12,593 research outputs found
Designing by Geometry. Rankine's Theorems of Transformation of Structures.
William John Macquorn Rankine (1820-1872) was one of the main figures in establishing engineering science in the second half of the 19th. Century. His Manual of Applied Mechanics (1858) gathers most of his contributions to strength of materials and structural theory. A few additions are to be found in his Manual of Civil Engineering (1862). The book is based in his Lectures on Engineering delivered in the Glasgow University, and formed part of his intention of converting engineering science in a university degree (Channell 1982, Buchanan 1985). Both in plan and in content the book shows and enormous rigour and originality. It is difficult to read. As remarked by Timoshenko (1953, 198): "In his work Rankine prefers to treat each problem first in its most general form and only later does he consider various particular cases which may be of some practical interest. Rankine's adoption of this method of writing makes his books difficult to read, and they demand considerable concentration of the reader." Besides, Rankine does not repeat any demonstration or formula, and sometimes the reader must trace back the complete development through four or five previous paragraphs. The method is that of a mathematician. However, the Manual had 21 editions (the last in 1921) an exerted a considerable influence both in England and America.
In this article we will concentrate only in one of the more originals contributions of Rankine in the field of structural theory, his Theorems of Transformation of Structures. These theorems have deserved no attention either to his contemporaries or to modern historians of structural theory. It appears that the only exception is Timoshenko (1953,198-200) who cited the general statement and described briefly its applications to arches. The present author has studied the application of the Theorems to masonry structures (Huerta and Aroca 1989; Huerta 1990, 2004, 2007).
Rankine discovered the Theorems during the preparation of his Lectures for his Chair of Engineering in the University of Glasgow . He considered it very important, as he published it in a short note communicated to the Royal Society in 1856 (Rankine 1856). He included it, also, in his article "Mechanics (applied)" for the 8th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Rankine 1857). Eventually, the Theorems were incoroporated in the Manual of applied mechanics and applied to frames, cables, rib arches and masonry structures. The theorems were also included in his Manual of civil engineering (1862), generally in a shortened way, but with some additions
CFDNet: a deep learning-based accelerator for fluid simulations
CFD is widely used in physical system design and optimization, where it is
used to predict engineering quantities of interest, such as the lift on a plane
wing or the drag on a motor vehicle. However, many systems of interest are
prohibitively expensive for design optimization, due to the expense of
evaluating CFD simulations. To render the computation tractable, reduced-order
or surrogate models are used to accelerate simulations while respecting the
convergence constraints provided by the higher-fidelity solution. This paper
introduces CFDNet -- a physical simulation and deep learning coupled framework,
for accelerating the convergence of Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes
simulations. CFDNet is designed to predict the primary physical properties of
the fluid including velocity, pressure, and eddy viscosity using a single
convolutional neural network at its core. We evaluate CFDNet on a variety of
use-cases, both extrapolative and interpolative, where test geometries are
observed/not-observed during training. Our results show that CFDNet meets the
convergence constraints of the domain-specific physics solver while
outperforming it by 1.9 - 7.4x on both steady laminar and turbulent flows.
Moreover, we demonstrate the generalization capacity of CFDNet by testing its
prediction on new geometries unseen during training. In this case, the approach
meets the CFD convergence criterion while still providing significant speedups
over traditional domain-only models.Comment: It has been accepted and almost published in the International
Conference in Supercomputing (ICS) 202
Wall-resolved large eddy simulation over NACA0012 airfoil
The work presented here forms part of a project on Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) of aeroengine aeroacoustic interactions. In this paper we concentrate on LES of near-field flow over an isolated NACA0012 airfoil at zero angle of attack with Rec=2e5. The predicted unsteady pressure/velocity field is used in an analytically-based scheme for far-field trailing edge noise prediction. A wall resolved implicit LES or so-callednumerical Large Eddy Simulation (NLES) approach is employed to resolve streak-like structure in the near-wall flow regions. The mean and RMS velocity and pressure profile on airfoil surface and in wake are validated against experimental data and computational results from other researchers. The results of the wall-resolved NLES method are very encouraging. The effects of grid-refinement and higher-order numerical scheme on the wall-resolved NLES approach are also discussed
Type-driven automated program transformations and cost modelling for optimising streaming programs on FPGAs
In this paper we present a novel approach to program optimisation based on compiler-based type-driven program transformations and a fast and accurate cost/performance model for the target architecture. We target streaming programs for the problem domain of scientific computing, such as numerical weather prediction. We present our theoretical framework for type-driven program transformation, our target high-level language and intermediate representation languages and the cost model and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by comparison with a commercial toolchain
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