2,208 research outputs found
Buckling of elastic filaments by discrete magnetic moments
We study the buckling of an idealized, semiflexible filament along whose
contour magnetic moments are placed. {We give analytic expressions for the
critical stiffness of the filament below which it buckles due to the magnetic
compression. For this, we consider various scenarios of the attachment of the
magnetic particles to the filament. One possible application for this model are
the magnetosome chains of magnetotactic bacteria. An estimate of the critical
bending stiffness indicates that buckling may occur within the range of
biologically relevant parameters and suggests a role for the bending stiffness
of the filament to stabilize the filament against buckling, which would
compromise the functional relevance of the bending stiffness of the used
filament.Comment: accepted for publication in EPJ
The Burbea-Rao and Bhattacharyya centroids
We study the centroid with respect to the class of information-theoretic
Burbea-Rao divergences that generalize the celebrated Jensen-Shannon divergence
by measuring the non-negative Jensen difference induced by a strictly convex
and differentiable function. Although those Burbea-Rao divergences are
symmetric by construction, they are not metric since they fail to satisfy the
triangle inequality. We first explain how a particular symmetrization of
Bregman divergences called Jensen-Bregman distances yields exactly those
Burbea-Rao divergences. We then proceed by defining skew Burbea-Rao
divergences, and show that skew Burbea-Rao divergences amount in limit cases to
compute Bregman divergences. We then prove that Burbea-Rao centroids are
unique, and can be arbitrarily finely approximated by a generic iterative
concave-convex optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence property. In
the second part of the paper, we consider the Bhattacharyya distance that is
commonly used to measure overlapping degree of probability distributions. We
show that Bhattacharyya distances on members of the same statistical
exponential family amount to calculate a Burbea-Rao divergence in disguise.
Thus we get an efficient algorithm for computing the Bhattacharyya centroid of
a set of parametric distributions belonging to the same exponential families,
improving over former specialized methods found in the literature that were
limited to univariate or "diagonal" multivariate Gaussians. To illustrate the
performance of our Bhattacharyya/Burbea-Rao centroid algorithm, we present
experimental performance results for -means and hierarchical clustering
methods of Gaussian mixture models.Comment: 13 page
Aerodynamic characteristics of an F-8 aircraft configuration with a variable camber wing at Mach numbers from 0.70 to 1.15
A 0.1-scale model of an F-8 aircraft was tested in the Ames 14-Foot Transonic Wind Tunnel at Mach numbers from 0.7 to 1.15. Angle of attack was varied from -2 deg. to 22 deg. at sideslip angles of 0 deg and -5 deg. Reynolds number, dictated by the atmospheric stagnation pressure, varied with Mach number from 3.4 to 4.0 million based on mean aerodynamic chord. The model was configured with a wing designed to simulate the downward deflection of the leading and trailing edges of an advanced-technology-conformal-variable camber wing. This wing was also equipped with conventional (simple hinge) flaps. In addition, the model was tested with the basic F-8 wing to provide a reference for extrapolating to flight data. In general, at all Mach numbers the use of conformal flap deflections at both the leading edge and trailing edge resulted in slightly higher maximum lift coefficients and lower drag coefficients than with the use of simple hinge flaps. There were also found to be small improvements in the pitching-moment characteristics with the use of conformal flaps
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