The space missions Voyager and Cassini together with earthbound observations revealed a wealth of structures in Saturn’s rings. There are, for example, waves being excited at ring positions which are in orbital resonance with Saturn’s moons. Other structures can be assigned to embedded moons like empty gaps, moon induced wakes or S-shaped propeller features. Furthermore, irregular radial structures are observed in the range from 10 meters until kilometers. Here some of these structures will be discussed in the frame of hydrodynamical modeling of Saturn’s dense rings. For this purpose we will characterize the physical properties of the ring particle ensemble by mean field quantities and point to the special behavior of the transport coefficients. We show that unperturbed rings can become unstable and how diffusion acts in the rings. Additionally, the alternative streamline formalism is introduced to describe perturbed regions of dense rings with applications to the wake damping and the dispersion relation of the density waves.

For flows with strong periodic content, time-spectral methods can be used to obtaintime-accurate solutions at substantially reduced cost compared to traditionaltime-implicit methods which operate directly in the time domain. However, these methodsare only applicable in the presence of fully periodic flows, which represents a severerestriction for many aerospace engineering problems. This paper presents an extension ofthe time-spectral approach for problems that include a slow transient in addition tostrong periodic behavior, suitable for applications such as transient turbofan simulationor maneuvering rotorcraft calculations. The formulation is based on a collocation methodwhich makes use of a combination of spectral and polynomial basis functions and results inthe requirement of solving coupled time instances within a period, similar to the timespectral approach, although multiple successive periods must be solved to capture thetransient behavior.

The implementation allows for two levels of parallelism, one in the spatial dimension,and another in the time-spectral dimension, and is implemented in a modular fashion whichminimizes the modifications required to an existing steady-state solver. For dynamicallydeforming mesh cases, a formulation which preserves discrete conservation as determined bythe Geometric Conservation Law is derived and implemented. A fully implicit approach whichtakes into account the coupling between the various time instances is implemented andshown to preserve the baseline steady-state multigrid convergence rate as the number oftime instances is increased. Accuracy and efficiency are demonstrated for periodic andnon-periodic problems by comparing the performance of the method with a traditionaltime-stepping approach using a simple two-dimensional pitching airfoil problem, athree-dimensional pitching wing problem, and a more realistic transitioning rotor problem.

A numerical model to compute the dynamics of glaciers is presented. Ice damage due tocracks or crevasses can be taken into account whenever needed. This model allowssimulations of the past and future retreat of glaciers, the calving process or thebreak-off of hanging glaciers. All these phenomena are strongly affected by climatechange.

Ice is assumed to behave as an incompressible fluid with nonlinear viscosity, so that thevelocity and pressure in the ice domain satisfy a nonlinear Stokes problem. The shape ofthe ice domain is defined using the volume fraction of ice, that is one in the ice regionand zero elsewhere. The volume fraction of ice satisfies a transport equation with asource term on the upper ice-air free surface accounting for ice accumulation or melting.If local effects due to ice damage must be taken into account, the damage functionD is introduced, ranging between zero if no damage occurs and one.Then, the ice viscosity μ in the momentum equation must be replaced by(1 − D)μ. The damage function Dsatisfies a transport equation with nonlinear source terms to model cracks formation orhealing.

A splitting scheme allows transport and diffusion phenomena to be decoupled. Two fixedgrids are used. The transport equations are solved on an unstructured grid of small cubiccells, thus allowing numerical diffusion of the volume fraction of ice to be reduced asmuch as possible. The nonlinear Stokes problem is solved on an unstructured mesh oftetrahedrons, larger than the cells, using stabilized finite elements.

Two computations are presented at different time scales. First, the dynamics ofRhonegletscher, Swiss Alps, are investigated in 3D from 2007 to 2100 using severalclimatic scenarios and without considering ice damage. Second, ice damage is taken intoaccount in order to reproduce the calving process of a 2D glacier tongue submerged bywater.

A growing body of literature testifies to the importance of quantitative reasoning skillsin the 21st-century biology curriculum, and to the learning benefits associated withactive pedagogies. The process of modeling a biological system provides an approach thatintegrates mathematical skills and higher-order thinking with existing course contentknowledge. We describe a general strategy for teaching model-building in an introductorybiology course, using the example of a model of an infectious disease outbreak.Preliminary assessment data suggest that working through the formal process of modelconstruction may help students develop their scientific reasoning and communicationskills.

