Research on the damage to aircraft composite material fuel tanks due to penetrating projectiles (hydraulic ram) at the naval postgraduate school

Metal aircraft fuel tanks that are subjected to ballistic impact and penetration by small arms fire and missile fragments can be severly damaged, with large petalling of the tank walls occurring at the entrance and exit points of the projectile. The damage mechanism, called hydraulic ram, is a very high pressure wave in the fuel caused by the passage of a ballistic penetrator through the fuel. Fluid pressures and wall strains have been experimentally measured and analytically predicted at NPS for rectangular tanks with aluminum walls. A summary of this work is given in Ref. [I]. Due to the fact that aircraft fuel tanks made of composite materials are now being seriously considered, the effect of hydraulic ram on composite material tank walls has been investigated. In Ref. 121, the various effects of hydraulic ram on a clamped I l-in. square, 0.067-in. thick, graphite/epoxy wall due to penetration by a .22 caliber projectile were examined. Shots at 2fXlOfps caused only light damage to the plate. At 2800 fps, the hydraulic ram caused considerable damage, including total severance of the plate from its clamped support over much of the outer perimeter. The objectives of the research in Ref. [3] were to show the relative importance of the transverse shear@ forces produced by hydraulic ram loading on military aircraft fuel tank joint designs for composite mater& and to propose fuel tank test section designs based upon specific composite material fuel tank design concepts for the F-16, F-18 and a Navy V/STOL delta wing. With the use of a finite element analysis, the transverse shearing force at a metal fastener was shown to be a major cause of failure at the attachment, primarily by an out-of-plane push-out mode of failure. This type of failure could have a significant effect on the structural integrity of a major load crrrying member of the aircraft, such as the wing box beam. In this situation, a large portion of the wing skin over the fuel tank may become detached from the spars, ribs and stringers, causing a serious degradation in the strength and stiffness of the wing. Future research will be devoted to the study of the amount of resistance to out-of-plane push-out shown by various composite attachment designs and to the determination of the amount of area over which push-out may occur.Joint Technical Coordinating Group for Aircraft SurvivabilityNaval Weapons Cente

Remarks on the KLS conjecture and Hardy-type inequalities

We generalize the classical Hardy and Faber-Krahn inequalities to arbitrary functions on a convex body $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, not necessarily vanishing on the boundary $\partial \Omega$. This reduces the study of the Neumann Poincar\'e constant on $\Omega$ to that of the cone and Lebesgue measures on $\partial \Omega$; these may be bounded via the curvature of $\partial \Omega$. A second reduction is obtained to the class of harmonic functions on $\Omega$. We also study the relation between the Poincar\'e constant of a log-concave measure $\mu$ and its associated K. Ball body $K_\mu$. In particular, we obtain a simple proof of a conjecture of Kannan--Lov\'asz--Simonovits for unit-balls of $\ell^n_p$, originally due to Sodin and Lata{\l}a--Wojtaszczyk.Comment: 18 pages. Numbering of propositions, theorems, etc.. as appeared in final form in GAFA seminar note

Levels of extra-pair paternity are associated with parental care in penduline tits (Remizidae)

In most passerine birds, individuals attempt to maximise their fitness by providing parental care while also mating outside their pair bond. A sex-specific trade-off between these two behaviours is predicted to occur since the fitness benefits of extra-pair mating differs between the sexes. We use nest observations and parentage analysis to reveal a negative association between male care and the incidence of extra-pair paternity across three species of penduline tit (Remizidae)

The Digital Life of Walkable Streets

Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day, while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services, urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015

Charmless Bs→PP,PV,VVB_s\to PP, PV, VV Decays Based on the six-quark Effective Hamiltonian with Strong Phase Effects II

We provide a systematic study of charmless $B_s \to PP, PV, VV$ decays ($P$ and $V$ denote pseudoscalar and vector mesons, respectively) based on an approximate six-quark operator effective Hamiltonian from QCD. The calculation of the relevant hard-scattering kernels is carried out, the resulting transition form factors are consistent with the results of QCD sum rule calculations. By taking into account important classes of power corrections involving "chirally-enhanced" terms and the vertex corrections as well as weak annihilation contributions with non-trivial strong phase, we present predictions for the branching ratios and CP asymmetries of $B_s$ decays into PP, PV and VV final states, and also for the corresponding polarization observables in VV final states. It is found that the weak annihilation contributions with non-trivial strong phase have remarkable effects on the observables in the color-suppressed and penguin-dominated decay modes. In addition, we discuss the SU(3) flavor symmetry and show that the symmetry relations are generally respected

Practical API Protocol Checking with Access Permissions

Reusable APIs often define usage protocols. We previously developed a sound modular type system that checks compliance with typestate-based protocols while affording a great deal of aliasing flexibility. We also developed Plural, a prototype tool that embodies our approach as an automated static analysis and includes several extensions we found useful in practice. This paper evaluates our approach along the following dimensions: (1) We report on experience in specifying relevant usage rules for a large Java standard API with our approach. We also specify several other Java APIs and identify recurring patterns. (2) We summarize two case studies in verifying third-party open-source code bases with few false positives using our tool. We discuss how tool shortcomings can be addressed either with code refactorings or extensions to the tool itself. These results indicate that our approach can be used to specify and enforce real API protocols in practice

Analysis of the vector form factors fKπ+(Q2)f^+_{K\pi}(Q^2) and fKπ−(Q2)f^-_{K\pi}(Q^2) with light-cone QCD sum rules

In this article, we calculate the vector form factors $f^+_{K\pi}(Q^2)$ and $f^-_{K\pi}(Q^2)$ within the framework of the light-cone QCD sum rules approach. The numerical values of the $f^+_{K\pi}(Q^2)$ are compatible with the existing theoretical calculations, the central value of the $f^+_{K\pi}(0)$, $f^+_{K\pi}(0)=0.97$, is in excellent agreement with the values from the chiral perturbation theory and lattice QCD. The values of the $|f^-_{K\pi}(0)|$ are very large comparing with the theoretical calculations and experimental data, and can not give any reliable predictions. At large momentum transfers with $Q^2> 5GeV^2$, the form factors $f^+_{K\pi}(Q^2)$ and $|f^-_{K\pi}(Q^2)|$ can either take up the asymptotic behavior of $\frac{1}{Q^2}$ or decrease more quickly than $\frac{1}{Q^2}$, more experimental data are needed to select the ideal sum rules.Comment: 22 pages, 16 figures, revised version, to appear in Eur. Phys. J.

The Glauber model and the heavy ion reaction cross section

We reexamine the Glauber model and calculate the total reaction cross section as a function of energy in the low and intermediate energy range, where many of the corrections in the model, are effective. The most significant effect in this energy range is by the modification of the trajectory due to the Coulomb field. The modification in the trajectory due to nuclear field is also taken into account in a self consistent way. The energy ranges in which particular corrections are effective, are quantified and it is found that when the center of mass energy of the system becomes 30 times the Coulomb barrier, none of the trajectory modification to the Glauber model is really required. The reaction cross sections for light and heavy systems, right from near coulomb barrier to intermediate energies have been calculated. The exact nuclear densities and free nucleon-nucleon (NN) cross sections have been used in the calculations. The center of mass correction which is important for light systems, has also been taken into account. There is an excellent agreement between the calculations with the modified Glauber model and the experimental data. This suggests that the heavy ion reactions in this energy range can be explained by the Glauber model in terms of free NN cross sections without incorporating any medium modification.Comment: RevTeX, 21 pages including 9 Postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.