We de ne a technique that is found to be useful when dealing with solution vectors (i.e., chromosomes) that must be normalized before evaluation. Normalized vectors can be either trivially manipulated or trivially interpreted, but not both. This paper studies some modi ed gradient techniques for both bit and oating point representations that have been successfully used at ARCO on some real worl...

A new driving mechanism for direction-controlled motion of nano-scale objects is proposed, based on a model of stretching a graphene strip linked to a rigid base with linear springs of identical stiffness. We find that the potential energy difference induced by the strain gradient field in the graphene strip substrate can generate sufficient force to overcome the static and kinetic friction for...

A critical examination is made of two classes of strain gradient plasticity theories currently available for studying micrometre-scale plasticity. One class is characterized by certain stress quantities expressed in terms of increments of strains and their gradients, whereas the other class employs incremental relationships between all stress quantities and the increments of strains and their g...

Conjugate gradient methods are probably the most famous iterative methods for solving large scale optimization problems in scientific and engineering computation, characterized by the simplicity of their iteration and their low memory requirements. In this paper, we propose a new conjugate gradient method which is based on the MBFGS secant condition by modifying Perry’s method. Our proposed met...

Diastolic and systolic left ventricular (LV) dysfunction often significantly contribute to disabling symptoms in familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (FHC). This study compares regional LV function (midwall circumferential strain) during systole and diastole in eight FHC patients and six normal volunteers (NVs) using MR tagging. A prospectively-gated fast gradient-echo sequence with an echo-tra...

Understanding strain gradient phenomena is of paramount importance in diverse areas condensed matter physics. This effect responsible for flexoelectricity dielectric materials, and it plays a crucial role the mechanical behavior nanoscale-sized specimens. In magnetoelectric composites, which comprise piezoelectric or ferroelectric (FE) materials coupled to magnetostrictive (MS) phases, can add ...

Classical continuum models exhibit strong mesh dependency during strain softening. For such materials, the phenomenon may be regularized via the gradient-enhanced nonlocal formulation. The paper discusses the implicit gradient framework and demonstrates that standard nonlocal enhancement may serve only as a partial localization limiter. The over-nonlocal approach, where the weight for the nonlo...

Issues related to the construction of continuum theories of strain gradient plasticity which have emerged in recent years are reviewed and brought to bear on the formulation of the most basic theories. Elastic loading gaps which can arise at initial yield or under imposition of non-proportional incremental boundary conditions are documented and analytical methods for dealing with them are illus...