Moving boundary problems for quasi-steady conduction limited melting

The problem of melting a crystal dendrite is modelled as a quasi-steady Stefan 5 problem. By employing the Baiocchi transform, asymptotic results are derived in the limit that 6 the crystal melts completely, extending previous results that hold for a special class of initial and 7 boundary conditions. These new results, together with predictions for whether the crystal pinches off 8 and breaks into two, are supported by numerical calculations using the level set method. The effects of 9 surface tension are subsequently considered, leading to a canonical problem for near-complete-melting 10 which is studied in linear stability terms and then solved numerically. Our study is motivated in 11 part by experiments undertaken as part of the Isothermal Dendritic Growth Experiment, in which 12 dendritic crystals of pivalic acid were melted in a microgravity environment: these crystals were 13 found to be prolate spheroidal in shape, with an aspect ratio initially increasing with time then 14 rather abruptly decreasing to unity. By including a kinetic undercooling-type boundary condition in 15 addition to surface tension, our model suggests the aspect ratio of a melting crystal can reproduce 16 the same non-monotonic behaviour as that which was observed experimentally. 1

Kafka's Copycats: Imitation, Fabulism, and Late Modernism

It’s often noted that Franz Kafka’s influence on 20th-century world literature is immense and that his two most touted novels, The Trial and The Castle, helped late modernists and their postmodernist successors articulate theological and epistemological skepticism, anxieties about bureaucratic tyranny, and Jewish trauma in the wake of the Holocaust. Yet Kafka’s creative and critical reception in Anglo-American culture has been largely misunderstood, especially during the period of his initial impact, circa 1933-1955. This project focuses on the large-scale integration of Kafka’s fables—his short stories about animals, hybrids, and assemblages—into Anglophone writing during the late modernist period. The dominant narratives about his reception render invisible the powerful effect of these supposedly minor texts on British and American literature. I argue that the fable genre, which has been construed as fallow for the greater part of the 20th century, was reanimated and disseminated largely due to Kafka’s work. A counterintuitive network of transatlantic writers are the media through which this dissemination took place: the Scots Willa and Edwin Muir, the first translators of Kafka’s novels and stories into English, whose own poems and prose narratives do surprising things with the Kafkan fable; leftwing radicals such as W.H. Auden and Christopher Caudwell, who opened up their Marxisms to zoological discourses via Kafka; surrealists like Leonora Carrington, Anna Kavan, and William Sansom, who were excited by Kafka’s explorations of hybridity and corporeal collage; American poets and practitioners of multiple genres, such as Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath, who, to greater and lesser extents, crafted fables whose nonhumans register psychological (and psychoanalytic) frictions between various individuals and communities; and the Jewish-American fiction writers Paul Goodman, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Saul Bellow, all of whom found Kafka’s dogs to be powerful figurations of the “insider-outsider.” In an energetic quest for a new language, at the crossroads and impasses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, in a quicksand of competing geopolitical and philosophical forces, late modernists turned to Kafka as a model for a new kind of cosmopolitan and deracinated writing, helping them remap their relationship to the dominant modernisms of their time. It is striking that the writers in this study frequently wrote direct imitations of Kafka’s work. Yet the vast majority of these rewritings have been deemed too minor to warrant critical investigation or have remained in the vaults and boxes of library archives. Oftentimes writers were hesitant or embarrassed to publish work that was patently fantastic or foregrounded the subjectivities of animals or other nonhuman beings. The boom in Anglophone writing inspired by Kafka’s fables hasn’t been registered by the Kafka industry for other reasons as well, such as the longstanding view that imitation (unlike adaptation and appropriation) is a spurious rather than a transformative cultural practice. By reconsidering and recovering these imitative texts, we encounter short stories, plays, libretti, and poems that closely replicate the particularities of Kafka’s formal and thematic tics while taking them in new directions that respond to the exigencies of a period of intense planetary, phylogenetic, and cultural crisis. Kafka opened up an avenue of temporary or permanent escape from the elaborate stylistics and epic projects of high modernism.PHDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147626/1/ariailg_1.pd

Cleaning viscoplastic soil layers from flat surfaces using impinging water jets

Impinging liquid jets are widely used in industry to clean unwanted soil layers from the internal walls of storage tanks and mixing vessels. Viscoplastic layers are common in a wide range of industrial applications and are challenging to clean due to their yield stress behaviour. When a stationary coherent turbulent perpendicular liquid jet impinges on a flat soiled surface, it generates a roughly circular cleaned region that grows over time. In this work, different insoluble viscoplastic materials such as petroleum jellies and a white soft paraffin were cleaned by impinging water jets. The rheological investigation of the soil layers indicated that these materials show time-dependent yield stress behaviour. A method to measure the yield stress of soil layers in-situ using a blade-scraping device was developed and shown to provide reasonable estimates of the yield stress of different industrial ointments, household items and food spreads. Two distinct regimes were observed in cleaning experiments by impinging jets: for thin soil layers, the liquid film pushed the soil layer radially outwards in a momentum-driven flow. For very thin soil layers, the liquid film flowed over the soil layer. The transition between these two regimes is related to the relative thickness of the liquid film to the soil layer. A phenomenological model was proposed to describe the transition from fast, momentum-driven to slow, creep-dominated cleaning of thin soil layers, and provided good agreement with experimental results. It required the fitting of a kinetic constant to experimental data to describe the initial fast growth of the cleaned radius close to the impinging point. A detailed model was also developed based on the rate of viscous dissipation in a shallow wedge of material at the cleaning front, which explains the kinetic parameter used in previous models in the literature in terms of measurable quantities, including the rheology of the soil. A shear-driven model was also proposed to describe the cleaning of very thin soil layers. This model gave inconsistent results when compared to experiments, and it is proposed that this results from the model not coupling the flow between the soil layer and the liquid film.This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 / 88881.128591/2016-01

