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Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

Concept Tests For A New Wire Flying Vehicle Designed To Achieve High Horizontal Resolution Profiling In Deep Water, Chris Roman, Dave Hebert Dec 2012

Concept Tests For A New Wire Flying Vehicle Designed To Achieve High Horizontal Resolution Profiling In Deep Water, Chris Roman, Dave Hebert

Christopher N. Roman

Efficiently profiling the water column to achieve both high vertical and horizontal resolution from a moving vessel in deep water is difficult. Current solutions, such as CTD tow-yos, moving vessel profilers, and undulating tow bodies, are limited by ship speed or water depth. As a consequence, it is difficult to obtain oceanographic sections with sufficient resolution to identify many relevant scales over the deeper sections of the water column. This paper presents a new concept for a profiling vehicle that slides up and down a towed wire in a controlled manner using the lift created by wing foils. The wings …


Trajectory Generation In High-Speed, High-Precision Micromilling Using Subdivision Surfaces, Athulan Vijayaraghavan, Angela Sodemann, Aaron Hoover, J. Mayor, David Dornfeld Jul 2012

Trajectory Generation In High-Speed, High-Precision Micromilling Using Subdivision Surfaces, Athulan Vijayaraghavan, Angela Sodemann, Aaron Hoover, J. Mayor, David Dornfeld

Aaron M. Hoover

Motion control in high-speed micromilling processes requires fast, accurate following of a specified curvilinear path. The accuracy with which the path can be followed is determined by the speed at which individual trajectories can be generated and sent to the control system. The time required to generate the trajectory is dependent on the representations used for the curvilinear trajectory path. In this study, we introduce the use of subdivision curves as a method for generating high-speed micromilling trajectories. Subdivision curves are discretized curves which are specified as a series of recursive refinements of a coarse mesh. By applying these recursive …


Precis: A Usercentric Word-Length Optimization Tool, Mark Chang, Scott Hauck Jul 2012

Precis: A Usercentric Word-Length Optimization Tool, Mark Chang, Scott Hauck

Mark L. Chang

Translating an algorithm designed for a general-purpose processor into an algorithm optimized for custom logic requires extensive knowledge of the algorithm and the target hardware. Precis lets designers analyze the precision requirements of algorithms specified in Matlab. The design time tool combines simulation, user input, and program analysis to help designers focus their manual precision optimization efforts.


Bistability In A Simple Fluid Network Due To Viscosity Contrast, John Geddes, Brian Storey, David Gardner, Russell Carr Mar 2012

Bistability In A Simple Fluid Network Due To Viscosity Contrast, John Geddes, Brian Storey, David Gardner, Russell Carr

Brian Storey

We study the existence of multiple equilibrium states in a simple fluid network using Newtonian fluids and laminar flow. We demonstrate theoretically the presence of hysteresis and bistability, and we confirm these predictions in an experiment using two miscible fluids of different viscosity—sucrose solution and water. Possible applications include blood flow, microfluidics, and other network flows governed by similar principles.