In this paper, we report a rapid and facile method for fabricating colloidal photonic crystals inside microchannels of radially symmetric microfluidic chips which were made using soft-lithography. As the suspension of monodisperse silica or polystyrene latex spheres was driven to flow through the channels under the action of centrifugal force, the colloidal spheres were quickly assembled into f...

Three-dimensional finite element (FE) simulations of the deformation and damage evolution of SiC particle reinforced Al composites are carried out for different microstructures of the composites. A program for the automatic generation and the design of FE meshes for different 3D microstructures of composites is developed. Numerical testing of composites with random, regular, clustered and gradi...

A method to fabricate silicon (Si) inverse opals with diamond structure is introduced. The method is based on the arrangement of silica particles in a template consisting of Si pillars periodically distributed. The profile of the pillars is specially designed to induce the self-organized growth of the particles in a diamond lattice along the (1 1 0) direction. Afterwards, the inverse structure ...

We experimentally investigate the rotation of plate shaped aggregates of clay mineral particles immersed in silicone oil. The rotation is induced by an external electric field. The rotation time is measured as a function of the following parameters: electric field strength, the plate geometry (length and width) and the dielectric properties of the plates. We find that the plates always align wi...

The øX174 DNA binding protein contains two DNA binding domains, containing a series of DNA binding basic amino acids, separated by a proline-rich linker region. Within each DNA binding domain, there is a conserved glycine residue. Glycine and proline residues were mutated and the effects on virion structure were examined. Substitutions for glycine residues yield particles with similar propertie...

Stable optical trapping and manipulation of high-index particles in low-index host media is often impossible due to the dominance of scattering forces over gradient forces. Here we explore optical manipulation in liquid crystalline structured hosts and show that robust optical manipulation of high-index particles, such as GaN nanowires, is enabled by laser-induced distortions in long-range mole...

We present a practical guide to Smoothed Particle Hydro-dynamics (SPH) and its application to astrophysical problems. Although remarkably robust, SPH must be used with care if the results are to be meaningful since the accuracy of SPH is sensitive to the arrangement of the particles and the form of the smoothing kernel. In particular, the initial conditions for any SPH simulation must consist o...

The behavior of electromagnetic waves can be controlled by controlling the constitutive parameters of the medium in which EM waves propagate. This can be accomplished to some extent by mixing different materials with different pemittivities, permeabilities, and conductivities as shown in the previous chapter. It was shown that the effective permittivity of a composite medium is not only a funct...

We compare two methods for the characterization of local order in samples undergoing crystal nucleation and growth. Particles with a crystal-like surrounding need to be identified to follow the nucleation process. Both methods are based on the knowledge of the particle positions in a small volume of the sample. (i) Local bond-order parameters are used to quantify the orientation of the nearest ...

We describe a parallel version of our tree-code for the simulation of self-gravitating systems in Astrophysics. It is based on a dynamic and adaptive method for the domain decomposition, which exploits the hierarchical data arrangement used by the tree-code. It shows low computational costs for the parallelization overhead – less than 4% of the total CPU-time in the tests done – because the dom...