OPINION article Front. Mech. Eng., 16 March 2021Sec. Micro- and Nanoelectromechanical Systems https://doi.org/10.3389/fmech.2021.616179

Time-variant reliability problems appear in the engineering practice when (a) the material properties of the structure deteriorate in time or (b) random loading modelled as random processes is involved. This paper presents a method called PHI2 which is based on the outcrossing approach and allows to solve such problems using classical time-invariant reliability tools such as FORM/SORM methods. ...

Consider the following line of thinking. For islands that are small and isolated, extinction is an authentic element of their biological integrity. A critical purpose of a park is to protect biological integrity. From those two points it would be best to refrain from conserving wolf predation as an ecological process in Isle Royale National Park and allow Isle Royale wolves to go extinct—if tha...

| To prevent moving shadows being misclassiied as moving objects or parts of moving objects, this paper presents an explicit method for detection of moving cast shadows on a dominating scene background. Those shadows are generated by objects moving between a light source and the background. Moving cast shadows cause a frame diierence between two succeeding images of a monocular video image sequ...

Recent experiments by Hammack et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 532, 2005, p. 1) on deepwater waves with two-dimensional, periodic surface patterns showed several features, some of which were unsteady. Fuhrman & Madsen (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 559, 2006, p. 391) explained three of these as being the consequence of sinusoidal forcing by the wavemaker array that did not include forced harmonics, either i...

Aristaless-related proteins are structurally defined by the presence of a paired-type homeodomain and an additional conserved domain, known as aristaless domain or OAR-domain. These proteins can be further categorized in three groups (Int. J. Dev. Biol., 43 (1999) 651). Group-I aristaless-related genes are linked to functions in the development of the craniofacial and appendicular skeleton and ...

A new space-time discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method utilizing special Trefftz polynomial basis functions is proposed and fully analyzed for the scalar wave equation in a second order formulation. The dG method considered is motivated by the class of interior penalty dG methods, as well as by the classical work of Hughes and Hulbert [Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 66 (1988), pp. 339–363; Co...

We study heat transport in a class of stochastic energy exchange systems that characterize the interactions of networks of locally trapped hard spheres under the assumption that neighbouring particles undergo rare binary collisions. Our results provide an extension to three-dimensional dynamics of previous ones applying to the dynamics of confined two-dimensional hard disks [Gaspard P & Gilbert...

A new space-time discontinuous Galerkin (dG) method utilizing special Trefftz polynomial basis functions is proposed and fully analyzed for the scalar wave equation in a second order formulation. The dG method considered is motivated by the class of interior penalty dG methods, as well as by the classical work of Hughes and Hulbert [Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 66 (1988), pp. 339–363; Co...

Within the framework of multifield continua, we move from the model of elastic microcracked body introduced in (Mariano, P.M. and Stazi, F.L., Strain localization in elastic microcracked bodies, Comp. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 2001, 190, 5657–5677) and propose a few novel variational formulations of mixed type along with relevant mixed FEM discretizations. To this goal, suitably extended Helli...