The discovery of nearly periodic vegetation patterns in arid and semi-arid regionsmotivated numerous model studies in the past decade. Most studies have focused onvegetation pattern formation, and on the response of vegetation patterns to gradients ofthe limiting water resource. The reciprocal question, what resource modifications areinduced by vegetation pattern formation, which is essential to the understanding ofdryland landscapes, has hardly been addressed. This paper is a synthetic review of modelstudies that address this question and the consequent implications for inter-specificplant interactions and species diversity. It focuses both on patch and landscape scales,highlighting bottom-up processes, where plant interactions at the patch scale give rise tospatial patterns at the landscape scale, and top-down processes, where pattern transitionsat the landscape scale affect inter-specific interactions at the patch scale.

Blood rheology is completely determined by its major corpuscles which are erythrocytes,or red blood cells (RBCs). That is why understanding and correct mathematical descriptionof RBCs behavior in blood is a critical step in modelling the blood dynamics. Variousphenomena provided by RBCs such as aggregation, deformation, shear-induced diffusion andnon-uniform radial distribution affect the passage of blood through the vessels. Hence,they have to be taken into account while modelling the blood dynamics. Other importantblood corpuscles are platelets, which are crucial for blood clotting. RBCs strongly affectthe platelet transport in blood expelling them to the vessel walls and increasing theirdispersion, which has to be considered in models of clotting. In this article we give abrief review of basic modern approaches in mathematical description of these phenomena,discuss their applicability to real flow conditions and propose further pathways fordeveloping the theory of blood flow.

We discuss the issues of implementation of a higher order discontinuous Galerkin (DG)scheme for aerodynamics computations. In recent years a DG method has intensively beenstudied at Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) where a computational code has beendesigned for numerical solution of the 3-D Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. Ourdiscussion is mainly based on the results of the DG study conducted in TsAGI incollaboration with the NUMECA International. The capacity of a DG scheme to tacklechallenging computational problems is demonstrated and its potential advantages over FVschemes widely used in modern computational aerodynamics are highlighted.

Infectious diseases ranging from the common cold to cholera affect our society physically, emotionally, ecologically, and economically. Yet despite their importance and impact, there remains a lack of effective teaching materials for epidemiology and disease ecology in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate curricula [2]. To address this deficit, we’ve developed a classroom lesson with three instructional goals: (1) Familiarize students on basic concepts of infectious disease ecology; (2) Introduce students to a classic compartmental model and its applications in epidemiology; (3) Demonstrate the application and importance of mathematical modeling as a tool in biology. The instructional strategy uses a game-based mathematical manipulative designed to engage students in the concepts of infectious disease spread. It has the potential to be modified for target audiences ranging from Kindergarten to professional schools in science, public health, policy, medical, and veterinarian programs. In addition, we’ve provided variations of the activity to enhance the transfer of fundamental concepts covered in the initial lesson to more complex concepts associated with vaccination and waning immunity. While 10 variations are presented here, the true number of directions in which the game might extend will only be limited by the imagination of its students [6].

A global feedback control of a system that exhibits a subcritical monotonic instabilityat a non-zero wavenumber (short-wave, or Turing instability) in the presence of a zeromode is investigated using a Ginzburg-Landau equation coupled to an equation for the zeromode. The method based on a variational principle is applied for the derivation of alow-dimensional evolution model. In the framework of this model the investigation of thesystem’s dynamics and the linear and nonlinear stability analysis are carried out. Theobtained results are compared with the results of direct numerical simulations of theoriginal problem.

We consider the stabilization of a rotating temperature pulse traveling in a continuousasymptotic model of many connected chemical reactors organized in a loop with continuouslyswitching the feed point synchronously with the motion of the pulse solution. We use theswitch velocity as control parameter and design it to follow the pulse: the switchvelocity is updated at every step on-line using the discrepancy between the temperature atthe front of the pulse and a set point. The resulting feedback controller, which can beregarded as a dynamic sampled-data controller, is designed using root-locus technique.Convergence conditions of the control law are obtained in terms of the zero structure(finite zeros, infinite zeros) of the related lumped model.

Pharmacokinetics is an excellent way to introduce biomathematical modeling at the sophomore level. Students have the opportunity to develop a mathematical model of a biological phenomenon to which they all can relate. Exploring pharmacokinetics takes students through the necessary stages of mathematical modeling: determining the goals of the model, deciphering between the biological aspects to include in the model, defining the assumptions of the model, and finally, building, analyzing, using, and refining the model to answer questions and test hypotheses. Readily accessible data allows students to use the model to test hypotheses that are meaningful to them on an individual level. Students make interdisciplinary connections between this model and their previous personal, mathematical, and other classroom experiences. By beginning with a simple model involving the half-life of a drug, students take advantage of their mathematical abilities to explore the biology. They can then use the new knowledge gained from analyzing the simple model to create more complicated models, thus gaining mathematical and modeling maturity through improving the biological accuracy of the model. Through this experiences, students actually get to do applied mathematics, and they take ownership of the model.

