1,933 research outputs found
A mathematical model of a large open fire
A mathematical model capable of predicting the detailed characteristics of large, liquid fuel, axisymmetric, pool fires is described. The predicted characteristics include spatial distributions of flame gas velocity, soot concentration and chemical specie concentrations including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water, unreacted oxygen, unreacted fuel and nitrogen. Comparisons of the predictions with experimental values are also given
Superlubricity - a new perspective on an established paradigm
Superlubricity is a frictionless tribological state sometimes occurring in
nanoscale material junctions. It is often associated with incommensurate
surface lattice structures appearing at the interface. Here, by using the
recently introduced registry index concept which quantifies the registry
mismatch in layered materials, we prove the existence of a direct relation
between interlayer commensurability and wearless friction in layered materials.
We show that our simple and intuitive model is able to capture, down to fine
details, the experimentally measured frictional behavior of a hexagonal
graphene flake sliding on-top of the surface of graphite. We further predict
that superlubricity is expected to occur in hexagonal boron nitride as well
with tribological characteristics very similar to those observed for the
graphitic system. The success of our method in predicting experimental results
along with its exceptional computational efficiency opens the way for modeling
large-scale material interfaces way beyond the reach of standard simulation
techniques.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
From white elephant to Nobel Prize: Dennis Gabor’s wavefront reconstruction
Dennis Gabor devised a new concept for optical imaging in 1947 that went by a variety of names over the following decade: holoscopy, wavefront reconstruction, interference microscopy, diffraction microscopy and Gaboroscopy. A well-connected and creative research engineer, Gabor worked actively to publicize and exploit his concept, but the scheme failed to capture the interest of many researchers. Gabor’s theory was repeatedly deemed unintuitive and baffling; the technique was appraised by his contemporaries to be of dubious practicality and, at best, constrained to a narrow branch of science. By the late 1950s, Gabor’s subject had been assessed by its handful of practitioners to be a white elephant. Nevertheless, the concept was later rehabilitated by the research of Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan, and Yury Denisyuk at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad. What had been judged a failure was recast as a success: evaluations of Gabor’s work were transformed during the 1960s, when it was represented as the foundation on which to construct the new and distinctly different subject of holography, a re-evaluation that gained the Nobel Prize for Physics for Gabor alone in 1971. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced in constructing a meaningful subject, a practical application and a viable technical community from Gabor’s ideas during the decade 1947-1957
Loop expansion around the Bethe-Peierls approximation for lattice models
We develop an effective field theory for lattice models, in which the only
non-vanishing diagrams exactly reproduce the topology of the lattice. The
Bethe-Peierls approximation appears naturally as the saddle point
approximation. The corrections to the saddle-point result can be obtained
systematically. We calculate the lowest loop corrections for magnetisation and
correlation function.Comment: 8 page
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