Cutout reinforcements for shear loaded laminate and sandwich composite panels

This paper presents the numerical and experimental studies of shear loaded laminated and sandwich carbon/epoxy composite panels with cutouts and reinforcements aiming at reducing the cutout stress concentration and increasing the buckling stability of the panels. The effect of different cutout sizes and the design and materials of cutout reinforcements on the stress and buckling behaviour of the panels are evaluated. For the sandwich panels with a range of cutout size and a constant weight, an optimal ratio of the core to the face thickness has been studied for the maximum buckling stability. The finite element method and an analytical method are employed to perform parametric studies. In both constant stress and constant displacement shear loading conditions, the results are in very good agreement with those obtained from experiment for selected cutout reinforcement cases. Conclusions are drawn on the cutout reinforcement design and improvement of stress concentration and buckling behaviour of shear loaded laminated and sandwich composite panels with cutouts

Rotation of Coulomb crystals in a magnetized inductively coupled complex plasma

Under suitable conditions, micron-sized dust particles introduced into inductively coupled argon plasma form a stable microscopic crystal lattice, known as a Coulomb (or plasma) crystal. In the experiment described, an external axial magnetic field was applied to various configurations of Coulomb crystal, including small crystal lattices consisting of one to several particles, and large crystal lattices with many hundreds of particles. The crystals were observed to rotate collectively under the influence of the magnetic field. This paper describes the experimental procedures and the preliminary results of this investigation

Free vibration of a three-layered sandwich beam using the dynamic stiffness method and experiment

In this paper, an accurate dynamic stiffness model for a three-layered sandwich beam of unequal thicknesses is developed and subsequently used to investigate its free vibration characteristics. Each layer of the beam is idealised by the Timoshenko beam theory and the combined system is reduced to a tenth-order system using symbolic computation. An exact dynamic stiffness matrix is then developed by relating amplitudes of harmonically varying loads to those of the responses. The resulting dynamic stiffness matrix is used with particular reference to the Wittrick-Williams algorithm to carry out the free vibration analysis of a few illustrative examples. The accuracy of the theory is confirmed both by published literature and by experiment. The paper closes with some concluding remarks. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

An event-related potential study on the information flow during prospective memory interference

Poster PresentationBACKGROUND: Electroencephalography (EEG) can examine the temporal sequence of brain activity related to a specific event, which is referred to as event-related potential (ERP). Prospective memory (PM) interference presents the interference effect of an embedded PM task on other ongoing task. In the previous functional MRI study, we found that the fusiform gyrus, left inferior parietal lobe and left frontal lobe play an essential role in PM interference effect. However, little temporal information could be retrieved from the functional MRI …published_or_final_versio

Detection of Optical Synchrotron Emission from the Radio Jet of 3C279

We report the detection of optical and ultraviolet emission from the kiloparsec scale jet of the well-known quasar 3C~279. A bright knot, discovered in archival V and U band {\it Hubble Space Telescope} Faint Object Camera images, is coincident with a peak in the radio jet \sim0.6\arcsec from the nucleus. The detection was also confirmed in Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 images. Archival Very Large Array and MERLIN radio data are also analyzed which help to show that the high-energy optical/UV continuum, and spectrum, are consistent with a synchrotron origin from the same population of relativistic electrons responsible for the radio emission.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figs. accepted for publication in ApJL with minor revision

On the numerical study of bubbly wakes generated by ventilated cavity using population balance approach

In this study, an Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid model integrated with the population balance approach based on Multiple-Size-Group (MUSIG) model was proposed to simulate on the gas leakage bubbly wake of a ventilated cavitation problem. Three selected flow conditions with Froude number ranging from 20 to 29 have been selected for investigation. Predicted void fraction and bubble velocity profiles were validated against the experimental measurements in the high-speed water tunnel of Schauer (2003) and Wosnik (2005). Sensitivity studies on the mesh resolution and three different turbulence closures were first carried out. In comparison with experimental data, the shear stress transport (SST) turbulence model was found to be the best candidate in modelling the re-circulation motions within the cavity wake region. To consider the neighbouring effect of closely packed bubbles, an empirical equation was proposed to correlate the turbulent dispersion coefficient to the local gas void fraction. Based on the proposed empirical equation, the turbulent dispersion coefficient reduces to 0.1 when local gas void fraction is higher than 60%. In general, numerical predictions were in satisfactory agreement with the experimental data. Some discrepancies have nonetheless been found between the numerical and experimental results. The lack of exact gas leakage mechanism remains an outstanding challenge in determining the actual gas leakage rate and initial bubble size from the continuous cavity. Further effort should be also focused on combing free-surface tracking model with the present population balance approach to investigate the complex vortex structure and interaction between ventilated cavity and discrete leakage bubble