Gaits are crucial to the performance of locomotors. However, it is often difficult to design effective gaits for complex locomotors. Geometric mechanics offers powerful gait design tools, but the utilities of these tools have been limited to systems with two joints. Using shape basis functions, it is possible to approximate the kinematics of complex locomotors using only two shape variables. As...

the use of structural adhesives in automotive structures has been increased recently for their role in noise, vibration and harshness (nvh). therefore, the dynamic behavior of structures containing bonded joints has become an area with numerous investigations over the past decades. development of accurate formulations capable of representing adhesively bonded joint dynamics is a step forward in...

in this work, we report synthesis of silver nanoplates by a simple reduction process of silver nitrate in the presence of polyvinyl alcohol (pva) and n,n'-dimethyl formamide (dmf). the characterization of the samples were carried out using x-ray diffraction (xrd), transmission-electron microscopy (tem) and uv-vis spectroscopy. absorption spectra of the nanoplates in comparison with that of...

This paper is concerned with elastic local buckling of rectangular plates subjected to intermediate and end inplane loads. Since closed form solution for buckling analysis of plates with different end conditions and subjected to intermediate loads is complicated, numerical methods are more useful. Because of restrictions on the two finite strip methods, the longitudinal B3 spline expressions co...

In this paper, we improve the generalized Bernstein basis functions introduced by Han, et al. The new basis functions not only inherit the most properties of the classical Bernstein basis functions, but also reserve the shape parameters that are similar to the shape parameters of the generalized Bernstein basis functions. The degree elevation algorithm and the conversion formulae between the ne...

In this paper we present a hierarchical multiscale shape description tool based on active contour models which enables data-driven quantitative and qualitative shape studies of MR brain images at multiple scales. At large scales, global shape properties are extracted from the image, while smaller scale features are suppressed. At lower scales, the detailed shape characteristics become more prom...

Shape-memory alloys are metal pieces that "remember" their original cold-forged shapes and return to the pre-deformed shape after heating. In this work we construct a software analogous of shape-memory alloys: programs whose code resists obfuscation. We show how to pour arbitrary functions into protective envelops that allow recovering the functions' exact initial code after obfuscation. We exp...