A model for the quasi-static growth of brittle fractures based on local minimization

We study a variant of the variational model for the quasi-static growth of brittle fractures proposed by Francfort and Marigo. The main feature of our model is that, in the discrete-time formulation, in each step we do not consider absolute minimizers of the energy, but, in a sense, we look for local minimizers which are sufficiently close to the approximate solution obtained in the previous step. This is done by introducing in the variational problem an additional term which penalizes the $L^2$-distance between the approximate solutions at two consecutive times. We study the continuous-time version of this model, obtained by passing to the limit as the time step tends to zero, and show that it satisfies (for almost every time) some minimality conditions which are slightly different from those considered in Francfort and Marigo and in our previous paper, but are still enough to prove (under suitable regularity assumptions on the crack path) that the classical Griffith's criterion holds at the crack tips. We prove also that, if no initial crack is present and if the data of the problem are sufficiently smooth, no crack will develop in this model, provided the penalization term is large enough.Comment: 20 page

Detection of holes in an elastic body based on eigenvalues and traces of eigenmodes

We consider the numerical solution of an inverse problem of finding the shape and location of holes in an elastic body. The problem is solved by minimizing a functional depending on the eigenvalues and traces of corresponding eigenmodes. We use the adjoint method to calculate the shape derivative of this functional. The optimization is performed by BFGS, using a genetic algorithm as a preprocessor and the Method of Fundamental Solutions as a solver for the direct problem. We address several numerical simulations that illustrate the good performance of the method.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A new space of generalised functions with bounded variation motivated by fracture mechanics

We introduce a new space of generalised functions with bounded variation to prove the existence of a solution to a minimum problem that arises in the variational approach to fracture mechanics in elastoplastic materials. We study the fine properties of the functions belonging to this space and prove a compactness result. In order to use the Direct Method of the Calculus of Variations we prove a lower semicontinuity result for the functional occurring in this minimum problem. Moreover, we adapt a nontrivial argument introduced by Friedrich to show that every minimizing sequence can be modified to obtain a new minimizing sequence that satisfies the hypotheses of our compactness result

Rate-Independent Damage in Thermo-Viscoelastic Materials with Inertia

We present a model for rate-independent, unidirectional, partial damage in visco-elastic materials with inertia and thermal effects. The damage process is modeled by means of an internal variable, governed by a rate-independent flow rule. The heat equation and the momentum balance for the displacements are coupled in a highly nonlinear way. Our assumptions on the corresponding energy functional also comprise the case of the Ambrosio\u2013 Tortorelli phase-field model (without passage to the brittle limit). We discuss a suitable weak formulation and prove an existence theorem obtained with the aid of a (partially) decoupled time-discrete scheme and variational convergence methods. We also carry out the asymptotic analysis for vanishing viscosity and inertia and obtain a fully rate-independent limit model for displacements and damage, which is independent of temperature

Efficient high-resolution refinement in cryo-EM with stochastic gradient descent

Electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) is an imaging technique widely used in structural biology to determine the three-dimensional structure of biological molecules from noisy two-dimensional projections with unknown orientations. As the typical pipeline involves processing large amounts of data, efficient algorithms are crucial for fast and reliable results. The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been used to improve the speed of ab initio reconstruction, which results in a first, low-resolution estimation of the volume representing the molecule of interest, but has yet to be applied successfully in the high-resolution regime, where expectation-maximization algorithms achieve state-of-the-art results, at a high computational cost. In this article, we investigate the conditioning of the optimization problem and show that the large condition number prevents the successful application of gradient descent-based methods at high resolution. Our results include a theoretical analysis of the condition number of the optimization problem in a simplified setting where the individual projection directions are known, an algorithm based on computing a diagonal preconditioner using Hutchinson's diagonal estimator, and numerical experiments showing the improvement in the convergence speed when using the estimated preconditioner with SGD. The preconditioned SGD approach can potentially enable a simple and unified approach to ab initio reconstruction and high-resolution refinement with faster convergence speed and higher flexibility, and our results are a promising step in this direction.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Existence for elastodynamic Griffith fracture with a weak maximal dissipation condition

We consider a model of elastodynamics with fracture evolution, based on energy-dissipation balance and a maximal dissipation condition. We prove an existence result in the case of planar elasticity with a free crack path, where the maximal dissipation condition is satisfied among suitably regular competitor cracks

Elastodynamic Griffith fracture on prescribed crack paths with kinks

We prove an existence result for a model of dynamic fracture based on Griffith\u2019s criterion in the case of a prescribed crack path with a kink

Methods for Cryo-EM Single Particle Reconstruction of Macromolecules having Continuous Heterogeneity

Macromolecules change their shape (conformation) in the process of carrying out their functions. The imaging by cryo-electron microscopy of rapidly-frozen, individual copies of macromolecules (single particles) is a powerful and general approach to understanding the motions and energy landscapes of macromolecules. Widely-used computational methods already allow the recovery of a few distinct conformations from heterogeneous single-particle samples, but the treatment of complex forms of heterogeneity such as the continuum of possible transitory states and flexible regions remains largely an open problem. In recent years there has been a surge of new approaches for treating the more general problem of continuous heterogeneity. This paper surveys the current state of the art in this area.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure