Letting Traditional Boundaries Blur

This illustrative case study describes the evolution of a series of courses (2014-present) aimed at providing advanced students and early career researchers from a Czech science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)campus with the skills they need to adequately participate in global scientific endeavors. The involvement of library staff in the courses described here ranged far beyond embedding in the passive sense of the word, with all aspects of course design, implementation, and revision managed collaboratively and actively by an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional team championed by library personnel. Thus, this study raises the question of whether or not “embedding” is the appropriate term for describing active library leadership in such “catalytic” endeavors. Structurally, the case study will linearly relate how course modules were developed and how the team approached various organizational and structural hurdles which emerged over time. The study will also show how information literacy concepts were woven into the curriculum without being labeled as such - thus identifying a possible necessity for refining the discourse surrounding information literacy concepts so that students and researchers better understand why they are valuable. The study includes original data from course evaluations as well as descriptions of final syllabi (topics covered, readings assigned, types of homework assigned) for two courses, Scientific Writing in English, and Gaining Confidence in Presenting. Because all instruction and materials were delivered in English, the content described will be relevant to anyone working with advanced STEM students and early career researchers who publish in English. Finally, the study relates how such courses provide essential starting points for proactive engagement with patrons and includes examples of dialogues about writing, publishing, and related topics, introducing issues related to blur: the blurring of traditional boundaries between librarianship and scholarship

Fast Fourier transform-based modelling for the determination of micromechanical fields in polycrystals

International audienceEmerging characterization methods in Experimental Mechanics pose a challenge to modelers to devise efficient formulations that permit interpretation and exploitation of the massive amount of data generated by these novel methods. In this overview we report on a numerical formulation based on Fast Fourier Transforms, developed over the last 15 years, which can use the voxelized microstructural images of heterogeneous materials as input to predict their micromechanical and effective response. The focus of this presentation is on applications of the method to plastically-deforming polycrystalline materials

Stochastic evaluation of stress and strain distributions in duplex steel

Austenite–ferrite duplex steels generally consist of two differently textured polycrystalline phases with different glide mechanisms. For estimating the effective mechanical behavior of heterogeneous materials, there exist well established approaches, two of which are the classes of mean-field and full-field methods. In this work, the local fields resulting from these different approaches are compared using analytical calculations and full-field simulations. Duplex steels of various textures measured using X-ray diffraction are considered. Special emphasis is given to the influence of the crystallographic texture on the stress and strain distributions

Microstructural enrichment functions based on stochastic Wang tilings

This paper presents an approach to constructing microstructural enrichment functions to local fields in non-periodic heterogeneous materials with applications in Partition of Unity and Hybrid Finite Element schemes. It is based on a concept of aperiodic tilings by the Wang tiles, designed to produce microstructures morphologically similar to original media and enrichment functions that satisfy the underlying governing equations. An appealing feature of this approach is that the enrichment functions are defined only on a small set of square tiles and extended to larger domains by an inexpensive stochastic tiling algorithm in a non-periodic manner. Feasibility of the proposed methodology is demonstrated on constructions of stress enrichment functions for two-dimensional mono-disperse particulate media.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures; v2: completely re-written after the first revie

Selected topics in homogenization of transport processes in historical masonry structures

The paper reviews several topics associated with the homogenization of transport processed in historical masonry structures. Since these often experience an irregular or random pattern, we open the subject by summarizing essential steps in the formulation of a suitable computational model in the form of Statistically Equivalent Periodic Unit Cell (SEPUC). Accepting SEPUC as a reliable representative volume element is supported by application of the Fast Fourier Transform to both the SEPUC and large binary sample of real masonry in search for effective thermal conductivities limited here to a steady state heat conduction problem. Fully coupled non-stationary heat and moisture transport is addressed next in the framework of two-scale first-order homogenization approach with emphases on the application of boundary and initial conditions on the meso-scale.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, 2 table