Mechanical Properties of Nanostructured Materials Determined Through Molecular Modeling Techniques

The potential for gains in material properties over conventional materials has motivated an effort to develop novel nanostructured materials for aerospace applications. These novel materials typically consist of a polymer matrix reinforced with particles on the nanometer length scale. In this study, molecular modeling is used to construct fully atomistic models of a carbon nanotube embedded in an epoxy polymer matrix. Functionalization of the nanotube which consists of the introduction of direct chemical bonding between the polymer matrix and the nanotube, hence providing a load transfer mechanism, is systematically varied. The relative effectiveness of functionalization in a nanostructured material may depend on a variety of factors related to the details of the chemical bonding and the polymer structure at the nanotube-polymer interface. The objective of this modeling is to determine what influence the details of functionalization of the carbon nanotube with the polymer matrix has on the resulting mechanical properties. By considering a range of degree of functionalization, the structure-property relationships of these materials is examined and mechanical properties of these models are calculated using standard techniques

Proprietary software tools as learning aids

Proprietary software tools, though not designed for educational use, have considerable educational potential. This paper describes, as case studies, the use of proprietary graphics- and audio-editing tools in two distance-taught courses produced by the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at the UK Open University – Europe's largest distance teaching institution. The paper examines the potential advantages and disadvantages of this type of software relative to conventional educational software in terms of constructivist learning theory, and describes how students use the software in the courses concerned. The paper concludes by suggesting further developments of this approach

Automatic Differentiation Tools in Optimization Software

We discuss the role of automatic differentiation tools in optimization software. We emphasize issues that are important to large-scale optimization and that have proved useful in the installation of nonlinear solvers in the NEOS Server. Our discussion centers on the computation of the gradient and Hessian matrix for partially separable functions and shows that the gradient and Hessian matrix can be computed with guaranteed bounds in time and memory requirementsComment: 11 page

Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of mapping intellectual landscapes.The focus of this book is on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one’s own understanding, as well as communicating it.The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable. With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communitie

Open Source Tools to Support Teaching Agile Software Development

Learning agile software development methodologies are important due to the popularity of agility in software industry. Agile software development has several practices and each practice needs specific tools to work with. Fortunately, there are plenty of open source tools to support working with the agile practices. However, each tool is a separate tool and there is no information about the interrelation of those open source tools. In this paper we propose a set of open source tools to support agile software development course. We start from identifying the principles and practices of agile software development and continue with examining open source tools that fit with agile practices. The relationship between the open source tools is also determined, based on their functionalities

Modeling Framework and Software Tools for Walking Robots

In research on passive dynamic walking, the aim is to study and design robots that walk naturally, i.e., with little or no control effort. McGeer [1] and others (e.g. [2, 3]) have shown that, indeed, robots can walk down a shallow slope with no actuation, only powered by gravity.\ud In this work, we derive mathematical models of walking ro- bots to better understand the dynamics that determine the walking behavior, and to design controllers that e.g. in- crease robustness against changing environments. We use the port-Hamiltonian framework, as it has the advantage of explicitly showing energy-flows inside and into the system. Thus, it allows a direct efficiency study as well as the possi- bility to connect external elements in a ‘physical’ way using ports, instead of using just torque/force signals

Software management tools: Lessons learned from use

Experience in inserting software project planning tools into more than 100 projects producing mission critical software are discussed. The problems the software project manager faces are listed along with methods and tools available to handle them. Experience is reported with the Project Manager's Workstation (PMW) and the SoftCost-R cost estimating package. Finally, the results of a survey, which looked at what could be done in the future to overcome the problems experienced and build a set of truly useful tools, are presented

Pathway Tools version 23.0: Integrated Software for Pathway/Genome Informatics and Systems Biology

Pathway Tools is a bioinformatics software environment with a broad set of capabilities. The software provides genome-informatics tools such as a genome browser, sequence alignments, a genome-variant analyzer, and comparative-genomics operations. It offers metabolic-informatics tools, such as metabolic reconstruction, quantitative metabolic modeling, prediction of reaction atom mappings, and metabolic route search. Pathway Tools also provides regulatory-informatics tools, such as the ability to represent and visualize a wide range of regulatory interactions. The software creates and manages a type of organism-specific database called a Pathway/Genome Database (PGDB), which the software enables database curators to interactively edit. It supports web publishing of PGDBs and provides a large number of query, visualization, and omics-data analysis tools. Scientists around the world have created more than 9,800 PGDBs by using Pathway Tools, many of which are curated databases for important model organisms. Those PGDBs can be exchanged using a peer-to-peer database-sharing system called the PGDB Registry.Comment: Reflects Pathway Tools version 23.0 in 2019; new information since the previous version is in blue text. 111 pages, 40 figure