Crushing Modes of Aluminium Tubes under Axial Compression

A numerical study of the crushing of circular aluminium tubes with and without aluminium foam fillers has been carried out to investigate their buckling behaviours under axial compression. A crushing mode classification chart has been established for empty tubes. The influence of boundary conditions on crushing mode has also been investigated. The effect of foam filler on the crushing mode of tubes filled with foam was then examined. The predicted results would assist the design of crashworthy tube components with the preferred crushing mode with the maximum energy absorption

Contact pressure and wear in sheet metal forming - an FEM analysis

Wear is the principal cause of tool failure in most sheet metal forming processes. It is well known that the contact pressure between the blank and the tool has a large influence on the wear of the tool, and hence the tool life. This investigation utilises the finite element method to analyse the contact pressure distribution over the die radius for a particular deep drawing process. Furthermore, the evolution of the predicted contact pressure distribution throughout the entire stroke of the punch is also examined. It was found that the majority of the process shows a steady state pressure distribution, with two characteristic peaks over the die radius, at the beginning and end of the sheet contact area. Interestingly, the initial transient contact pressure response showed extremely high localised peak pressures; more than twice that of the steady state peaks. Results are compared to wear reported in the literature, during similar experimental deep drawing processes. Finally, the significance and effect of the results on wear and wear-testing techniques are discussed.<br /

Infinitely many solutions for the Schrödinger equations in RN with critical growth

AbstractWe consider the following nonlinear problem in RN(0.1){−Δu+V(|y|)u=uN+2N−2,u>0, in RN;u∈H1(RN), where V(r) is a bounded non-negative function, N⩾5. We show that if r2V(r) has a local maximum point, or local minimum point r0>0 with V(r0)>0, then (0.1) has infinitely many non-radial solutions, whose energy can be made arbitrarily large. As an application, we show that the solution set of the following problem−Δu=λu+uN+2N−2,u>0 on SN has unbounded energy, as long as λ<−N(N−2)4, N⩾5

A new Speech Feature Fusion method with cross gate parallel CNN for Speaker Recognition

In this paper, a new speech feature fusion method is proposed for speaker recognition on the basis of the cross gate parallel convolutional neural network (CG-PCNN). The Mel filter bank features (MFBFs) of different frequency resolutions can be extracted from each speech frame of a speaker's speech by several Mel filter banks, where the numbers of the triangular filters in the Mel filter banks are different. Due to the frequency resolutions of these MFBFs are different, there are some complementaries for these MFBFs. The CG-PCNN is utilized to extract the deep features from these MFBFs, which applies a cross gate mechanism to capture the complementaries for improving the performance of the speaker recognition system. Then, the fusion feature can be obtained by concatenating these deep features for speaker recognition. The experimental results show that the speaker recognition system with the proposed speech feature fusion method is effective, and marginally outperforms the existing state-of-the-art systems

Uncertain Dynamic Characteristic Analysis for Structures with Spatially Dependent Random System Parameters

This work presents a robust non-deterministic free vibration analysis for engineering structures with random field parameters in the frame of stochastic finite element method. For this, considering the randomness and spatial correlation of structural physical parameters, a parameter setting model based on random field theory is proposed to represent the random uncertainty of parameters, and the stochastic dynamic characteristics of different structural systems are then analyzed by incorporating the presented parameter setting model with finite element method. First, Gauss random field theory is used to describe the uncertainty of structural material parameters, the random parameters are then characterized as the standard deviation and correlation length of the random field, and the random field parameters are then discretized with the Karhunen–Loeve expansion method. Moreover, based on the discretized random parameters and finite element method, structural dynamic characteristics analysis is addressed, and the probability distribution density function of the random natural frequency is estimated based on multi-dimensional kernel density estimation method. Finally, the random field parameters of the structures are quantified by using the maximum likelihood estimation method to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the applicability of the constructed model. The results indicate that (1) for the perspective of maximum likelihood estimation, the parameter setting at the maximum value point is highly similar to the input parameters; (2) the random field considering more parameters reflects a more realistic structure

Effects of Different Spectrum of LEDs on Retinal Degeneration Through Regulating Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress

PURPOSE: To evaluate the impact of full-spectrum light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on albino guinea pigs\u27 retina and investigate the roles of short-wavelength opsin (S-opsin) and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in light-induced retinal degeneration (LIRD). METHODS: Three-week-old albino guinea pigs (n = 30) were distributed into five groups under 12/12 light/dark cycles with indoor natural light (NC; 300-500 lux, n = 6), full-spectrum LEDs (FL; 300 lux, n = 6; 3000 lux, n = 6), and commercial cold-white LEDs (CL; 300 lux, n = 6; 3000 lux, n = 6) and raised for 28 days. Hematoxylin and eosin staining and transmission electron microscopy evaluated the morphological changes of retinas. The immunofluorescence and real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) measured the expression and content of S-opsin and ER stress-related genes and proteins. RESULTS: We found that albino guinea pigs exposed to FL at either 300 lux or 3000 lux developed less severe retinal morphological damage than animals exposed to the CL light, which emerged as a significant characteristic of LIRD. Meanwhile, the damage on the ventral retina was more serious, mainly due to its ability to absorb the blue light in the LEDs more easily. Compared to the FL-exposed groups, the CL light increased the aggregation of S-opsin and the expression of ER stress-related factors. CONCLUSIONS: Commercial cold-white LEDs can induce ER stress and unfolded protein response in LIRD, and full-spectrum LED attenuates LIRD by regulating ER stress in albino guinea pig retinas in vivo. TRANSLATIONAL RELEVANCE: Full-spectrum LEDs offer specific eye protection and eye adaptability that can well replace commercial cold-white LEDs in both clinical practice and research. It should be further developed for lighting used in health care facilities