Transient growth in the flow past a three-dimensional smooth roughness element

This work provides a global optimization analysis, looking for perturbations inducing the largest energy growth at a finite time in a boundary-layer flow in the presence of smooth three-dimensional roughness elements. Amplification mechanisms are described which can bypass the asymptotical growth of Tollmien–Schlichting waves. Smooth axisymmetric roughness elements of different height have been studied, at different Reynolds numbers. The results show that even very small roughness elements, inducing only a weak deformation of the base flow, can localize the optimal disturbance characterizing the Blasius boundary-layer flow. Moreover, for large enough bump heights and Reynolds numbers, a strong amplification mechanism has been recovered, inducing an increase of several orders of magnitude of the energy gain with respect to the Blasius case. In particular, the highest value of the energy gain is obtained for an initial varicose perturbation, differently to what found for a streaky parallel flow. Optimal varicose perturbations grow very rapidly by transporting the strong wall-normal shear of the base flow, which is localized in the wake of the bump. Such optimal disturbances are found to lead to transition for initial energies and amplitudes considerably smaller than sinuous optimal ones, inducing hairpin vortices downstream of the roughness element

Towards a cyber physical system for personalised and automatic OSA treatment

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a breathing disorder that takes place in the course of the sleep and is produced by a complete or a partial obstruction of the upper airway that manifests itself as frequent breathing stops and starts during the sleep. The real-time evaluation of whether or not a patient is undergoing OSA episode is a very important task in medicine in many scenarios, as for example for making instantaneous pressure adjustments that should take place when Automatic Positive Airway Pressure (APAP) devices are used during the treatment of OSA. In this paper the design of a possible Cyber Physical System (CPS) suited to real-time monitoring of OSA is described, and its software architecture and possible hardware sensing components are detailed. It should be emphasized here that this paper does not deal with a full CPS, rather with a software part of it under a set of assumptions on the environment. The paper also reports some preliminary experiments about the cognitive and learning capabilities of the designed CPS involving its use on a publicly available sleep apnea database

Evading 1/m_b-suppressed IR divergencies in QCDF: Bs-->KK Decays and B_{d,s} mixing

We analyze the deviations of the mixing induced CP asymmetry in B-->phi Ks from sin(2beta), as well as the deviations of the asymmetries in Bs-->K*K*, Bs-->phi K* and Bs-->phi phi from sin(2beta_s), that arise in SM due to penguin pollution. We use a theoretical input which is short-distance dominated in QCD-factorization and thus free of IR-divergencies. We also provide alternative ways to extract angles of the unitarity triangle from penguin-mediated decays, and give predictions for Bs-->K*K* observables.Comment: 5 pages. Talk given at the International Workshop on Quantum Chromodynamics: QCD@Work 2007, Martina Franca, Italy, June 200

Instabilities in two flavor quark matter

I discuss briefly the instabilities of two flavor quark matter, paying attention to the gradient instability which develops in the g2SC phase in the Goldstone $U(1)_A$ sector.Comment: 6 pages. Talk given at QCD@Work07, Martina Franca (Italy). Some typos corrected, one reference adde

Instabilities in two flavor quark matter

I discuss briefly the instabilities of two flavor quark matter, paying attention to the gradient instability which develops in the g2SC phase in the Goldstone $U(1)_A$ sector.Comment: 6 pages. Talk given at QCD@Work07, Martina Franca (Italy). Some typos corrected, one reference adde

Probing Universal Extra Dimensions through rare decays induced by b→sb \to s transition

A few $B_{d,s}$ and $\Lambda_b$ decays induced by $b \to s$ transition are studied in the Standard Model and in the framework of the Appelquist, Cheng and Dobrescu (ACD) model, which is a New Physics scenario where a single universal extra dimension is considered. In particular, we investigate the sensitivity of the observables to the radius $R$ of the compactified extra dimension.Comment: LaTex, 7 pages, 4 eps figures. Contribution to the International Workshop QCD@Work 2007, June 16-20, Martina Franca - Ital