9,716 research outputs found
Educating a creative engineer: learning from engineering professionals
The rapid growth of engineering knowledge has resulted in continuous expansion of novel technologies and materials that can be used in designing new products and processed. Computer- and web-based technologies allowed engineers to significantly shorten the development of novel artefacts. These advances intensified the competition between engineering companies and shortened the lifespans of the majority of engineering products. As a result, practicing engineers are now expected to deliver creative designs to markets much more swiftly than ever before. This paper presents the results of a survey that intended to establish the ways and the means of enhancing engineering creativity that suit the engineering industry of the 21st Century. This study engaged 46 engineering experts from the major international corporations who utilised numerous creativity techniques including TRIZ in their day-to-day engineering work. It had been found that the surveyed engineering experts think that in the current Information age (i) knowledge beyond engineering profession is more important for creativity than the discipline knowledge; (ii) learning creativity methods and problem solving heuristics is more important than acquiring additional discipline knowledge; (iii) the problem solving stage of identifying and understanding a problem is the key to a creative solution
Eight fields of MATCEMIB help students to generate more ideas
This paper presents the results of the idea generation experiment that repeats the study originally conducted at RMIT. In order to establish the influence that the experimental treatments make on the number and the breadth of solution ideas proposed by problem solvers with different knowledge levels, students from different years of study were recruited. Ninety students from the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany were divided into three groups. All students were asked to generate ideas on cleaning lime deposits from the inside of a water pipe and were given 16 minutes to record their individual ideas. Students of two experimental groups were shown some words for two minuted each. The Su-Field group was exposed to the eight fields of MATCEMIB. The Random Word group was shown eight random words every two minutes. The Su-Field group outperformed both the Control group and the Random Word group in the number of ideas generated. It was also found that the students from the Su-Field group proposed significantly broader solutions than the students from the Control and Random Word groups. The overall results of the experiment support the conclusions made by the RMIT researchers that simple ideation techniques can significantly improve idea generation and that the systematised Substance-Field Analysis is a suitable heuristic for engineering students
The stability of the O(N) invariant fixed point in three dimensions
We study the stability of the O(N) fixed point in three dimensions under
perturbations of the cubic type. We address this problem in the three cases
by using finite size scaling techniques and high precision Monte
Carlo simulations. It is well know that there is a critical value
below which the O(N) fixed point is stable and above which the cubic fixed
point becomes the stable one. While we cannot exclude that , as recently
claimed by Kleinert and collaborators, our analysis strongly suggests that
coincides with 3.Comment: latex file of 18 pages plus three ps figure
Weak quenched disorder and criticality: resummation of asymptotic(?) series
In these lectures, we discuss the influence of weak quenched disorder on the
critical behavior in condensed matter and give a brief review of available
experimental and theoretical results as well as results of MC simulations of
these phenomena. We concentrate on three cases: (i) uncorrelated random-site
disorder, (ii) long-range-correlated random-site disorder, and (iii) random
anisotropy.
Today, the standard analytical description of critical behavior is given by
renormalization group results refined by resummation of the perturbation theory
series. The convergence properties of the series are unknown for most
disordered models. The main object of these lectures is to discuss the
peculiarities of the application of resummation techniques to perturbation
theory series of disordered models.Comment: Lectures given at the Second International Pamporovo Workshop on
Cooperative Phenomena in Condensed Matter (28th July - 7th August 2001,
Pamporovo, Bulgaria). 51 pages, 12 figures, 1 style files include
The stability of a cubic fixed point in three dimensions from the renormalization group
The global structure of the renormalization-group flows of a model with
isotropic and cubic interactions is studied using the massive field theory
directly in three dimensions. The four-loop expansions of the \bt-functions
are calculated for arbitrary . The critical dimensionality and the stability matrix eigenvalues estimates obtained on the basis of
the generalized Pad-Borel-Leroy resummation technique are shown
to be in a good agreement with those found recently by exploiting the five-loop
\ve-expansions.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 5 PostScript figure
Stability of 3D Cubic Fixed Point in Two-Coupling-Constant \phi^4-Theory
For an anisotropic euclidean -theory with two interactions [u
(\sum_{i=1^M {\phi}_i^2)^2+v \sum_{i=1}^M \phi_i^4] the -functions are
calculated from five-loop perturbation expansions in
dimensions, using the knowledge of the large-order behavior and Borel
transformations. For , an infrared stable cubic fixed point for
is found, implying that the critical exponents in the magnetic phase
transition of real crystals are of the cubic universality class. There were
previous indications of the stability based either on lower-loop expansions or
on less reliable Pad\'{e approximations, but only the evidence presented in
this work seems to be sufficently convincing to draw this conclusion.Comment: Author Information under
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/institution.html . Paper also at
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/kleiner_re250/preprint.htm
Critical Point Correlation Function for the 2D Random Bond Ising Model
High accuracy Monte Carlo simulation results for 1024*1024 Ising system with
ferromagnetic impurity bonds are presented. Spin-spin correlation function at a
critical point is found to be numerically very close to that of a pure system.
This is not trivial since a critical temperature for the system with impurities
is almost two times lower than pure Ising . Finite corrections to the
correlation function due to combined action of impurities and finite lattice
size are described.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures after LaTeX fil
Critical Behaviour of 3D Systems with Long-Range Correlated Quenched Defects
A field-theoretic description of the critical behaviour of systems with
quenched defects obeying a power law correlations for
large separations is given. Directly for three-dimensional systems
and different values of correlation parameter a
renormalization analysis of scaling function in the two-loop approximation is
carried out, and the fixed points corresponding to stability of the various
types of critical behaviour are identified. The obtained results essentially
differ from results evaluated by double - expansion. The
critical exponents in the two-loop approximation are calculated with the use of
the Pade-Borel summation technique.Comment: Submitted to J. Phys. A, Letter to Editor 9 pages, 4 figure
The AGASA/SUGAR Anisotropies and TeV Gamma Rays from the Galactic Center: A Possible Signature of Extremely High-energy Neutrons
Recent analysis of data sets from two extensive air shower cosmic ray
detectors shows tantalizing evidence of an anisotropic overabundance of cosmic
rays towards the Galactic Center (GC) that ``turns on'' around eV. We
demonstrate that the anisotropy could be due to neutrons created at the
Galactic Center through charge-exchange in proton-proton collisions, where the
incident, high energy protons obey an power law associated with
acceleration at a strong shock. We show that the normalization supplied by the
gamma-ray signal from EGRET GC source 3EG J1746-2851 -- ascribed to pp induced
neutral pion decay at GeV energies -- together with a very reasonable spectral
index of 2.2, predicts a neutron flux at eV fully consistent
with the extremely high energy cosmic ray data. Likewise, the normalization
supplied by the very recent GC data from the HESS air-Cerenkov telescope at
\~TeV energies is almost equally-well compatible with the eV
cosmic ray data. Interestingly, however, the EGRET and HESS data appear to be
themselves incompatible. We consider the implications of this discrepancy. We
discuss why the Galactic Center environment can allow diffusive shock
acceleration at strong shocks up to energies approaching the ankle in the
cosmic ray spectrum. Finally, we argue that the shock acceleration may be
occuring in the shell of Sagittarius A East, an unusual supernova remnant
located very close to the Galactic Center. If this connection between the
anisotropy and Sagittarius A East could be firmly established it would be the
first direct evidence for a particular Galactic source of cosmic rays up to
energies near the ankle.Comment: 57 pages, 2 figure
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