4,773 research outputs found
High performance interior point methods for three-dimensional finite element limit analysis
The ability to obtain rigorous upper and lower bounds on collapse loads of various structures makes ïŹnite element limit analysis an attractive design tool. The increasingly high cost of computing those bounds, however, has limited its application on problems in three dimensions. This work reports on a high-performance homogeneous self-dual primal-dual interior point method developed for three-dimensional ïŹnite element limit analysis. This implementation achieves convergence times over 4.5Ă faster than the leading commercial solver across a set of three-dimensional ïŹnite element limit analysis test problems, making investigation of three dimensional limit loads viable. A comparison between a range of iterative linear solvers and direct methods used to determine the search direction is also provided, demonstrating the superiority of direct methods for this application. The components of the interior point solver considered include the elimination of and options for handling remaining free variables, multifrontal and supernodal Cholesky comparison for computing the search direction, diïŹerences between approximate minimum degree [1] and nested dissection [13] orderings, dealing with dense columns and ïŹxed variables, and accelerating the linear system solver through parallelization. Each of these areas resulted in an improvement on at least one of the problems in the test set, with many achieving gains across the whole set. The serial implementation achieved runtime performance 1.7Ă faster than the commercial solver Mosek [5]. Compared with the parallel version of Mosek, the use of parallel BLAS routines in the supernodal solver saw a 1.9Ă speedup, and with a modiïŹed version of the GPU-enabled CHOLMOD [11] and a single NVIDIA Tesla K20c this speedup increased to 4.65Ă
Three dimensional lower bound solutions for the stability of plate anchors in sand
Soil anchors are commonly used as foundation systems for structures that require uplift or lateral resistance. These types of structures include transmission towers, sheet pile walls and buried pipelines. Although anchors are typically complex in shape (e.g. drag or helical anchors), many previous analyses idealise the anchor as a continuous strip under plane strain conditions. This assumption provides numerical advantages and the problem can solved in two dimensions. In contrast to recent numerical studies, this
paper applies three dimensional numerical limit analysis and axi-symetrical displacement finite element analysis to evaluate the effect of anchor shape on the pullout capacity of horizontal anchors in sand. The anchor is idealised as either square or circular in shape. Results are presented in the familiar form of breakout factors based on various anchor shapes and embedment depths, and are also compared with existing numerical and empirical solutions
Advanced optimal extraction for the Spitzer/IRS
We present new advances in the spectral extraction of point-like sources
adapted to the Infrared Spectrograph onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope. For
the first time, we created a super-sampled point spread function of the
low-resolution modules. We describe how to use the point spread function to
perform optimal extraction of a single source and of multiple sources within
the slit. We also examine the case of the optimal extraction of one or several
sources with a complex background. The new algorithms are gathered in a plugin
called Adopt which is part of the SMART data analysis software.Comment: Accepted for publication in PAS
Simulation of Cosmic Ray neutrinos Interactions in Water
The program CORSIKA, usually used to simulate extensive cosmic ray air
showers, has been adapted to a water medium in order to study the acoustic
detection of ultra high energy neutrinos. Showers in water from incident
protons and from neutrinos have been generated and their properties are
described. The results obtained from CORSIKA are compared to those from other
available simulation programs such as Geant4.Comment: Talk presented on behalf of the ACoRNE Collaboration at the ARENA
Workshop 200
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