Feasibility study of using a two-plate model to approximate the TDRSS solar pressure effects

An investigation was performed to determine the feasibility of using a two plate model to approximate the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) in orbit propagation, taking into account the effects of solar radiation pressure. The two plate model comprises one plate which always points to the Earth, and the other which is hinged to an axis normal to the orbital plane and is always rotated so that its normal makes a minimum angle with the direction of the sun. The results indicate that it is sufficient to take three parameters, the areas of the two plates and the reflectivity of the Earth pointing plate, to achieve an accuracy of one meter during a 24 hour orbit propagation

Domain decomposition algorithms and computation fluid dynamics

In the past several years, domain decomposition was a very popular topic, partly motivated by the potential of parallelization. While a large body of theory and algorithms were developed for model elliptic problems, they are only recently starting to be tested on realistic applications. The application of some of these methods to two model problems in computational fluid dynamics are investigated. Some examples are two dimensional convection-diffusion problems and the incompressible driven cavity flow problem. The construction and analysis of efficient preconditioners for the interface operator to be used in the iterative solution of the interface solution is described. For the convection-diffusion problems, the effect of the convection term and its discretization on the performance of some of the preconditioners is discussed. For the driven cavity problem, the effectiveness of a class of boundary probe preconditioners is discussed

The physics of parallel machines

The idea is considered that architectures for massively parallel computers must be designed to go beyond supporting a particular class of algorithms to supporting the underlying physical processes being modelled. Physical processes modelled by partial differential equations (PDEs) are discussed. Also discussed is the idea that an efficient architecture must go beyond nearest neighbor mesh interconnections and support global and hierarchical communications

Epilepsy Therapy Goes Viral.

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NMR studies of membrane structure and dynamics

Over the past decade, there has been considerable interest in the motional state of the phospholipid bilayer membrane. The motivation underlying these efforts has been the contention that the phospholipid bilayer is the basic matrix in which membrane proteins are embedded to form the biological membrane, and that the permeability and mechanical properties of the membrane, as well as the enzymatic activity of membrane proteins, are dependent upon the fluidity of the bilayer, especially the motional state of the hydrocarbon chains

ENO-wavelet transforms for piecewise smooth functions

We have designed an adaptive essentially nonoscillatory (ENO)-wavelet transform for approximating discontinuous functions without oscillations near the discontinuities. Our approach is to apply the main idea from ENO schemes for numerical shock capturing to standard wavelet transforms. The crucial point is that the wavelet coefficients are computed without differencing function values across jumps. However, we accomplish this in a different way than in the standard ENO schemes. Whereas in the standard ENO schemes the stencils are adaptively chosen, in the ENO-wavelet transforms we adaptively change the function and use the same uniform stencils. The ENO-wavelet transform retains the essential properties and advantages of standard wavelet transforms such as concentrating the energy to the low frequencies, obtaining maximum accuracy, maintained up to the discontinuities, and having a multiresolution framework and fast algorithms, all without any edge artifacts. We have obtained a rigorous approximation error bound which shows that the error in the ENO-wavelet approximation depends only on the size of the derivative of the function away from the discontinuities. We will show some numerical examples to illustrate this error estimate