Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Infrastructure Design, Signalling and Security in Railway

Railway transportation has become one of the main technological advances of our society. Since the first railway used to carry coal from a mine in Shropshire (England, 1600), a lot of efforts have been made to improve this transportation concept. One of its milestones was the invention and development of the steam locomotive, but commercial rail travels became practical two hundred years later. From these first attempts, railway infrastructures, signalling and security have evolved and become more complex than those performed in its earlier stages. This book will provide readers a comprehensive technical guide, covering these topics and presenting a brief overview of selected railway systems in the world. The objective of the book is to serve as a valuable reference for students, educators, scientists, faculty members, researchers, and engineers

Multiscale aeroelastic modelling in porous composite structures

Driven by economic, environmental and ergonomic concerns, porous composites are increasingly being adopted by the aeronautical and structural engineering communities for their improved physical and mechanical properties. Such materials often possess highly heterogeneous material descriptions and tessellated/complex geometries. Deploying commercially viable porous composite structures necessitates numerical methods that are capable of accurately and efficiently handling these complexities within the prescribed design iterations. Classical numerical methods, such as the Finite Element Method (FEM), while extremely versatile, incur large computational costs when accounting for heterogeneous inclusions and high frequency waves. This often renders the problem prohibitively expensive, even with the advent of modern high performance computing facilities. Multiscale Finite Element Methods (MsFEM) is an order reduction strategy specifically developed to address such issues. This is done by introducing meshes at different scales. All underlying physics and material descriptions are explicitly resolved at the fine scale. This information is then mapped onto the coarse scale through a set of numerically evaluated multiscale basis functions. The problems are then solved at the coarse scale at a significantly reduced cost and mapped back to the fine scale using the same multiscale shape functions. To this point, the MsFEM has been developed exclusively with quadrilateral/hexahedral coarse and fine elements. This proves highly inefficient when encountering complex coarse scale geometries and fine scale inclusions. A more flexible meshing scheme at all scales is essential for ensuring optimal simulation runtimes. The Virtual Element Method (VEM) is a relatively recent development within the computational mechanics community aimed at handling arbitrary polygonal (potentially non-convex) elements. In this thesis, novel VEM formulations for poromechanical problems (consolidation and vibroacoustics) are developed. This is then integrated at the fine scale into the multiscale procedure to enable versatile meshing possibilities. Further, this enhanced capability is also extended to the coarse scale to allow for efficient macroscale discretizations of complex structures. The resulting Multiscale Virtual Element Method (MsVEM) is originally applied to problems in elastostatics, consolidation and vibroacoustics in porous media to successfully drive down computational run times without significantly affecting accuracy. Following this, a parametric Model Order Reduction scheme for coupled problems is introduced for the first time at the fine scale to obtain a Reduced Basis Multiscale Virtual Element Method. This is used to augment the rate of multiscale basis function evaluation in spectral acoustics problems. The accuracy of all the above novel contributions are investigated in relation to standard numerical methods, i.e., the FEM and MsFEM, analytical solutions and experimental data. The associated efficiency is quantified in terms of computational run-times, complexity analyses and speed-up metrics. Several extended applications of the VEM and the MsVEM are briefly visited, e.g., VEM phase field Methods for brittle fracture, structural and acoustical topology optimization, random vibrations and stochastic dynamics, and structural vibroacoustics