13,259 research outputs found
Meso-scale FDM material layout design strategies under manufacturability constraints and fracture conditions
In the manufacturability-driven design (MDD) perspective, manufacturability of the product or system is the most important of the design requirements. In addition to being able to ensure that complex designs (e.g., topology optimization) are manufacturable with a given process or process family, MDD also helps mechanical designers to take advantage of unique process-material effects generated during manufacturing. One of the most recognizable examples of this comes from the scanning-type family of additive manufacturing (AM) processes; the most notable and familiar member of this family is the fused deposition modeling (FDM) or fused filament fabrication (FFF) process. This process works by selectively depositing uniform, approximately isotropic beads or elements of molten thermoplastic material (typically structural engineering plastics) in a series of pre-specified traces to build each layer of the part. There are many interesting 2-D and 3-D mechanical design problems that can be explored by designing the layout of these elements. The resulting structured, hierarchical material (which is both manufacturable and customized layer-by-layer within the limits of the process and material) can be defined as a manufacturing process-driven structured material (MPDSM). This dissertation explores several practical methods for designing these element layouts for 2-D and 3-D meso-scale mechanical problems, focusing ultimately on design-for-fracture. Three different fracture conditions are explored: (1) cases where a crack must be prevented or stopped, (2) cases where the crack must be encouraged or accelerated, and (3) cases where cracks must grow in a simple pre-determined pattern. Several new design tools, including a mapping method for the FDM manufacturability constraints, three major literature reviews, the collection, organization, and analysis of several large (qualitative and quantitative) multi-scale datasets on the fracture behavior of FDM-processed materials, some new experimental equipment, and the refinement of a fast and simple g-code generator based on commercially-available software, were developed and refined to support the design of MPDSMs under fracture conditions. The refined design method and rules were experimentally validated using a series of case studies (involving both design and physical testing of the designs) at the end of the dissertation. Finally, a simple design guide for practicing engineers who are not experts in advanced solid mechanics nor process-tailored materials was developed from the results of this project.U of I OnlyAuthor's request
MAS: A versatile Landau-fluid eigenvalue code for plasma stability analysis in general geometry
We have developed a new global eigenvalue code, Multiscale Analysis for
plasma Stabilities (MAS), for studying plasma problems with wave toroidal mode
number n and frequency omega in a broad range of interest in general tokamak
geometry, based on a five-field Landau-fluid description of thermal plasmas.
Beyond keeping the necessary plasma fluid response, we further retain the
important kinetic effects including diamagnetic drift, ion finite Larmor
radius, finite parallel electric field, ion and electron Landau resonances in a
self-consistent and non-perturbative manner without sacrificing the attractive
efficiency in computation. The physical capabilities of the code are evaluated
and examined in the aspects of both theory and simulation. In theory, the
comprehensive Landau-fluid model implemented in MAS can be reduced to the
well-known ideal MHD model, electrostatic ion-fluid model, and drift-kinetic
model in various limits, which clearly delineates the physics validity regime.
In simulation, MAS has been well benchmarked with theory and other gyrokinetic
and kinetic-MHD hybrid codes in a manner of adopting the unified physical and
numerical framework, which covers the kinetic Alfven wave, ion sound wave,
low-n kink, high-n ion temperature gradient mode and kinetic ballooning mode.
Moreover, MAS is successfully applied to model the Alfven eigenmode (AE)
activities in DIII-D discharge #159243, which faithfully captures the frequency
sweeping of RSAE, the tunneling damping of TAE, as well as the polarization
characteristics of KBAE and BAAE being consistent with former gyrokinetic
theory and simulation. With respect to the key progress contributed to the
community, MAS has the advantage of combining rich physics ingredients,
realistic global geometry and high computation efficiency together for plasma
stability analysis in linear regime.Comment: 40 pages, 21 figure
A family of total Lagrangian Petrov-Galerkin Cosserat rod finite element formulations
The standard in rod finite element formulations is the Bubnov-Galerkin
projection method, where the test functions arise from a consistent variation
of the ansatz functions. This approach becomes increasingly complex when highly
nonlinear ansatz functions are chosen to approximate the rod's centerline and
cross-section orientations. Using a Petrov-Galerkin projection method, we
propose a whole family of rod finite element formulations where the nodal
generalized virtual displacements and generalized velocities are interpolated
instead of using the consistent variations and time derivatives of the ansatz
functions. This approach leads to a significant simplification of the
expressions in the discrete virtual work functionals. In addition, independent
strategies can be chosen for interpolating the nodal centerline points and
cross-section orientations. We discuss three objective interpolation strategies
and give an in-depth analysis concerning locking and convergence behavior for
the whole family of rod finite element formulations.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2301.0559
Subsidiary Entrepreneurial Alertness: Antecedents and Outcomes
This thesis brings together concepts from both international business and entrepreneurship to develop a framework of the facilitators of subsidiary innovation and performance. This study proposes that Subsidiary Entrepreneurial Alertness (SEA) facilitates the recognition of opportunities (the origin of subsidiary initiatives). First introduced by Kirzner (1979) in the context of the individual, entrepreneurial alertness (EA) is the ability to notice an opportunity without actively searching. Similarly, to entrepreneurial alertness at the individual level, this study argues that SEA enables the subsidiary to best select opportunities based on resources available. The research further develops our conceptualisation of SEA by drawing on work by Tang et al. (2012) identifying three distinct activities of EA: scanning and search (identifying opportunities unseen by others due to their awareness gaps), association and connection of information, and evaluation and judgement to interpret or anticipate future viability of opportunities. This study then hypothesises that SEA leads to opportunity recognition at the subsidiary level and further hypothesises innovation and performance as outcomes of opportunity recognition. This research brings these arguments together to develop and test a comprehensive theoretical model.
