Model Validation and Simulation

The Bauhaus Summer School series provides an international forum for an exchange of methods and skills related to the interaction between different disciplines of modern engineering science. The 2012 civil engineering course was held in August over two weeks at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The overall aim was the exchange of research and modern scientific approaches in the field of model validation and simulation between well-known experts acting as lecturers and active students. Besides these educational intentions the social and cultural component of the meeting has been in the focus. 48 graduate and doctoral students from 20 different countries and 22 lecturers from 12 countries attended this summer school. Among other aspects, this activity can be considered successful as it raised the sensitivity towards both the significance of research in civil engineering and the role of intercultural exchange. This volume summarizes and publishes some of the results: abstracts of key note papers presented by the experts and selected student research works. The overview reflects the quality of this summer school. Furthermore the individual contributions confirm that for active students this event has been a research forum and a special opportunity to learn from the experiences of the researchers in terms of methodology and strategies for research implementation in their current work

Observational constraints on the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae : the case for missing high mass stars

Over the last 15 years, the supernova community has endeavoured to identify progenitor stars of core-collapse supernovae in high resolution archival images of their galaxies.This review compiles results (from 1999 - 2013) in a distance limited sample and discusses the implications. The vast majority of the detections of progenitor stars are of type II-P, II-L or IIb with one type Ib progenitor system detected and many more upper limits for progenitors of Ibc supernovae (14). The data for these 45 supernovae progenitors illustrate a remarkable deficit of high luminosity stars above an apparent limit of Log L ~= 5.1 dex. For a typical Salpeter IMF, one would expect to have found 13 high luminosity and high mass progenitors. There is, possibly, only one object in this time and volume limited sample that is unambiguously high mass (the progenitor of SN2009ip). The possible biases due to the influence of circumstellar dust and sample selection methods are reviewed. It does not appear likely that these can explain the missing high mass progenitor stars. This review concludes that the observed populations of supernovae in the local Universe are not, on the whole, produced by high mass (M > ~18Msun) stars. Theoretical explosions of model stars also predict that black hole formation and failed supernovae tend to occur above M > ~18Msun. The models also suggest there are islands of explodability for stars in the 8-120Msun range. The observational constraints are quite consistent with the bulk of stars above M > ~18Msun collapsing to form black holes with no visible supernovae. (Abridged).Comment: Invited review article for Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, to be published in a special PASA collection on "SN1987A and Supernovae in the Local Universe". This is the accepted version, after referee review. Additional minor corrections to match proofs. (25 pages

A reusable iterative optimization software library to solve combinatorial problems with approximate reasoning

Real world combinatorial optimization problems such as scheduling are typically too complex to solve with exact methods. Additionally, the problems often have to observe vaguely specified constraints of different importance, the available data may be uncertain, and compromises between antagonistic criteria may be necessary. We present a combination of approximate reasoning based constraints and iterative optimization based heuristics that help to model and solve such problems in a framework of C++ software libraries called StarFLIP++. While initially developed to schedule continuous caster units in steel plants, we present in this paper results from reusing the library components in a shift scheduling system for the workforce of an industrial production plant.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figures; for a project overview see http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/proj/StarFLIP

The atomic simulation environment — a python library for working with atoms

The Atomic Simulation Environment (ASE) is a software package written in the Python programming language with the aim of setting up, steering, and analyzing atomistic simula- tions. In ASE, tasks are fully scripted in Python. The powerful syntax of Python combined with the NumPy array library make it possible to perform very complex simulation tasks. For example, a sequence of calculations may be performed with the use of a simple "for-loop" construction. Calculations of energy, forces, stresses and other quantities are performed through interfaces to many external electronic structure codes or force fields using a uniform interface. On top of this calculator interface, ASE provides modules for performing many standard simulation tasks such as structure optimization, molecular dynamics, handling of constraints and performing nudged elastic band calculations

SPH Simulations of Counterrotating Disk Formation in Spiral Galaxies

We present the results of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the formation of a massive counterrotating disk in a spiral galaxy. The current study revisits and extends (with SPH) previous work carried out with sticky particle gas dynamics, in which adiabatic gas infall and a retrograde gas-rich dwarf merger were tested as the two most likely processes for producing such a counterrotating disk. We report on experiments with a cold primary similar to our Galaxy, as well as a hot, compact primary modeled after NGC 4138. We have also conducted numerical experiments with varying amounts of prograde gas in the primary disk, and an alternative infall model (a spherical shell with retrograde angular momentum). The structure of the resulting counterrotating disks is dramatically different with SPH. The disks we produce are considerably thinner than the primary disks and those produced with sticky particles. The time-scales for counterrotating disk formation are shorter with SPH because the gas loses kinetic energy and angular momentum more rapidly. Spiral structure is evident in most of the disks, but an exponential radial profile is not a natural byproduct of these processes. The infalling gas shells that we tested produce counterrotating bulges and rings rather than disks. The presence of a considerable amount of preexisting prograde gas in the primary causes, at least in the absence of star formation, a rapid inflow of gas to the center and a subsequent hole in the counterrotating disk. In general, our SPH experiments yield stronger evidence to suggest that the accretion of massive counterrotating disks drives the evolution of the host galaxies towards earlier (S0/Sa) Hubble types.Comment: To appear in ApJ. 20 pages LaTex 2-column with 3 tables, 23 figures (GIF) available at this site. Complete gzipped postscript preprint with embedded figures available from http://tarkus.pha.jhu.edu/~thakar/cr3.html (3 Mb