses of x-ray free-electron lasers opened the way to obtain
diffraction signal from single particles beyond the radiation dose limit. For
3D structure reconstruction many patterns are recorded in the object's unknown
orientation. We describe a method for orientation of continuous diffraction
patterns of non-periodic objects, utilizing intensity correlations in the
curved intersections of the corresponding Ewald spheres, hence named Common Arc
orientation. Present implementation of the algorithm optionally takes into
account the Friedel law, handles missing data and is capable to determine the
point group of symmetric objects. Its performance is demonstrated on simulated
diffraction datasets and verification of the results indicates high orientation
accuracy even at low signal levels. The Common Arc method fills a gap in the
wide palette of the orientation methods.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
Progressive surface modeling scheme from unorganised curves
This paper presents a novel surface modelling scheme to construct a freeform surface
progressively from unorganised curves representing the boundary and interior characteristic curves.
The approach can construct a base surface model from four ordinary or composite boundary curves
and support incremental surface updating from interior characteristic curves, some of which may not
be on the final surface. The base surface is first constructed as a regular Coons surface and upon receiving an interior curve sketch, it is then updated. With this progressive modelling scheme, a final
surface with multiple sub-surfaces can be obtained from a set of unorganised curves and transferred
to commercial surface modelling software for detailed modification. The approach has been tested
with examples based on 3D motion sketches; it is capable of dealing with unorganised design curves
for surface modelling in conceptual design. Its limitations have been discussed
Wing and body motion during flight initiation in Drosophila revealed by automated visual tracking
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a widely used model organism in studies of genetics, developmental biology and biomechanics. One limitation for exploiting Drosophila as a model system for behavioral neurobiology is that measuring body kinematics during behavior is labor intensive and subjective. In order to quantify flight kinematics during different types of maneuvers, we have developed a visual tracking system that estimates the posture of the fly from multiple calibrated cameras. An accurate geometric fly model is designed using unit quaternions to capture complex body and wing rotations, which are automatically fitted to the images in each time frame. Our approach works across a range of flight behaviors, while also being robust to common environmental clutter. The tracking system is used in this paper to compare wing and body motion during both voluntary and escape take-offs. Using our automated algorithms, we are able to measure stroke amplitude, geometric angle of attack and other parameters important to a mechanistic understanding of flapping flight. When compared with manual tracking methods, the algorithm estimates body position within 4.4±1.3% of the body length, while body orientation is measured within 6.5±1.9 deg. (roll), 3.2±1.3 deg. (pitch) and 3.4±1.6 deg. (yaw) on average across six videos. Similarly, stroke amplitude and deviation are estimated within 3.3 deg. and 2.1 deg., while angle of attack is typically measured within 8.8 deg. comparing against a human digitizer. Using our automated tracker, we analyzed a total of eight voluntary and two escape take-offs. These sequences show that Drosophila melanogaster do not utilize clap and fling during take-off and are able to modify their wing kinematics from one wingstroke to the next. Our approach should enable biomechanists and ethologists to process much larger datasets than possible at present and, therefore, accelerate insight into the mechanisms of free-flight maneuvers of flying insects
Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates
The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for
the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This
dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral
anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been
developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data.
To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image
analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral
vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from
automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature
registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of-
Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets.
To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation
and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal
cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain
because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels
containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The
neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel
expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled
partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit
surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in
neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed
landmark study.
To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm
for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted
cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form
deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using
data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local
changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus
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