The theoretical model is tested through a mail survey of the CEOs/MDs of foreign subsidiaries within the Republic of Ireland (an innovative hub for foreign subsidiaries). This method was selected as the best method to reach the targeted respondent, and due to the depth of knowledge the target respondent holds, the survey can answer the desired question more substantially. The results were examined using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The study’s findings confirm two critical aspects of subsidiary context, subsidiary brokerage and subsidiary credibility are positively related to SEA. The study establishes a positive link between SEA and both the generation of innovation and the subsidiary’s performance. This thesis makes three significant contributions to the subsidiary literature as it 1) introduces and develops the concept of SEA, 2) identifies the antecedents of SEA, and 3) demonstrates the impact of SEA on subsidiary opportunity recognition. Implications for subsidiaries, headquarters and policy makers are discussed along with the limitations of the study
On Monte Carlo methods for the Dirichlet process mixture model, and the selection of its precision parameter prior
Two issues commonly faced by users of Dirichlet process mixture models are: 1) how to appropriately select a hyperprior for its precision parameter alpha, and 2) the typically slow mixing of the MCMC chain produced by conditional Gibbs samplers based on its stick-breaking representation, as opposed to marginal collapsed Gibbs samplers based on the Polya urn, which have smaller integrated autocorrelation times.
In this thesis, we analyse the most common approaches to hyperprior selection for alpha, we identify their limitations, and we propose a new methodology to overcome them.
To address slow mixing, we revisit three label-switching Metropolis moves from the literature (Hastie et al., 2015; Papaspiliopoulos and Roberts, 2008), improve them, and introduce a fourth move. Secondly, we revisit two i.i.d. sequential importance samplers which operate in the collapsed space (Liu, 1996; S. N. MacEachern et al., 1999), and we develop a new sequential importance sampler for the stick-breaking parameters of Dirichlet process mixtures, which operates in the stick-breaking space and which has minimal integrated autocorrelation time. Thirdly, we introduce the i.i.d. transcoding algorithm which, conditional to a partition of the data, can infer back which specific stick in the stick-breaking construction each observation originated from. We use it as a building block to develop the transcoding sampler, which removes the need for label-switching Metropolis moves in the conditional stick-breaking sampler, as it uses the better performing marginal sampler (or any other sampler) to drive the MCMC chain, and augments its exchangeable partition posterior with conditional i.i.d. stick-breaking parameter inferences after the fact, thereby inheriting its shorter autocorrelation times
Robust Deep Learning Models Against Semantic-Preserving Adversarial Attack
Deep learning models can be fooled by small -norm adversarial
perturbations and natural perturbations in terms of attributes. Although the
robustness against each perturbation has been explored, it remains a challenge
to address the robustness against joint perturbations effectively. In this
paper, we study the robustness of deep learning models against joint
perturbations by proposing a novel attack mechanism named Semantic-Preserving
Adversarial (SPA) attack, which can then be used to enhance adversarial
training. Specifically, we introduce an attribute manipulator to generate
natural and human-comprehensible perturbations and a noise generator to
generate diverse adversarial noises. Based on such combined noises, we optimize
both the attribute value and the diversity variable to generate
jointly-perturbed samples. For robust training, we adversarially train the deep
learning model against the generated joint perturbations. Empirical results on
four benchmarks show that the SPA attack causes a larger performance decline
with small norm-ball constraints compared to existing approaches.
Furthermore, our SPA-enhanced training outperforms existing defense methods
against such joint perturbations.Comment: Paper accepted by the 2023 International Joint Conference on Neural
Networks (IJCNN 2023
Single Image Depth Prediction Made Better: A Multivariate Gaussian Take
Neural-network-based single image depth prediction (SIDP) is a challenging
task where the goal is to predict the scene's per-pixel depth at test time.
