Functional graded materials are generally provided in discretely layered structures to reduce the abrupt mismatch and to improve failure performance. To investigate the thermal stress singularity occurring at the intersection of an interface and a free end, two-dimensional and three-dimensional finite element analyses are performed for titanium and aluminum layers with or without functional graded materials. The results indicate that once the functional graded material is added, the stress singularity around the intersection of an interface and a free end could be significantly relieved. If more FGM layers are used, the stress singularity could be further reduced to a very small value. If the longitudinal normal stresses and interlaminar shear stress are considered, two-dimensional finite element analysis may be enough, while three-dimensional analysis is necessary for the interlaminar normal stress. Otherwise, one may underestimate its stress singularity.

A present model is developed to calculate the adhesion meniscus force due to a rough surface with surface asperity in contact with a smooth, rigid flat covered by a thin water film. The original thickness of this film before surface contacts is dependent upon the relative humidity in the air. Microcontact deformations of surface asperities in the elastic, elastoplastic, and fully plastic regimes are included in the present model under a normal load. The new water film thickness under the condition of microcontact deformations is considered changing with the normal load, and it is obtained from the equation developed on the basis of the volume conservation principle for the new film thickness and the water film volume displaced by the asperities heights dipping in the film. The meniscus profile is also calculated from the balance of the surface tension force and the pressure difference force across the meniscus profile if the new film thickness is available. Water film thickness and the meniscus force are increased by decreasing the mean separation of two contact surfaces, or increasing the relative humidity, or increasing the plastic index. A significant difference in the meniscus force is found between the present model and the model of the literature, which is enhanced by either decreasing the mean separation, or raising the plasticity index, or increasing the relative humidity. The effects of the meniscus force on the load capacity are also evaluated at different mean separations, relative humidity and plasticity indices.

This work presents a novel mathematical model, formed by modifying the conventional Slab Model, to predict the behaviors of tube drawing with a floating plug in the hollow copper tubes. FEM and experimentation are employed to verify the analytical solution. The model incorporates some parameters, including as die semi-angle, plug semi-angle, friction coefficient and wall thickness reduction ratio. The Self Lock Effect is simulated using FEM, and the effect is useful in estimating the critical drawing force. The results of this work reveal that the new model is more accurate than the conventional Slab Model especially at reduction ratios of up to 40%.

Seemann Composites Resin Infusion Molding Process (called SCRIMPTM for short) is a resin transfer molding process which is commonly used in the manufacture of yachts. Fiber-Reinforced Plastic (called FRP for short) manufactured by using SCRIMP has higher fiber-volume-content than that manufactured by using Hand Lay-Up Process (called HLUP for short). In general, the tensile strength and fatigue strength are used to compare the tensile properties of SCRIMP-FRP and HLUP-FRP. In this paper, another viewpoint of comparison is used to compare their tensile properties, especially their fatigue tensile properties. Experiments on the fatigue life and damage phenomena in SCRIMP-FRP and HLUP-FRP were performed. Experimental results show that if the same fibers are used in SCRIMP-FRP and HLUPFRP, SCRIMP-FRP will be much thinner than HLUP-FRP and few air bubbles exist inside SCRIMP-FRP. Although SCRIMP-FRP has higher tensile strength than HLU-FRP, the tensile forces they can bear are approached. That means, processes do not affect the tensile load carrying capacities of FRP. However, SCRIMP-FRP exhibits shorter fatigue life than HLUP-FRP. The reason for that is discussed in this paper and qualitative analysis is performed to explain the author's contentions.

The transient thermal process of a thin-wall beam with CO2 Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) is analyzed by Finite Element Analysis Method (FEA). The thermal input is simplified as transient section body heat sources and loaded as its actual sequence in the analysis. The transient temperature field obtained can represent the basic characteristics of the real welding process and can be used as the foundation of thermal elastic-plastic analysis. Based on the temperature field, thermal elastic-plastic FEA is performed on the thin-wall beam. The distribution and change of the welding deformation, stress and strain are obtained and compared with the experiment results. Also an improvement can be presented on the inherent strain method. Using the inherent strain method, the welding deformation of the thin-wall beam is calculated. The temperature loading method is developed to load the variable inherent strain value expediently. The loading of inherent strain value on spatial welding line that is unparallel to the global coordinate axis is achieved with the application of element coordinate system. Comparison with the experiment results shows that both the thermal-elastic-plastic analysis and inherent strain analysis method can be used to predict the welding deformation effectively, the results calculated by both the thermal-elastic-plastic analysis and inherent strain analysis are close to the test measure results.

