Dissertation question time: supporting the dissertation project through peer advice

Dissertation question time is a model for a workshop provided by the central academic skills department at Brunel and used to support dissertation writing. The analysis of the use of the model with students and their feedback raises interesting questions about peer learning and advice giving as a pedagogical method, especially when supporting researchers. The research focuses on the delivery of the dissertation question time workshop and the analysis of student feedback and follow up interviews. The positive impact of the workshop upon students’ understanding of the research processes led to in becoming an important aspect of central support provision for dissertation writing and research

Determination of Bootstrap confidence intervals on sensitivity indices obtained by polynomial chaos expansion

L’analyse de sensibilité a pour but d’évaluer l’influence de la variabilité d’un ou plusieurs paramètres d’entrée d’un modèle sur la variabilité d’une ou plusieurs réponses. Parmi toutes les méthodes d’approximations, le développement sur une base de chaos polynômial est une des plus efficace pour le calcul des indices de sensibilité, car ils sont obtenus analytiquement grâce aux coefficients de la décomposition (Sudret (2008)). Les indices sont donc approximés et il est difficile d’évaluer l’erreur due à cette approximation. Afin d’évaluer la confiance que l’on peut leur accorder nous proposons de construire des intervalles de confiance par ré-échantillonnage Bootstrap (Efron, Tibshirani (1993)) sur le plan d’expérience utilisé pour construire l’approximation par chaos polynômial. L’utilisation de ces intervalles de confiance permet de trouver un plan d’expérience optimal garantissant le calcul des indices de sensibilité avec une précision donnée

The dynamics of laser droplet generation

We propose an experimental setup allowing for the characterization of laser droplet generation in terms of the underlying dynamics, primarily showing that the latter is deterministically chaotic by means of nonlinear time series analysis methods. In particular, we use a laser pulse to melt the end of a properly fed vertically placed metal wire. Due to the interplay of surface tension, gravity force and light-metal interaction, undulating pendant droplets are formed at the molten end, which eventually completely detach from the wire as a consequence of their increasing mass. We capture the dynamics of this process by employing a high-speed infrared camera, thereby indirectly measuring the temperature of the wire end and the pendant droplets. The time series is subsequently generated as the mean value over the pixel intensity of every infrared snapshot. Finally, we employ methods of nonlinear time series analysis to reconstruct the phase space from the observed variable and test it against determinism and stationarity. After establishing that the observed laser droplet generation is a deterministic and dynamically stationary process, we calculate the spectra of Lyapunov exponents. We obtain a positive largest Lyapunov exponent and a negative divergence, i.e., sum of all the exponents, thus indicating that the observed dynamics is deterministically chaotic with an attractor as solution in the phase space. In addition to characterizing the dynamics of laser droplet generation, we outline industrial applications of the process and point out the significance of our findings for future attempts at mathematical modeling.Comment: 7 two-column pages, 8 figures; accepted for publication in Chaos [supplementary material available at http://www.matjazperc.com/chaos/laser.html

Using Resonances to Control Chaotic Mixing within a Translating and Rotating Droplet

Enhancing and controlling chaotic advection or chaotic mixing within liquid droplets is crucial for a variety of applications including digital microfluidic devices which use microscopic ``discrete'' fluid volumes (droplets) as microreactors. In this work, we consider the Stokes flow of a translating spherical liquid droplet which we perturb by imposing a time-periodic rigid-body rotation. Using the tools of dynamical systems, we have shown in previous work that the rotation not only leads to one or more three-dimensional chaotic mixing regions, in which mixing occurs through the stretching and folding of material lines, but also offers the possibility of controlling both the size and the location of chaotic mixing within the drop. Such a control was achieved through appropriate tuning of the amplitude and frequency of the rotation in order to use resonances between the natural frequencies of the system and those of the external forcing. In this paper, we study the influence of the orientation of the rotation axis on the chaotic mixing zones as a third parameter, as well as propose an experimental set up to implement the techniques discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Collective Phase Chaos in the Dynamics of Interacting Oscillator Ensembles

We study chaotic behavior of order parameters in two coupled ensembles of self-sustained oscillators. Coupling within each of these ensembles is switched on and off alternately, while the mutual interaction between these two subsystems is arranged through quadratic nonlinear coupling. We show numerically that in the course of alternating Kuramoto transitions to synchrony and back to asynchrony, the exchange of excitations between two subpopulations proceeds in such a way that their collective phases are governed by an expanding circle map similar to the Bernoulli map. We perform the Lyapunov analysis of the dynamics and discuss finite-size effects.Comment: 19 page

Controlling Mixing Inside a Droplet by Time Dependent Rigid-body Rotation

The use of microscopic discrete fluid volumes (i.e., droplets) as microreactors for digital microfluidic applications often requires mixing enhancement and control within droplets. In this work, we consider a translating spherical liquid droplet to which we impose a time periodic rigid-body rotation which we model using the superposition of a Hill vortex and an unsteady rigid body rotation. This perturbation in the form of a rotation not only creates a three-dimensional chaotic mixing region, which operates through the stretching and folding of material lines, but also offers the possibility of controlling both the size and the location of the mixing. Such a control is achieved by judiciously adjusting the three parameters that characterize the rotation, i.e., the rotation amplitude, frequency and orientation of the rotation. As the size of the mixing region is increased, complete mixing within the drop is obtained.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure