Continuously-Propelled Automobile Trains

Formal Methods in the Wild: Trains, Planes, & Automobile

Why is it that carefully researched and well-formulated theoretical and methodological constructs don’t make their way into industrial applications? This keynote speech takes a look at my personal experiences in both the aviation and automotive fields to suggest what can be done about it. I will first try to explain why engineers (and even industry scientists) tend not to use the kind of method...

Acoustically propelled nanoshells.

Herein we report a new design for acoustic nanoswimmers, making use of a nanoshell geometry that was synthesized using a sphere template process. Such shell-shaped nanomotors display highly efficient acoustic propulsion on the nanoscale by converting energy from the ambient acoustic field into motion. The propulsion mechanism of the nanoshell motors relies on acoustic streaming stress over the ...

Self-propelled Leidenfrost droplets.

We report that liquids perform self-propelled motion when they are placed in contact with hot surfaces with asymmetric (ratchetlike) topology. The pumping effect is observed when the liquid is in the Leidenfrost regime (the film-boiling regime), for many liquids and over a wide temperature range. We propose that liquid motion is driven by a viscous force exerted by vapor flow between the solid ...

Stratified Propelled Wakes

Packet Trains

Traffic measurements on a ring local area computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are presented. The analysis of the arrival pattern shows that the arrival processes are neither Poisson nor compound Poisson. An alternative model called “packet train” is proposed. In the train model, the traffic on the network consists of a number of packet streams between various pairs of ...