accurate calculation of reliability index is very important for the reliability analysis of structures. in some limit state functions with nonlinear characteristic and several local optimum design points, the computational reliability methods may not appropriately determine the failure probability, and iterative reliability approaches may be converged to local optimum design points. in this pap...

A side-viewing, 2.3-mm diameter, surface magnifying chromoendoscopy-optical coherence tomography (SMC-OCT) endoscope has been designed for simultaneous, nondestructive surface fluorescence visualization and cross-sectional imaging. We apply this endoscope to in vivo examination of the mouse colon. A 30,000 element fiber bundle is combined with single mode fibers, for SMC and OCT imaging, respec...

Using the principle of energy conservation and laws of geometrical optics, we derive the photon transport equation for turbid biological media with spatially varying isotropic refractive index. We show that when the refractive index is constant, our result reduces to the standard radiative transfer equation and when the medium is lossless and free of scattering to the well known geometrical opt...

We study the acoustic scattering properties of a phononic crystal designed to behave as a gradient index lens in water, both experimentally and theoretically. The gradient index lens is designed using a square lattice of stainless-steel cylinders based on a multiple scattering approach in the homogenization limit. We experimentally demonstrate that the lens follows the graded index equations de...

The hybrid model of laser energy deposition is a combination of the geometrical-optics ray-tracing method with the one-dimensional (1D) solution of the Helmholtz wave equation in regions where the geometrical optics becomes inapplicable. We propose an improved version of this model, where a new physically consistent criterion for transition to the 1D wave optics is derived, and a special rescal...