Attraction between Neutral Dielectrics Mediated by Multivalent Ions in an Asymmetric Ionic Fluid

We study the interaction between two neutral plane-parallel dielectric bodies in the presence of a highly asymmetric ionic fluid, containing multivalent as well as monovalent (salt) ions. Image charge interactions, due to dielectric discontinuities at the boundaries, as well as effects from ion confinement in the slit region between the surfaces are taken fully into account, leading to image-generated depletion attraction, ion correlation attraction and steric-like repulsive interactions. We investigate these effects by employing a combination of methods including explicit-ion and implicit-ion Monte-Carlo simulations, as well as an effective interaction potential analytical theory. The latter incorporates strong ion-image charge correlations, which develop in the presence of high valency ions in the mixture. We show that the implicit-ion simulations and the proposed analytical theory can describe the explicit simulation results on a qualitative level, while excellent quantitative agreement can be obtained for sufficiently large monovalent salt concentrations. The resultant attractive interaction between the neutral surfaces is shown to be significant, as compared with the usual van der Waals interactions between semi-infinite dielectrics, and can thus play a significant role at the nano scale.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

CHANCE: A FRENCH-GERMAN HELICOPTER CFD-PROJECT

The paper gives an overview of the CHANCE research project (partly supported by the French DPAC and DGA and the German BMWA) which was started in 1998 between the German and French Aerospace Research Centres DLR and ONERA, the University of Stuttgart and the two National Helicopter Manufacturers, Eurocopter and Eurocopter Deutschland. The objective of the project was to develop and validate CFD tools for computing the aerodynamics of the complete helicopter, accounting for the blade elasticity by coupling with blade dynamics. The validation activity of the flow solvers was achieved through intermediate stages of increasing geometry and flow modelling complexity, starting from an isolated rotor in hover, and concluding with the time-accurate simulation of a complete helicopter configuration in forward-flight. All along the research program the updated versions of the CFD codes were systematically delivered to Industry. This approach was chosen to speed up the transfer of capabilities to industry and check early enough that the products meet the expectations for applicability in the industrial environment of Eurocopter

An adaptive hierarchical domain decomposition method for parallel contact dynamics simulations of granular materials

A fully parallel version of the contact dynamics (CD) method is presented in this paper. For large enough systems, 100% efficiency has been demonstrated for up to 256 processors using a hierarchical domain decomposition with dynamic load balancing. The iterative scheme to calculate the contact forces is left domain-wise sequential, with data exchange after each iteration step, which ensures its stability. The number of additional iterations required for convergence by the partially parallel updates at the domain boundaries becomes negligible with increasing number of particles, which allows for an effective parallelization. Compared to the sequential implementation, we found no influence of the parallelization on simulation results.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures, published in Journal of Computational Physics (2011