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Applied Mathematics

Selected Works

2014

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Free-Standing Inflatable Solar Chimney: Experiment And Theory, Peter Vorobieff, Andrea Mammoli, Nima Fathi, Vakhtang Putkaradze Nov 2014

Free-Standing Inflatable Solar Chimney: Experiment And Theory, Peter Vorobieff, Andrea Mammoli, Nima Fathi, Vakhtang Putkaradze

Nima Fathi

Solar chimneys (or solar updraft towers) offer an attractive way to use solar energy for production of baseload power. In a power plant of this type, sunshine heats the air under a wide greenhouse-like roofed collector surrounding the central base of a tall chimney. The heated air drives an updraft flow through the tower, whose energy is harvested with turbines. For a sufficiently large plant of this type, the thermal mass of the heated ground under the collector is sufficient to drive the flow even when the sun is down. The primary challenge in building the solar chimney power plant …

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Analytic And Finite Element Solutions Of The Power-Law Euler-Bernoulli Beams, Dongming Wei, Yu Liu Feb 2014

Analytic And Finite Element Solutions Of The Power-Law Euler-Bernoulli Beams, Dongming Wei, Yu Liu

Dongming Wei

In this paper, we use Hermite cubic finite elements to approximate the solutions of a nonlinear Euler-Bernoulli beam equation. The equation is derived from Hollomon’s generalized Hooke’s law for work hardening materials with the assumptions of the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The Ritz-Galerkin finite element procedure is used to form a finite dimensional nonlinear program problem, and a nonlinear conjugate gradient scheme is implemented to find the minimizer of the Lagrangian. Convergence of the finite element approximations is analyzed and some error estimates are presented. A Matlab finite element code is developed to provide numerical solutions to the beam equation. Some …

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