22,957 research outputs found
On the forces that cable webs under tension can support and how to design cable webs to channel stresses
In many applications of Structural Engineering the following question arises:
given a set of forces applied at
prescribed points , under what
constraints on the forces does there exist a truss structure (or wire web) with
all elements under tension that supports these forces? Here we provide answer
to such a question for any configuration of the terminal points
in the two- and
three-dimensional case. Specifically, the existence of a web is guaranteed by a
necessary and sufficient condition on the loading which corresponds to a finite
dimensional linear programming problem. In two-dimensions we show that any such
web can be replaced by one in which there are at most elementary loops,
where elementary means the loop cannot be subdivided into subloops, and where
is the number of forces
applied at points strictly within the convex hull of
. In three-dimensions we show
that, by slightly perturbing ,
there exists a uniloadable web supporting this loading. Uniloadable means it
supports this loading and all positive multiples of it, but not any other
loading. Uniloadable webs provide a mechanism for distributing stress in
desired ways.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure
Finding an ordinary conic and an ordinary hyperplane
Given a finite set of non-collinear points in the plane, there exists a line
that passes through exactly two points. Such a line is called an ordinary line.
An efficient algorithm for computing such a line was proposed by Mukhopadhyay
et al. In this note we extend this result in two directions. We first show how
to use this algorithm to compute an ordinary conic, that is, a conic passing
through exactly five points, assuming that all the points do not lie on the
same conic. Both our proofs of existence and the consequent algorithms are
simpler than previous ones. We next show how to compute an ordinary hyperplane
in three and higher dimensions.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure
Singularities and the distribution of density in the Burgers/adhesion model
We are interested in the tail behavior of the pdf of mass density within the
one and -dimensional Burgers/adhesion model used, e.g., to model the
formation of large-scale structures in the Universe after baryon-photon
decoupling. We show that large densities are localized near ``kurtoparabolic''
singularities residing on space-time manifolds of codimension two ()
or higher (). For smooth initial conditions, such singularities are
obtained from the convex hull of the Lagrangian potential (the initial velocity
potential minus a parabolic term). The singularities contribute {\em
\hbox{universal} power-law tails} to the density pdf when the initial
conditions are random. In one dimension the singularities are preshocks
(nascent shocks), whereas in two and three dimensions they persist in time and
correspond to boundaries of shocks; in all cases the corresponding density pdf
has the exponent -7/2, originally proposed by E, Khanin, Mazel and Sinai (1997
Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1904) for the pdf of velocity gradients in one-dimensional
forced Burgers turbulence. We also briefly consider models permitting particle
crossings and thus multi-stream solutions, such as the Zel'dovich approximation
and the (Jeans)--Vlasov--Poisson equation with single-stream initial data: they
have singularities of codimension one, yielding power-law tails with exponent
-3.Comment: LATEX 11 pages, 6 figures, revised; Physica D, in pres
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