Taylor bubble moving in a flowing liquid in vertical channel: transition from symmetric to asymmetric shape

The velocity and shape of Taylor bubbles moving in a vertical channel in a Poiseuille liquid flow were studied for the inertial regime, characterized by large Reynolds numbers. Numerical experiments were carried out for positive (upward) and negative (downward) liquid mean velocity. Previous investigations in tube have reported that for upward flow the bubble is symmetric and its velocity follows the law of Nicklin whereas for certain downward flow conditions the symmetry is broken and the bubble rises appreciably faster. To study the bubble motion and to identify the existence of a transition, a 2D numerical code that solves the Navier-Stokes equations (through a VoF implementation) was used to obtain the bubble shape and the rise velocity for different liquid mean velocity. A reference frame located at the bubble tip as well as an irregular grid were implemented to allow for long simulation times without an excessively large numerical domain. It was observed that whenever the mean liquid velocity exceeded some critical value, bubbles adopted a symmetric final shape even though their initial shape was asymmetric. Conversely, if the mean liquid velocity was smaller than that critical value, a transition to a non-symmetric shape occurred, along with a correspondingly faster velocity. It was also found that surface tension has a stabilizing effect on the transition

FRIENDS - A flexible architecture for implementing fault tolerant and secure distributed applications

FRIENDS is a software-based architecture for implementing fault-tolerant and, to some extent, secure applications. This architecture is composed of sub-systems and libraries of metaobjects. Transparency and separation of concerns is provided not only to the application programmer but also to the programmers implementing metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication and distribution. Common services required for implementing metaobjects are provided by the sub-systems. Metaobjects are implemented using object-oriented techniques and can be reused and customised according to the application needs, the operational environment and its related fault assumptions. Flexibility is increased by a recursive use of metaobjects. Examples and experiments are also described

A metaobject architecture for fault-tolerant distributed systems : the FRIENDS approach

The FRIENDS system developed at LAAS-CNRS is a metalevel architecture providing libraries of metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication, and group-based distributed applications. The use of metaobjects provides a nice separation of concerns between mechanisms and applications. Metaobjects can be used transparently by applications and can be composed according to the needs of a given application, a given architecture, and its underlying properties. In FRIENDS, metaobjects are used recursively to add new properties to applications. They are designed using an object oriented design method and implemented on top of basic system services. This paper describes the FRIENDS software-based architecture, the object-oriented development of metaobjects, the experiments that we have done, and summarizes the advantages and drawbacks of a metaobject approach for building fault-tolerant system

Friction behavior of laser cladding magnesium alloy against AISI 52100 steel

The use of magnesium alloys in engineering applications is becoming increasingly important as a relatively low density allows savings in energy consumption and therefore reduction in air pollution. An associated reduction in inertia makes these alloys potential candidates for friction components, but they suffer from poor wear resistance. Laser surface alloying with appropriate powder mixture is an innovative technique to improve surface properties of metallic alloys. In this study, the effect of laser surface alloying using Al12%Si powder on wear resistance of a magnesium alloy ZE41 is investigated. Hardness and wear resistance of the alloy are significantly enhanced after treatment

Fragmentation of confidential objects for data processing security in distributed systems

This paper discusses how object orientation in application design enables confidentiality aspects to be handled more easily than in conventional approaches. The idea, based on object fragmentation at design time, is to reduce processing in confidential objects; the more non confidential objects can be produced at design-time, the more application objects can be processed on untrusted shared computers. Still confidential objects must be processed on non shared trusted workstations. Rules and limits of object fragmentation are discussed together with some criteria evaluating trade-offs between fragmentation and performance

Turbulent bubbly flow in pipe under gravity and microgravity conditions

Experiments on vertical turbulent flow with millimetric bubbles, under three gravity conditions, upward, downward and microgravity flows (1g, -1g and 0g), have been performed to understand the influence of gravity upon the flow structure and the phase distribution. The mean and fluctuating phase velocities, shear stress, turbulence production, gas fraction and bubble size have been measured or determined. The results for 0g flow obtained during parabolic flights are taken as reference for buoyant 1g and -1g flows. Three buoyancy numbers are introduced to understand and quantify the effects of gravity with respect to friction. We show that the kinematic structure of the liquid is similar to single-phase flow for 0g flow whereas it deviates in 1g and -1g buoyant flows. The present results confirm the existence of a two-layer structure for buoyant flows with a nearly homogeneous core and a wall layer similar to the single-phase inertial layer whose thickness seems to result from a friction–gravity balance. The distributions of phase velocity, shear stress and turbulence are discussed in the light of various existing physical models. This leads to a dimensionless correlation that quantifies the wall shear stress increase due to buoyancy. The turbulent dispersion, the lift and the nonlinear effects of added mass are taken into account in a simplified model for the phase distribution. Its analytical solution gives a qualitative description of the gas fraction distribution in the wall layer

Topology beyond the horizon: how far can it be probed?

The standard cosmological model does not determine the spatial topology of the universe. This article revisits the signature of a non-trivial topology on the properties of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. We show that the correlation function of the coefficients of the expansion of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in spherical harmonics, encodes a topological signature that can be used to distinguish a multi-connected space from an infinite space on sizes larger than the last scattering surface. The effect of the instrumental noise and of a galactic cut are estimated. We thus establish boundaries for the size of the biggest torus dintinguisable with temperature and polarization CMB data. We also describe the imprint of the spatial topology on the 3-point function and on non-Gaussianity.Comment: 20 pages, 24 figure

Dynamic hybrid simulation of batch processes driven by a scheduling module

Simulation is now a CAPE tool widely used by practicing engineers for process design and control. In particular, it allows various offline analyses to improve system performance such as productivity, energy efficiency, waste reduction, etc. In this framework, we have developed the dynamic hybrid simulation environment PrODHyS whose particularity is to provide general and reusable object-oriented components dedicated to the modeling of devices and operations found in chemical processes. Unlike continuous processes, the dynamic simulation of batch processes requires the execution of control recipes to achieve a set of production orders. For these reasons, PrODHyS is coupled to a scheduling module (ProSched) based on a MILP mathematical model in order to initialize various operational parameters and to ensure a proper completion of the simulation. This paper focuses on the procedure used to generate the simulation model corresponding to the realization of a scenario described through a particular scheduling

Compact Gaussian quantum computation by multi-pixel homodyne detection

We study the possibility of producing and detecting continuous variable cluster states in an optical set-up in an extremely compact fashion. This method is based on a multi-pixel homodyne detection system recently demonstrated experimentally, which includes classical data post-processing. It allows to incorporate the linear optics network, usually employed in standard experiments for the production of cluster states, in the stage of the measurement. After giving an example of cluster state generation by this method, we further study how this procedure can be generalized to perform gaussian quantum computation.Comment: Eqs.(20)-(21) correcte

Implementing fault tolerant applications using reflective object-oriented programming

Abstract: Shows how reflection and object-oriented programming can be used to ease the implementation of classical fault tolerance mechanisms in distributed applications. When the underlying runtime system does not provide fault tolerance transparently, classical approaches to implementing fault tolerance mechanisms often imply mixing functional programming with non-functional programming (e.g. error processing mechanisms). The use of reflection improves the transparency of fault tolerance mechanisms to the programmer and more generally provides a clearer separation between functional and non-functional programming. The implementations of some classical replication techniques using a reflective approach are presented in detail and illustrated by several examples, which have been prototyped on a network of Unix workstations. Lessons learnt from our experiments are drawn and future work is discussed