On the predictive capability and stability of rubber material models

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computation for Design and Optimization Program, 2008.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-101).Due to the high non-linearity and incompressibility constraint of rubber materials, the predictive capability and stability of rubber material models require specific attention for practical engineering analysis. In this thesis, the predictive capability of various rubber material models, namely the Mooney-Rivlin model, Arruda-Boyce model, Ogden model and the newly proposed Sussman-Bathe model, is investigated theoretically with continuum mechanics methods and tested numerically in various deformation situations using the finite element analysis software ADINA. In addition, a recently made available stability criterion of rubber material models is re-derived and verified through numerical experiments for the above four models with ADINA. Thereafter, the predictive capability and stability of material models are studied jointly for non-homogenous deformations. The Mooney-Rivlin model, Arruda-Boyce model, Ogden model have difficulties in describing the uniaxial compression data while the Sussman-Bathe model can fit both compression and extension data well. Thus, the Sussman-Bathe model has the best predictive capability for pure shear deformations. Furthermore, with respect to more complex non-homogenous deformations, a conclusion is drawn that all three major deformations, namely uniaxial deformation, biaxial deformation and pure shear deformation, must satisfy the stability criterion to obtain physically correct non-homogenous simulation results.by Haining Zheng.S.M

Inline-Crossflow Coupled Vortex Induced Vibrations of Long Flexible Cylinders

The inline motion of long flexible cylinders caused by Vortex Induced Vibrations (VIV) has been long neglected due to its small amplitude compared to the cross-flow response amplitude. However, the inline motion has a major impact on fatigue life due to its higher frequency (second harmonic) and more importantly, because it triggers a third harmonic stress component in the crossflow direction along with a broad-band frequency stress component. We introduce an inline response prediction module to VIVA, a VIV response prediction program widely used in the offshore industry, to be able to consequently predict the higher harmonic and chaotic VIV response characteristics of flexible cylinders. Extensive forced inline and combined inline-crossflow experiments were employed to provide hydrodynamic coefficient databases for input to VIVA, in addition to existing crossflow hydrodynamic coefficients. The Norwegian Deepwater Programme (NDP) experimental data were used to validate this prediction methodology.BP-MIT Major Projects Progra

Coupled Inline-Cross Flow VIV Hydrodynamic Coefficients Database

Vortex Induced Vibrations (VIV) cause major fatigue damage to long slender bodies and have been extensively studied in the past decades. While most of the past research focused on the cross flow direction, it was recently shown that the inline motion in the direction of the flow has a major impact on the fatigue life damage due to its higher frequency (second harmonic) and more importantly, its coupling with the crossflow motion, which triggers a third harmonic stress component in the cross flow direction. In this paper, the coupled inline-crossflow VIV problem is addressed from semiempirical modeling of fluid forces. Extensive fine grid forced inline-crossflow VIV experiments were designed and carried out in the MIT towing tank. An inline-crossflow VIV hydrodynamics coefficients database was newly constructed using the experimental results and it is expected to be useful for other semi empirical programs predicting coupled inlinecrossflow VIV in the field. Several key hydrodynamic coefficients in the database, including lift force coefficients, drag force coefficients and added mass coefficients, were systematically analyzed. The coefficients in the crossflow and the inline directions were found to have strong dependency on the phase between the inline and crossflow motions.BP-MIT Major Program

Carbon nanotubes affect the toxicity of CuO nanoparticles to denitrification in marine sediments by altering cellular internalization of nanoparticle

Denitrification is an important pathway for nitrate transformation in marine sediments, and this process has been observed to be negatively affected by engineered nanomaterials. However, previous studies only focused on the potential effect of a certain type of nanomaterial on microbial denitrification. Here we show that the toxicity of CuO nanoparticles (NPs) to denitrification in marine sediments is highly affected by the presence of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). It was found that the removal efficiency of total NOX−-N (NO3−-N and NO2−-N) in the presence of CuO NPs was only 62.3%, but it increased to 81.1% when CNTs appeared in this circumstance. Our data revealed that CuO NPs were more easily attached to CNTs rather than cell surface because of the lower energy barrier (3.5 versus 36.2 kT). Further studies confirmed that the presence of CNTs caused the formation of large, incompact, non-uniform dispersed, and more negatively charged CuO-CNTs heteroaggregates, and thus reduced the nanoparticle internalization by cells, leading to less toxicity to metabolism of carbon source, generation of reduction equivalent, and activities of nitrate reductase and nitrite reductase. These results indicate that assessing nanomaterial-induced risks in real circumstances needs to consider the “mixed” effects of nanomaterials

A Key Backup Scheme Based on Bitcoin

Since first introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, Bitcoin has become the biggest and most well-known decentralized digital currency. Its anonymity allows users all over the world to make transactions with each other and keep their identities hidden. However, protecting private key becomes a very important issue because it is the only access to a unique account and can hardly be recovered if missing. Storing an encrypted backup of private key and its corresponding advanced key is a traditional but effective way, and many other techniques help to make the backup harder to obtain by attackers. While in this paper, we introduce a new backup scheme that can provide protection when an attacker manages to obtain the backup. It is based on Bitcoin system and ECDSA signature scheme. The biggest difference is the generation and recovery of the backup processes are both related with some specific transactions on blockchain, thus it creates a gap for legal users and attackers who manages to obtain backup to recover key. The gap is decided by the number of accounts and transactions on the blockchain which increases rapidly with the growth of Bitcoin\u27s popularity and therefore strengthens the security of our scheme at the same time. What\u27s more, our technique can also be combined with former ones to achieve better security

Receiver-Initiated Handshaking MAC Based on Traffic Estimation for Underwater Sensor Networks

In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the unique characteristics of acoustic channels have posed great challenges for the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The long propagation delay problem has been widely explored in recent literature. However,the long preamble problem with acoustic modems revealed in real experiments brings new challenges to underwater MAC design. The overhead of control messages in handshaking-based protocols becomes significant due to the long preamble in underwater acoustic modems. To address this problem, we advocate the receiver-initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. Despite some existing works along this direction, the data polling problem is still an open issue. Without knowing the status of senders, the receiver faces two challenges for efficient data polling: when to poll data from the sender and how much data to request. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation-basedreceiver-initiated MAC(TERI-MAC)to solve this problem with an adaptive approach. Data polling in TERI-MAC depends on an online approximation of traffic distribution. It estimates the energy efficiency and network latency and starts the data request only when the preferred performance can be achieved. TERI-MAC can achieve a stable energy efficiency with arbitrary network traffic patterns. For traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. The performance of TERI-MAC in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization, and communication latency is verified in simulations. Our results show that, compared with existing receiver-initiated-based underwater MAC protocols, TERI-MAC can achieve higher energy efficiency at the price of a delay penalty. This confirms the strength of TERI-MAC for delay-tolerant applications