This paper presents the study of aerodynamic performance about low-aspect-ratio wings at a low Reynolds number in wind tunnel testing. The aerodynamic properties, including lift, total drag, lift-to-drag ratio and induced drag were measured and analyzed for detailed investigations. Two forms of nonlinear equations of lift curves were reported for comparison. The effect of airfoil thickness was found to be significant on aerodynamic characteristics for all wings tested. The lift due to tip vortices was prominent for wings of AR =1.0 and their stall angles were all larger than 20°, which was mainly augmented by tip vortices shed from the wing tips.

In order to reduce the venting noise within a confined room, the development of a high performance muffler within certain space constraints is imperative. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to develop an optimally shaped one-chamber cross-flow perforated muffler that will dramatically increase the acoustical performance within a limited space.

On the basis of plane wave theory, a four-pole system matrix for evaluating acoustical performance is derived by using a decoupled numerical method. Moreover, in order to search for a global optimum, a genetic algorithm (GA) with tournament selection in elitism and uniform crossover/mutation (analogous to a genes' evolutionary process) has been used for the mufflers' optimization. To assure the GAs' correctness, the STLs' maximization of one-chamber cross-flow perforated mufflers with respect to three targeted frequencies (200, 400, and 800Hz) is exemplified. Furthermore, a numerical case for dealing with an octave band noise emitted from an air compressor using one-chamber cross-flow mufflers has been introduced and fully discussed. To achieve a better optimization with the GA, various GA parameter sets were used. Before the GA operation is carried out, the mathematical models of cross-flow perforated mufflers are verified by comparing the numerical result and experimental data with those obtained by Sullivan and Wu respectively.

Consequently, the results reveal that the acoustical performance for a cross-flow perforated muffler is excellent. Moreover, they reveal that the optimization approach proposed in this study is easy, economical, and quite effective.

In this paper, we present the optimization works of two disk-type piezoelectric transformers (PTs), the single-output PT and the dual-output PT, by using the elite Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the finite-element solver, NTUPZE. The goal of optimization is to maximize the efficiency under the constraint that the voltage gain is greater than 50 for igniting CCFL. The design parameters are the radii of the outputelectrode sections and the electrode areas, as well as the dimensions of the device structure. With different electrical loading impedances, the voltage gain and the efficiency were computed using the NTUPZE. The results were also validated with measured data. The optimization process is parallelized by the MPI library and a PC cluster for improving the computation efficiency. The characteristics of the optimal designs with different loads are also calculated. The optimized voltage gain and the efficiency for the PT with single output electrode are about 53 and 91.9%, respectively. Also, the voltage gains and the efficiency of PT with dual output electrodes are above 57 and 91%, respectively.

As an excellent ability in eliminating venting noise in lower frequencies, the reactiv silencer has prevailed and is widely discussed. Most researchers have explored noise reduction effects due to the flowing rate and temperature gradient based on a pure plane wave theory; however, the maximum noise reduction of a silencer under a space constraint, which frequently occurs in engineering problems, is rarely addressed. Because most of the optimal assessments were oriented with a slower optimizer, the issue of using a novel optimizer to speed up the optimization of a complicated silencer has arisen. In this paper, the optimal design of a double-chamber side muffler connected with an internal extended tube under a limited space is presented; in addition, simulated annealing (SA) is selected as the optimizer. Based on a plane wave theory, the systems' matrices under a flowing effect have been established. To verify the accuracy of the mathematical model, one set of silencers has been constructed and acoustically tested in the laboratory. The results reveal that they are in agreement; thereafter, two numerical cases of optimal noise reduction to pure tone and octave band noise sources are exemplified. Consequently, the SA method can definitely provide a quick and efficient way in optimal muffler design work.

