Numerical Analysis and Computation Commons^™

A Study Of The Numerical Implementation Of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Strategies, Rodney A. Taylor

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Design optimization provides an organized, systematic, and efficient method for obtaining design improvements based upon a specified measure of design performance. In the multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) environment efficient optimization techniques allow complex designs to be improved by managing conflicting disciplinary design goals so as to improve the global design. This thesis studies the implementation issues surrounding MDO techniques and strategies. To facilitate this investigation two testbed problems have been selected for study. These problems consider two approaches to the conceptual design of an aeroelastic wing. The first approach is based on an idealized, two-dimensional representation of an airfoil under …

Characteristic Spatial Quadratures For Discrete Ordinates Neutral Particle Transport On Arbitrary Tetrahedral Meshes, Charles R. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

Characteristic spatial quadratures for discrete ordinates calculations on meshes of arbitrary tetrahedra are derived and tested, including the step (SC), linear (LC), and exponential (EC) characteristic quadratures and variants that assume constant distributions on cell faces. Tetrahedral meshes accurately model curved surfaces with few cells. A split cell approach subdivides tetrahedra along the streaming direction, reducing the transport to one dimension. Assumed forms of the cell source and entering flux distributions have sufficient parameters to match the zeroth and first spatial moments. These parameters are determined by analytically inverting a linear system (LC), or by numerical inversion using Newton's method …

Droplet Evaporation And Deformations In An Amplitude Modulated Ultrasonic Field, Nihad E. Daidzic, Rene Stadler, Adrian Melling

Aviation Department Publications

The aim of the report presented is the measurements of droplet oscillations.

Effective Behavior Of Clusters Of Microscopic Cracks Inside A Homogeneous Conductor, Kurt M. Bryan, Michael Vogelius

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

We study the effective behaviour of a periodic array of microscopic cracks inside a homoge­neous conductor. Special emphasis is placed on a rigorous study of the case in which the corresponding effective conductivity becomes nearly singular, due to the fact that adjacent cracks nearly touch. It is heuristically shown how thin clusters of such extremely close cracks may macroscopically appear as a single crack. The results have implications for our earlier work on impedance imaging.

On An Investment-Consumption Model With Transaction Costs, Marianne Akian, José Luis Menaldi, Agnès Sulem

Mathematics Faculty Research Publications

This paper considers the optimal consumption and investment policy for an investor who has available one bank account paying a fixed interest rate and n risky assets whose prices are log-normal diffusions. We suppose that transactions between the assets incur a cost proportional to the size of the transaction. The problem is to maximize the total utility of consumption. Dynamic programming leads to a variational inequality for the value function. Existence and uniqueness of a viscosity solution are proved. The variational inequality is solved by using a numerical algorithm based on policies, iterations, and multigrid methods. Numerical results are displayed …

Optimal Starting-Stopping Problems For Markov-Feller Processes, Jose-Luis Menaldi, Maurice Robin, Min Sun

Mathematics Faculty Research Publications

By means of nested inequalities in semigroup form we give a characterization of the value functions of the starting-stopping problem for general Markov-Feller processes. Next, we consider two versions of constrained problems on the nal state or on the final time. The plan is as follows:

1. Introduction
2. Nested variational inequalities
3. Solution of optimal starting-stopping problem
4. Problems with constraints

References.