Culinary fluid mechanics and other currents in food science

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Maps for the lost: A collection of short fiction And Human / nature ecotones: Climate change and the ecological imagination: A critical essay

The thesis comprises a collection of short fiction, Maps for the Lost, and a critical essay, “Human / Nature Ecotones: Climate Change and the Ecological Imagination.” In ecological terms, areas of interaction between adjacent ecosystems are known as ecotones. Sites of relationship between biotic communities, they are charged with fertility and evolutionary possibility. While postcolonial scholarship is concerned with borders as points of cross-cultural contact, ecocritical thought focuses upon the ecotone that occurs at the interface between human and non-human nature. In their occupation of the liminal zones between human and natural realms, the characters and narratives of Maps for the Lost reveal and nurture the porosity of conventional demarcations. In the title story, a Czech artist maps the globe by night in order to find his lover. The buried geographies of human landscapes coalesce with those of the non-human realm: the territories of wolves and the scent-trails of a fox mingle imperceptibly with nocturnal Prague and the ransacked villages of post-war Croatia. In “Seeds,” a narrative structured around the process of biological growth, the lost memories of an elderly woman are returned to her by her garden. “The Skin of the Ocean” traces the obsession of a diver who sinks his yacht under the weight of coral and fish, while in “Drift,” an Iranian refugee writes letters along the tide-line of a Tasmanian beach. The essay identifies the inadequacy of literature and literary scholarship’s response to the threat of climate change as a failure of the imagination, reflecting the transgressive dimension of the crisis itself, and the dualistic legacy which still informs Western discourse on non-human nature. In order to redress this shortfall, which I argue the current generations of writers have an urgent moral responsibility to do, it is critical that we learn to understand the natural world of which we are a part, in ways that cast off the limitations of conventional representation. Paradoxically, it is the profoundly disruptive (apocalyptic?) nature of the climate crisis itself, which may create the imaginative traction for that shift in comprehension, forcing us, through loss, to interpret the world in ways that have been forgotten, or are fundamentally new. By analysing Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, and Les Murray’s “Presence” sequence, the essay explores the correlation between imaginative and ecological processes, and the role of voice, embodiment, patterning and story in negotiations of nature and place. In the context of the asymptotical essence of the relation between text and world, and the paradox of phenomenological representation, it calls for a deeper cultural engagement with scientific discourse and indigenous philosophy, in order to illuminate the multiplicity and complexity of human connections to the non-human natural worl

George Eliot’s Generative Economies: transactional maternal sacrifice in social realist fiction, 1853-1894

This project argues for a reconsideration of the importance of the maternal body in mid-to-late nineteenth-century social realist fiction, taking George Eliot’s work as its primary case study. Using recent work in sacrifice studies as a framework, I illustrate the ways in which maternal sacrifice underpins canonical Victorian narrative structures. The thesis draws on historical advancements in obstetrics and gynaecology, political economy, and Freudian psychoanalysis: these interlocking contextual strands combine to question the received idea that the pressures of the new industrial age created a divide between the public, masculine workplace and the feminine, domestic domain of the home. As the novel became increasingly concerned with an explicitly capitalist system of value, the figure of the mother became symbolic of the commodification of care; thus, the reproductive bodies of the female protagonists in these novels are embedded in a complex value system in which their idealized virtue is directly related to their economic function as producers, compounded by the patriarchal structures that obstructed female sexual autonomy. The thesis begins with an introduction that uses George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)—three narratives of complicated reproduction—to establish its theoretical and contextual concerns, before moving to a consideration of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) alongside Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853). It then reads Daniel Deronda (1876) as a proto-Freudian fragmentation point for the novel form, before turning to an analysis of infanticide in Adam Bede (1859). The final chapter reads George Moore’s rewriting of these Victorian stories of taboo maternity in Esther Waters as a pathbreaking text in the renegotiation between representation and realism that came to define twentieth-century fiction. Published in 1894 and continuously revised until 1930, Esther Waters straddles the changing century, and so demonstrates the importance of maternity to this broader paradigm shift: the illegitimate mother survives, and the bodies sacrificed to the text are those of the father and, ultimately, the imperial soldier son

Metaphors of the Body in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee

This dissertation investigates the role played by the image of the body that features prominently in Coelzee's novels. In a series of close readings and utilising the tools of cognitive linguistics, it argues that the image creates meaning because of the employment of two conceptual metaphors, TRUTH IS IN A CONTAINER and BODY IS A CONTAINER, which endow the represented body with the attributes of truth. The meaning is then created through the foregrounding of the body (most commonly in the images of mutilation, disability and disease), through the use of the image as a blended space (a signifying body) and through the situating of the image as the narrative foca1 point, an object of scrutinity and interpretation. Such use of the image aids in interpreting the body as a container for truth, a kernel of human identity, a source of thought and morally purposive action. This often leads to interpreting the image of the body allegorically and partly explains the nature of the critical reception of Coetzee's novel s. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter) presents the history and theory of thinking about the metaphor from Aristotle to cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on the context-based understanding of metaphor and on its cognitive value. The final section of this chapter presents the author's engagement with the ideas expressed in Derek Attridge's J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chapter 2 presents the problem of reading and interpreting the body on the example of Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. Chapter 3 analyses corporeal metaphors and gender symbolism in history through the reading of Dusklands and The Age of Iron. Chapter 4 presents Foe and Master of Petersburg as examples of the representation of literary thinking, creation and interpretation of bodily experience.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo