The authors of [W. D. Ristenpart et al., Nature, 461 (2009), pp. 377–380] have observed the following remarkable phenomenon during their experiments. If two oppositely charged droplets of fluid are close enough, at first they attract each other and eventually touch. Surprisingly after that the droplets are repelled from each other, if the initial strength of the charges is high enough. Otherwis...

In this paper an example is elaborated of the design of a river dike, incorporating reliability-based models. The design is demonstrated with the help of this example, which is based on [1]. 1. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION A river dike has to be designed to protect a particular region of land. The goal is to minimize the construction cost and the expected loss, due to inundation. The total cost can be e...

We present a sufficient criterion for the Bernstein-Bezier (BB) form of a trivariate polynomial within a tetrahedron, such that the real zero contour of the polynomial defines a smooth and single sheeted algebraic surface patch. We call this an A-patch. We present algorithms to build a mesh of cubic A-patches to interpolate a given set of scattered point data in three dimensions, respecting the...

A double-sheeted double many-body expansion potential energy surface is reported for the coupled 12A'/22A' states of HN2 by fitting about 6000 ab initio energies. All crossing seams are described to their full extent on the basis of converged results. The lowest adiabatic sheet is fitted with a rmsd of 0.8 kcal mol-1 with respect to the calculated energies up to 100 kcal mol-1 above the absolut...

This paper determines the optimal timing of dike heightenings as well as the corresponding optimal dike heightenings to protect against floods. To derive the optimal policy we design an algorithm based on the Impulse Control Maximum Principle. In this way the paper presents one of the first real life applications of the Impulse Control Maximum Principle developed by Blaquière. We show that the ...

Global Positioning System geodesy was used to measure surface deformation on Soufriere Hills volcano, Montserrat from October 6, 1995 to July 1, 1997 during initial dome growth and gravitational collapse. Our data from this period show non-axially symmetric horizontal displacements, and decreasing subsidence as a function of radial distance from the former topographic high of the volcanic edifi...

Introduction: The Yaxcopoil borehole (Yax-1) penetrates below the suevitic units through 600 m of sediments (894.9 m – 1510.9 m). These rocks are most likely of Cretaceous age and are regarded as a displaced “megablock”. The stratified sequence was intruded by suevitic dikes (910 m, 916 m), one impact melt dike (1347 m) and several clastic, polymict dikes. The latter are the focus of this study...