The hydrodynamics and energetics of bioinspired oscillating mechanisms have received significant attentions by engineers and biologists to develop the underwater and air vehicles. Undulating and pure heaving (or plunging) motions are two significant mechanisms which are utilized in nature to provide propulsive, maneuvering, and stabilization forces. This study aims to elucidate and compare the ...

The magnetic compass orientation of birds is light dependent. The respective directional information, originating in radical pair processes, is mediated by the right eye. These findings suggest possible interactions between magnetoreception and vision, in particular with the perception of contours, because the right eye has been found to be dominant in discrimination tasks requiring object visi...

Study of various transportation indicators could be an appropriate criterion in evaluating the performance of the existing railways throughout the globe. This study was carried out to investigate the performance of rolling stock of Iranian railway using productivity analysis. In order to solve the problems, some solutions were provided by productivity management cycle steps. At the first step, ...

Gas foil bearings (GFBs) are finding widespread usage in oil-free turbo expanders, APUs and micro gas turbines for distributed power due to their low drag friction and ability to tolerate high level vibrations, including transient rubs and severe misalignment, static and dynamic. The static load capacity and dynamic forced performance of GFBs depends largely on the material properties of the su...

∗ Previous address: Department of Automation, Tianjin University, P. R. China Abstract In steel rolling industry, control of hot metal rolling process plays an important role in assuring high product quality and safe process operation. Although many advanced looper control technologies for finishing rolling process have emerged, looperless interstand tension control of roughing rolling mills re...

foil is a rst-order learning system that uses information in a collection of relations to construct theories expressed in a dialect of Prolog. This paper provides an overview of the principal ideas and methods used in the current version of the system, including two recent additions. We present examples of tasks tackled by foil and of systems that adapt and extend its approach.

We present a numerical method for the dynamics of a flexible body in an inviscid flow with a free vortex sheet. The formulation is implicit with respect to body variables and explicit with respect to the free vortex sheet. We apply the method to a flexible foil driven periodically in a steady stream. We give numerical evidence that the method is stable and accurate for a relatively small comput...

Leukocyte recruitment during inflammation is achieved through a multistep paradigm that includes margination, selectin-mediated rolling, beta 2 integrin-mediated firm adhesion, emigration, and migration into the site of inflammation. We have used the mouse cremaster muscle as a model of trauma- and cytokine-induced inflammation to study the possible role of intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM...

TiN nanotube arrays, prepared by the anodization of metallic Ti foil substrate and subsequent simple nitridation in an ammonia atmosphere, were investigated as low-cost counter electrodes in dye-sensitized solar cells for the first time. It is found that the highly ordered TiN nanotube arrays on the metallic Ti foil substrate show an excellent performance, comparable with typical Pt counter ele...

An accurate value for the radiative lifetime of the 2s 2p~(~P) 3s ~P~ level in N II has been obtained using the beam-foil-laser spectroscopy method. The result (T = 0.456 ± 0.020 ns ) is shorter than the beam-foil lifetime values reported previously for the 3s' ~P term. No theoretical value for the lifetime of this term is available at the present time.