Hydroelasto-plasticity approach to predicting the post-ultimate strength behavior of a ship’s hull girder in waves

Dynamic collapse behavior of a ship’s hull girder in waves is investigated; post-ultimate strength behavior is the focus. Firstly, a simulation method is proposed. Assuming that a plastic hinge is formed during the collapse of the hull girder, the whole ship is modeled as two rigid bodies connected amidship via a nonlinear rotational spring. The post-ultimate strength behavior, such as the reduction of load carrying capacity due to buckling and yielding, is reflected in the model. Hydrodynamic loads are evaluated by using nonlinear strip theory to account for the effect of large plastic deformations on the loads. A scaled model for validation of the simulation is designed and fabricated. Then a series of tank tests is conducted using the scaled model to validate the simulation results. Post-ultimate strength behavior characteristics in waves are clarified by using the numerical and tank test results. It is shown that the hull girder collapses rapidly after reaching ultimate strength, and then the plastic deformation grows until unloading starts at the collapsed section. Finally, several parametric dependencies of the extent of the collapse behavior are discussed based on a series of the simulations.     

Investigation on transient dynamic behaviors of low-tension undersea cables

This paper presents a numerical analysis of the dynamic transient behaviors of undersea cables. In this numerical study, the governing equations based on Euler-Bernoulli beam theory are adopted, and they can satisfy many applications no matter what the magnitude of the cable tension is. The nonlinear coupled equations are solved by a popular central finite difference method, and the numerical results of transient behaviors are presented when several kinds of surrounding conditions, such as different towing speeds of surface vessel, different currents and waves with various frequencies and amplitudes, are exerted. Then a detailed comparison of the results, including the upper end tension and cable shape in time-domain, is made under the above external excitations, and finally the possible reasons for these are further explained.     

Determination of interfacial heat flux of stainless steel solidification on copper substrate during the first 0.2 s

Interfacial heat transfer is a key issue in many solidification processes. In the paper, a novel experimental apparatus has been designed and on this basis, the instantaneous interfacial heat transfer between molten steel or solidified shell and copper substrate during the first 0.2 s has been studied. The investigated parameters include melt superheat, substrate temperature and surface roughness. The results show that the peak value of the interfacial heat flux in the first stage of liquid/solid contact increases with melt superheat and changes slightly with substrate temperature and surface roughness. The interfacial heat flux in the stage of solid/solid contact has a similar trend of slow decrease in most conditions.     

Industry foundation classes based integration of architectural design and structural analysis

The numerous construction projects in China provide the best environment for the development of information technology applied in building design. Various commercial CAD/CAE software applications are purchased by design firms for multi-disciplinary design tasks. However, researches on integration and interoperability are seldom considered. This study pursues a breakthrough point of integration in the architectural and structural domains and expects further development in other aspects. A central building information modeling (BIM) framework based on the industry foundation classes (IFC) is proposed to handle the data exchange between IFC-compatible architectural models and structural models. A central XML(extensible markup language)-based unified finite element model (FEM) is proposed for model conversion among various commercial structural CAE software applications. In addition to bidirectional data interfaces among IFC-based BIM, XML-based FEM and various commercial FEMs, some other components such as visualization, calculation and model editing/check are also equipped into the prototype system.     

Evaluation and optimization of intersection process between voxelized mesh models and homocentric spheres

In the field of 3D model matching and retrieval, an effective method for feature extraction is spherical harmonic or its mutations, and is acted on the spherical images. But the obtainment of spherical images from 3D models is very time-consuming, which greatly restrains the responding speed of such systems. In this paper, we propose a quantitative evaluation of the whole process and give a detailed two-sided analysis based on the comparative size between pixels and voxels. The experiments show that the resultant optimized parameters are fit for the practical application and exhibit a satisfactory performance.     

Human and bicycle detection system using range sensor

This paper presents a full-scale solution to the detection of the traffic data using laser device. Range images, gathered by a particular laser camera, are used in the multi-threshold segmentation. The multi-threshold segmentation is based on the height of the moving objects. In order to get the precise height of the moving objects, mapping of the original terrain is performed on the first step. On each layer, the clustering algorithm called iteration-self organizing data analysis techniques algorithm (ISODATA) is conducted afterwards. Kalman filtering technique is applied to recognize and track the moving objects. Extensive experiments show that these algorithms are effective in object recognition and tracking, as well as robust in the applications.     

Looper-tension <Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis><Subscript>∞</Subscript> control for hot strip finishing mills

The development of an innovative H _∞ controller for looper and tension control in hot strip finishing mills is traced based on approximately linearized model. This solution has been considered thanks to its well-known robustness and simplicity characteristics concerning disturbances’ attenuation. The controller is designed based on an optimal problem with linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints, and the problem is solved by the mincx function of Matlab LMI Toolbox. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller compared with conventional ones.     

Numerical simulation of macrosegregation during steel ingot solidification using continuum model

A continuum model is adopted to study the macrosegregation phenomena during solidification of large steel ingots. Evolution of temperature, melt velocity, and compositional concentration field during a 22 t steel ingot solidification are illustrated by using the finite volume method. Numerical results of temperature distribution are validated by experiments. The influence of local permeability relates to the friction that the melt experienced in mushy region is investigated. It is shown that the continuum model is able to predict the temperature field, and the variation of permeability obviously affects the melt flowing behavior and the final compositional distribution.     

Implementation of dynamic matrix control on field programmable gate array

High performance computer is often required by model predictive control (MPC) systems due to the heavy online computation burden. To extend MPC to more application cases with low-cost computation facilities, the implementation of MPC controller on field programmable gate array (FPGA) system is studied. For the dynamic matrix control (DMC) algorithm, the main design idea and the implemental strategy of DMC controller are introduced based on a FPGA’s embedded system. The performance tests show that both the computation efficiency and the accuracy of the proposed controller can be satisfied due to the parallel computing capability of FPGA.     

Bit stream oriented enumeration tree pruning algorithm

Packet analysis is very important in our digital life. But what protocol analyzers can do is limited because they can only process data in determined format. This paper puts forward a solution to decode raw data in an unknown format. It is certain that data can be cut into packets because there are usually characteristic bit sequences in packet headers. The key to solve the problem is how to find out those characteristic sequences. We present an efficient way of bit sequence enumeration. Both Aho-Corasick (AC) algorithm and data mining method are used to reduce the cost of the process.