An experimental study of miscible magnetic fluid motion in a vertical capillary tube is presented. Transporting ferrofluids is dominated by a dimensionless magnetic number Ma, which characterizes the ratio of upward magnetic force to the downward gravity. Two distinct stages of motion, referred to as the sub-critical mode of finite lift and the effective transportation, are identified. These two modes are determined by the values of the sub-critical magnetic number Masub and critical magnetic number Macr respectively. For the cases of sub-critical mode (Masub < Ma < Macr), the ferrofluids are lifted to quasiequilibrium heights, which are nearly proportional to the magnetic number Ma. As for the situations of effective transportation (Ma > Macr), a penetrating finger of ferrofluids is formed similar to the conventional miscible displacements. A dimensionless proportionality of fingertip velocity ν, magnetic number Ma and field distribution profile fz is obtained as ν ∼ Ma1/2fz by scaling arguments. This proportional correlation shows a good agreement with the experiments.

We analyze the propagation of shear horizontal (SH) piezoelectric waves guided by a plate of polarized piezoceramics between two piezoceramic half-spaces with imperfectly bonded interfaces. The interfaces are described by the so-called shear-lag model with an elastic constant characterizing the interface physical behavior. Exact dispersion relations are obtained. It is found that the waves are sensitive to the physical nature of the interfaces. The results are useful for acoustic wave devices.

Performance of an improved shock absorber designed for absorbing and isolating the oil test pipe vibration is researched in this paper. 3D finite element model is established for the analysis of the shock absorber system accurately by the FEA software ANSYS/LS-DYNA. Numerical simulations show that the effect of the shock absorber can be greatly improved by optimizing the plastic material parameter. In the practice petroleum well test, the new designed shock absorber showed good shock absorption effect and no damage on the detecting instruments was observed even after ten times loading.

In this study, the element-free Galerkin (EFG) method is extended to include nonlinear behavior of cohesive cracks in 2D domains. A cohesive curved crack is modeled by using several straight-line interface elements connected to form the crack. The constitutive law of cohesive cracks is considered through the use of these interface elements. The stiffness equation of the domain is constructed by directly including, in the weak form of the global system equation, a term related to the energy dissipation along the interface elements. The constitutive law of cohesive cracks can then be considered directly and efficiently by using this energy term. The validity and efficiency of the proposed method are discussed by using problems found in the literature. The proposed method is found to be an efficient method for simulating propagation of cohesive cracks.

The influence of both the flow index and the cylinder size on the nonlinear hydrodynamic stability of a thin power law liquid film flowing down along the surface of a vertical cylinder is investigated. The long-wave perturbation method is employed to solve for generalized nonlinear kinematic equations with a free film interface. The normal mode approach is first used to compute the linear stability solution for the film flow. The method of multiple scales is then used to obtain the weakly nonlinear dynamics of the film flow for stability analysis. The stability criteria are discussed theoretically and numerically and stability diagrams are obtained. The modeling results indicate that by increasing the flow index and increasing the radius of the cylinder the film flow can become relatively more stable as traveling down along the vertical cylinder.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the pressure-stream function formulation to solve 2D and 3D Stokes flows by the meshless numerical scheme of the method of fundamental solutions (MFS). The MFS can be regarded as a truly scattered, grid-free (or meshless) and non-singular numerical scheme. By the proposed algorithm, the stream function is governed by the bi-harmonic equation while the pressure is governed by the Laplace equation. The velocity field is then obtained by the curl of the stream function for 2D flows and curl of the vector stream function for 3D flows. We can simultaneously solve the pressure, velocity, vorticity, stream function and traction forces fields. Furthermore during the present numerical procedure no pressure boundary condition is needed which is a tedious and forbidden task. The developed algorithm is used to test several numerical experiments for the benchmark examples, including (1) the driven circular cavity, (2) the circular cavity with eccentric rotating cylinder, (3) the square cavity with traction boundary conditions and (4) the uniform flow past a sphere. The results compare very well with the solutions obtained by analytical or other numerical methods such as finite element method (FEM). It is found that the meshless MFS will give a simpler and more efficient and accurate solutions to the Stokes flows investigated in this study.