Since the problem, by definition, is ill-posed, the fundamental goal is to come
up with an approach that can reliably model the scene depth from a set of
training examples. In the pursuit of perfect depth estimation, most existing
state-of-the-art learning techniques predict a single scalar depth value
per-pixel. Yet, it is well-known that the trained model has accuracy limits and
can predict imprecise depth. Therefore, an SIDP approach must be mindful of the
expected depth variations in the model's prediction at test time. Accordingly,
we introduce an approach that performs continuous modeling of per-pixel depth,
where we can predict and reason about the per-pixel depth and its distribution.
To this end, we model per-pixel scene depth using a multivariate Gaussian
distribution. Moreover, contrary to the existing uncertainty modeling methods
-- in the same spirit, where per-pixel depth is assumed to be independent, we
introduce per-pixel covariance modeling that encodes its depth dependency w.r.t
all the scene points. Unfortunately, per-pixel depth covariance modeling leads
to a computationally expensive continuous loss function, which we solve
efficiently using the learned low-rank approximation of the overall covariance
matrix. Notably, when tested on benchmark datasets such as KITTI, NYU, and
SUN-RGB-D, the SIDP model obtained by optimizing our loss function shows
state-of-the-art results. Our method's accuracy (named MG) is among the top on
the KITTI depth-prediction benchmark leaderboard.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/CVF CVPR 2023. Draft info: 17 pages, 13 Figures, 9
Table
Wald-Zoupas prescription with (soft) anomalies
We show that the Wald-Zoupas prescription for gravitational charges is valid
in the presence of anomalies and field-dependent diffeomorphism, but only if
these are related to one another in a specific way. The geometric
interpretation of the allowed anomalies is exposed looking at the example of
BMS symmetries: They correspond to soft terms in the charges. We determine if
the Wald-Zoupas prescription coincides with an improved Noether charge. The
necessary condition is a certain differential equation, and when it is
satisfied, the boundary Lagrangian of the resulting improved Noether charge
contains in general a non-trivial corner term that can be identified a priori
from a condition of anomaly-freeness. Our results explain why the Wald-Zoupas
prescription works in spite of the anomalous behaviour of BMS transformations,
and should be helpful to relate different branches of the literature on surface
charges.Comment: 19 pages plus Appendix. V2: many improvements to the text,
clarifications added, improved comparison with the results in the literature.
More general analysis of the WZ covariance requirement, leading to a simpler
discussion of some results at future null infinity. V3: minor amendments,
matches published versio
Deep Learning for Scene Flow Estimation on Point Clouds: A Survey and Prospective Trends
Aiming at obtaining structural information and 3D motion of dynamic scenes, scene flow estimation has been an interest of research in computer vision and computer graphics for a long time. It is also a fundamental task for various applications such as autonomous driving. Compared to previous methods that utilize image representations, many recent researches build upon the power of deep analysis and focus on point clouds representation to conduct 3D flow estimation. This paper comprehensively reviews the pioneering literature in scene flow estimation based on point clouds. Meanwhile, it delves into detail in learning paradigms and presents insightful comparisons between the state-of-the-art methods using deep learning for scene flow estimation. Furthermore, this paper investigates various higher-level scene understanding tasks, including object tracking, motion segmentation, etc. and concludes with an overview of foreseeable research trends for scene flow estimation
Kirchhoff-Love shell representation and analysis using triangle configuration B-splines
This paper presents the application of triangle configuration B-splines
(TCB-splines) for representing and analyzing the Kirchhoff-Love shell in the
context of isogeometric analysis (IGA). The Kirchhoff-Love shell formulation
requires global -continuous basis functions. The nonuniform rational
B-spline (NURBS)-based IGA has been extensively used for developing
Kirchhoff-Love shell elements. However, shells with complex geometries
inevitably need multiple patches and trimming techniques, where stitching
patches with high continuity is a challenge. On the other hand, due to their
unstructured nature, TCB-splines can accommodate general polygonal domains,
have local refinement, and are flexible to model complex geometries with
continuity, which naturally fit into the Kirchhoff-Love shell formulation with
complex geometries. Therefore, we propose to use TCB-splines as basis functions
for geometric representation and solution approximation. We apply our method to
both linear and nonlinear benchmark shell problems, where the accuracy and
robustness are validated. The applicability of the proposed approach to shell
analysis is further exemplified by performing geometrically nonlinear
Kirchhoff-Love shell simulations of a pipe junction and a front bumper
represented by a single patch of TCB-splines
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