Related papers: Building the next pyramid
A large family of deployable filamentary structures can be built by connecting two elastic rods along their length. The resulting structure has interesting shapes that can be stabilized by tuning the material properties of each rod. To…
Pour sand into a container and only the grains near the top surface move. The collective motion associated with the translational and rotational energy of the grains in a thin flowing layer is quickly dissipated as friction through…
We present a novel implementation of a soft sphere, discrete elements code to simulate the dynamics of self-gravitating granular materials. The code is used to study the outcome of sub-sonic collisions between self-gravitating rubble piles…
The morphology of the first three-dimensional islands appearing during strained growth of SiGe alloys on Si(001) was investigated by scanning tunneling microscopy. High resolution images of individual islands and a statistical analysis of…
This paper designs a new spherical robot structure capable of supporting high-speed motion at up to 10 m/s. Building upon a single-pendulum-driven spherical robot, the design incorporates a momentum wheel with an axis aligned with the…
A computational study of sliding blocks on inclined surfaces is presented. Assuming that the friction coefficient $\mu$ is a function of position, the probability $P(\lambda)$ for the block to slide down over a length $\lambda$ is…
A new Monte Carlo move for polymer simulations is presented. The ``wormhole'' move is build out of reptation steps and allows a polymer to reptate through a hole in space; it is able to completely displace a polymer in time N^2 (with N the…
Recently, experiments showed that forces on intruders dragged horizontally through dense, hydrostatic granular packings mainly depend on the local surface orientation and can be seen as the sum of the forces exerted on small surface…
A new idea for turbulent skin-friction reduction is proposed, wherein the shape of the solid wall is designed to create the spanwise pressure gradient acting similarly to the well-known method of drag reduction by in-plane spanwise wall…
Recent advances in atomic and nano-scale growth and characterization techniques have led to the production of modern magnetic materials and magneto-devices which reveal a range of new fascinating phenomena. The modeling of these is a tough…
Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh…
We present a novel method to perform numerical integration over curved polyhedra enclosed by high-order parametric surfaces. Such a polyhedron is first decomposed into a set of triangular and/or rectangular pyramids, whose certain faces…
Since the 1930s, theories of skin-friction drag from plates with rough surfaces have been based by analogy to turbulent flow in pipes with rough interiors. Failure of this analogy at slow velocities has frustrated attempts to create a…
The pyramid-to-dome transition in Ge$_{x}$Si$_{1-x}$ on Si(100) initiated by step bunching on pyramidal quantum dots is atomistically simulated using a novel multi-state lattice model incorporating effective surface reconstructions. Results…
Tensegrity structures have been extensively studied over the last years due to their potential applications in modern engineering like metamaterials, deployable structures, planetary lander modules, etc. Many of the form-finding methods…
Our fluid dynamics video shows the response of a layer of viscoelastic fluid to an array of four-roll mills steadily rotating underneath. When the relaxation time of the fluid is sufficiently long, the fluid divides into "cells" with a…
In micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is…
A function for the bed-load sediment transport rate is derived. This is achieved from the first principle by using the entrainment probabilities of the sediment grains by rolling and lifting, and by introducing two travel lengths,…
Processes on different length scales affect the dynamics of chain molecules. In this work, we focus on structures on the scale of a monomer and investigate polyolefins, i.e. hydrocarbon chains with different small scale architectures. We…
A Poisson line process is a random set of straight lines contained in the plane, as the image of the map $(x,v)\mapsto (x+vt)_{t\in\mathbb{R}}$, for each point $(x,v)$ of a Poisson process in the space-velocity plane. By associating a step…