A nondestructive detection method of surface cracks in two dimensional plate structures using modal strain energy method is investigated in this paper. Experimental modal analysis (EMA) is conducted on an aluminum alloy 6061 thin plate to obtain the mode shapes before and after damage under a completely free boundary condition. The measured mode shapes are used to compute the strain energy of the plate. Limited by the measured points, a differential quadrature method is employed to compute the partial differential terms in strain energy formula. A damage index is then defined based on strain energy ratio of the plate before and after damage. This damage index is employed to identify the location of surface crack in plate structure. A finite element analysis (FEA) is also performed to access this approach and demonstrate a feasible process for the experimental work. Good correlation between FEA and EMA results is obtained. The damage index obtained from both FEA and EMA successfully identify the location of surface crack in the aluminum plate. Only few measured mode shapes of the plate are required in this method, which provides a quick, flexible, inexpensive and nondestructive technique to identify the damagein local and global 2D plate structures.

The evolution of a bubble confined inside a nonlinear micro vessel fully filled with a viscous liquid, subjected to a shock lithotripsy wave (SWL), is analyzed with a previously established asymmetrical model on bubble oscillation. Both the normal and shear stress components within the vessel wall are calculated. It is observed that although the shear stress induced by viscosity is far less than the normal stresses, hypertension patients are still at more risk than normal people in SWL because of the high blood pre-pressure and stiff vessel wall accompanying their high blood viscosity. Hence, safety of hypertensive patients with high blood viscosity must be taken into careful consideration in SWL. More detailed numerical results show that the increase of circumferential normal stress and strain in SWL is significantly larger than that of other stresses and strains. Large circumferential normal stress and strain are responsible for excessive dilation of vessel wall during asymmetrical oscillation of constrained bubbles, which implies that the vessel wall will rupture mainly in the form of a cleft along the vessel axial direction.

Effects of the inlet-stream deflection on the temporal and spatial evolution processes of the in-cylinder flow structures (tumble/swirl) and turbulence intensities in the symmetry and diametral planes of a motored four-valve, four-stroke engine are diagnosed by using a particle image velocimeter. The inception, establishment, and evolution of the tumbling/swirling vortical flow structures during the intake and compression strokes in the engine cylinder with/without inlet-stream deflection are depicted and compared. Quantitative strengths of the rotating vortical flow motions are presented by dimensionless parameters (tumble and swirl ratios) which can represent the mean angular velocity of the vortices in the target plane. The turbulence intensity is calculated by using the measured time-varying velocity data. The results show that by deflecting the inlet air-stream the tumble and swirl ratios of the in-cylinder flow are appreciably increased by about 0.1 and the turbulence intensity is increased by about 5 ∼ 10%.

In this paper, an optimized position of a mass-spring-damper vibration absorber is proposed for a rotating mechanism device (such as optical disk drive or rotary-wing and deck coupled system). A nonlinear 3-D theoretical model for a deck is established by Lagrange's equation. A 2-bladed rotor and deck (foundation) coupled aeroelastic system with vibration reduction device is presented and studied as well. The analytical solution is obtained by the Multiple-scales method for the case of no vibration absorber. The numerical results in time and frequency domain and with/no absorber are acquired. This research provides a theoretical background for the preliminary vibration reduction design for industries. It is found that the existing disk drives vibration can be reduced by simply adding the absorber at the end corner isolator of the deck, but without changing the main configurations. This will not only save costs but also increase testing efficiency, achieving the most cost-effective vibration reduction result.

The flow of a viscous still fluid disturbed by an oscillating porous plate with an arbitrary initial phase is investigated. Using the Laplace transform, the exact solution of the velocity profile is revisited. Subsequently, the wall stress implying the required driving force is derived in this study. The solutions are valid not only for large times but also for small times. Four special cases are discussed to investigate the influences of four parameters on the development of the flow. A dimensionless analysis for general cases is also provided. Our analyses significantly stress on the following subjects. Firstly, the porous velocity and the decay factor affecting the development of the flow are studied. Secondly, the occurrence time of separation and the corresponding critical condition are investigated. The period of the transient velocity influenced by the Reynolds number and the initial phase is discussed. Present study includes many existing solutions as special cases. Results can be also applied to many engineering problems with the same PDE form and boundary conditions. In conclusion, this study presents the detailed discussions and the magnitude of the required driving force which were missed in previous works.