Bouncing droplets on a billiard table

In a set of experiments, Couder et. al. demonstrate that an oscillating fluid bed may propagate a bouncing droplet through the guidance of the surface waves. We present a dynamical systems model, in the form of an iterative map, for a droplet on an oscillating bath. We examine the droplet bifurcation from bouncing to walking, and prescribe general requirements for the surface wave to support stable walking states. We show that in addition to walking, there is a region of large forcing that may support the chaotic bouncing of the droplet. Using the map, we then investigate the droplet trajectories for two different wave responses in a square (billiard ball) domain. We show that for waves which are quickly damped in space, the long time trajectories in a square domain are either non-periodic dense curves, or approach a quasiperiodic orbit. In contrast, for waves which extend over many wavelengths, at low forcing, trajectories tend to approach an array of circular attracting sets. As the forcing increases, the attracting sets break down and the droplet travels throughout space

Spatial Manifestations of Order Reduction in Runge-Kutta Methods for Initial Boundary Value Problems

This paper studies the spatial manifestations of order reduction that occur when time-stepping initial-boundary-value problems (IBVPs) with high-order Runge-Kutta methods. For such IBVPs, geometric structures arise that do not have an analog in ODE IVPs: boundary layers appear, induced by a mismatch between the approximation error in the interior and at the boundaries. To understand those boundary layers, an analysis of the modes of the numerical scheme is conducted, which explains under which circumstances boundary layers persist over many time steps. Based on this, two remedies to order reduction are studied: first, a new condition on the Butcher tableau, called weak stage order, that is compatible with diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes; and second, the impact of modified boundary conditions on the boundary layer theory is analyzed.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figure

Characterization of the Structure of Saudi Crude Asphaltenes by X-ray Diffraction

Structural characterization studies have been carried out on four commercial Saudi Arabian crude oils. The aromaticity and crystallite parameters of the asphaltenes were studied by X-ray diffraction methods and compared to the average structural parameters calculated from nuclear magnetic resonance spectra