Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Analytical Framework For Quantifying Urban And Community Resilience To Natural Hazards From Cell-Phone Gps-Location And Traffic-Flow Data, Georgios Chatzikyriakidis

Civil and Environmental Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Urban areas are increasingly exposed to natural hazards while accommodating a growing share of the global population, yet a consistent science-based framework for quantifying urban and community resilience remains lacking. This dissertation develops a physics-based analytical framework grounded in statistical mechanics and the quantitative theory of Brownian motion. A city is conceptualized as a complex medium in which citizens move analogously to Brownian particles within a viscoelastic environment, influenced by socioeconomic interactions and infrastructure functionality.

A central premise is that urban resilience, interpreted as engineering resilience (an outcome), can be quantified through a single metric: the mean-square displacement MSD=⟨r²(t)⟩, of …

Viscous Thin-Film Models Of Nanoscale Self-Organization Under Ion Bombardment, Tyler Evans

Mathematics Theses and Dissertations

For decades, it has been observed that broad-beam irradiation of semiconductor surfaces can lead to spontaneous self-organization into highly regular patterns, sometimes at length scales of only a few nanometers. Initial theory was largely based on erosion and redistribution of material occurring on fast time scales, which are able to produce good agreement with certain aspects of surface evolution. However, further experimental and theoretical work eventually led to the realization that numerous effects are active in the irradiated target, including stresses associated with ion-implantation and the accumulation of damage leading to the development of a disordered, amorphous layer atop the …

A Fast Method For Computing Volume Potentials In The Galerkin Boundary Element Method In 3d Geometries, Sasan Mohyaddin

Mathematics Theses and Dissertations

We discuss how the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) applied to a boundary concentrated mesh can be used to evaluate volume potentials that arise in the boundary element method. If $h$ is the meshwidth near the boundary, then the algorithm can compute the potential in nearly $\Ord(h^{-2})$ operations while maintaining an $\Ord(h^p)$ convergence of the error. The effectiveness of the algorithms are demonstrated by solving boundary integral equations of the Poisson equation.

High-Order Relaxed Multirate Infinitesimal Step Methods For Multiphysics Applications, Jean Sexton

Mathematics Theses and Dissertations

In this work, we consider numerical methods for integrating multirate ordinary differential equations. We are interested in the development of new multirate methods with good stability properties and improved efficiency over existing methods. We discuss the development of multirate methods, particularly focusing on those that are based on Runge-Kutta theory. We introduce the theory of Generalized Additive Runge-Kutta methods proposed by Sandu and Günther. We also introduce the theory of Recursive Flux Splitting Multirate Methods with Sub-cycling described by Schlegel, as well as the Multirate Infinitesimal Step methods this work is based on. We propose a generic structure called Flexible …