Various particle methods are widely used to model dynamics of complex media. In this workmolecular dynamics and dissipative particles dynamics are applied to model blood flowscomposed of plasma and erythrocytes. The properties of the homogeneous particle fluid arestudied. Capillary flows with erythrocytes are investigated.

We investigate the origin of deterministic chaos in the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction carried out in closed and unstirred reactors (CURs). In detail, we develop a model on the idea that hydrodynamic instabilities play a driving role in the transition to chaotic dynamics. A set of partial differential equations were derived by coupling the two variable Oregonator–diffusion system to the Navier–Stokes equations. This approach allows us to shed light on the correlation between chemical oscillations and spatial–temporal dynamics. In particular, numerical solutions to the corresponding reaction-diffusion-convection (RDC) problem show that natural convection can change the evolution of the concentration distribution as well as oscillation patterns. The results suggest a new way of perceiving the BZ reaction when it is conducted in CURs. In conflict with the common experience, chemical oscillations are no longer a mere chemical process. Within this framework the evolution of all dynamical observables are demonstrated to converge to the regime imposed by the RDC coupling: chemical and spatial–temporal chaos are genuine manifestations of the same phenomenon.

We present the fiber-spring elastic model of the arterial wall with atheroscleroticplaque composed of a lipid pool and a fibrous cap. This model allows us to reproducepressure to cross-sectional area relationship along the diseased vessel which is used inthe network model of global blood circulation. Atherosclerosis attacks a region ofsystemic arterial network. Our approach allows us to examine the impact of the diseasedregion onto global haemodynamics.

Compartmentalization is a general principle in biological systems which is observable on all size scales, ranging from organelles inside of cells, cells in histology, and up to the level of groups, herds, swarms, meta-populations, and populations. Compartmental models are often used to model such phenomena, but such models can be both highly nonlinear and difficult to work with.

Fortunately, there are many significant biological systems that are amenable to linear compartmental models which are often more mathematically accessible. Moreover, the biology and mathematics is often so intertwined in such models that one can be used to better understand the other. Indeed, as we demonstrate in this paper, linear compartmental models of migratory dynamics can be used as an exciting and interactive means of introducing sophisticated mathematics, and conversely, the associated mathematics can be used to demonstrate important biological properties not only of seasonal migrations but also of compartmental models in general.

We have found this approach to be of great value in introducing derivatives, integrals, and the fundamental theorem of calculus. Additionally, these models are appropriate as applications in a differential equations course, and they can also be used to illustrate important ideas in probability and statistics, such as the Poisson distribution.

The question, how does an organism maintain balance? provides a unifying theme tointroduce undergraduate students to the use of mathematics and modeling techniques inbiological research. The availability of inexpensive high speed motion capture camerasmakes it possible to collect the precise and reliable data that facilitates thedevelopment of relevant mathematical models. An in–house laboratory component ensures thatstudents have the opportunity to directly compare prediction to observation and motivatesthe development of projects that push the boundaries of the subject. The projects, bytheir nature, readily lend themselves to the formation of inter–disciplinary studentresearch teams. Thus students have the opportunity to learn skills essential for successin today’s workplace including productive team work, critical thinking, problem solving,project management, and effective communication.

Linear oscillators are used for modeling a diverse array of natural systems, for instance acoustics, materials science, and chemical spectroscopy. In this paper I describe simple models of structural interactions in biological molecules, known as elastic network models, as a useful topic for undergraduate biology instruction in mathematical modeling. These models use coupled linear oscillators to model the fluctuations of molecular structures around the equilibrium state. I present many learning activities associated with building and understanding these models, ranging from analytical to computational. I provide a number of web resources where students can obtain structural data, perform calculations, and suggest research directions for independent projects.

This paper demonstrates the development of a simple model of carbon flow during plant growth. The model was developed by six undergraduate students and their instructor as a project in a plant ecophysiology course. The paper describes the structure of the model including the equations that were used to implement it in Excel®, the plant growth experiments that were conducted to obtain information for parameterizing and testing the model, model performance, student responses to the modeling project, and potential uses of the model by other students.