During their service life, marine pipelines continually accumulate damage as a result of the action of various environmental forces. Clearly, the development of robust techniques for early damage detection is very important to avoid the possible occurrence of a disastrous structural failure. Most of vibration-based damage detection methods require the modal properties that are obtained from mea...

In the usual d dimensional SO(d) gauged Higgs models with d-component Higgs fields, the ’energies’ of the topologically stable solitons are bounded from below by the ChernPontryagin charges. A new class of Higgs models is proposed here, whose ’energies’ are stabilised instead by the winding number of the Higgs field itself, with no reference to the gauge group. Consequently, such Higgs models c...

We extend the normal transport model to include the medium effect on pions by treating them as quasiparticles. The property of the quasipion is determined using the delta-hole model. Modeling heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies with the new transport equations, we find that it leads to an enhanced production of pions with low kinetic energies. This gives a plausible explanation for th...

Quantitative analysis of spatially resolved valence electron energy-loss spectra shows strong physical property contrasts for Sigma5 and near Sigma13 grain boundaries in Fe-doped SrTiO3, resulting in London dispersion interaction energies of 14 to 50 mJ/m(2) between the adjacent grains. The determination of local physical properties of grain boundary cores and the appreciable contribution of lo...

Recently, the use of renewable energies has increased to  environmental pollution, limitation of fossil energy resources and energy security  One of the means that enable us to use such energies is fuel cells (FC). However, there are many problems  in the commercialization of FC from an economically and operation perspective. One of the most important problems is heat management. New heat pipes...

Prediction of interaction energies between ligands and their receptors remains a major challenge for structure-based inhibitor discovery. Much effort has been devoted to developing scoring schemes that can successfully rank the affinities of a diverse set of possible ligands to a binding site for which the structure is known. To test these scoring functions, well-characterized experimental syst...

Lβ2 X-ray satellite spectra of tungsten and gold are calculated using the Multi-Configuration Dirac-Fock energies and compared with recent experimental data. New calculations of L1-L3M5 Coster-Kronig transition energies for tungsten are presented, confirming the origin of the Lβ2 visible satellites reported by two experimental groups. We found the value 5.09 eV for the average energy of the L1-...

We extend the study of the performance of a prototype two-phase liquid xenon WIMP dark matter detector to energies below 20 keV. We demonstrate a new method for obtaining the best estimate of the energy from events, show that fluctuations in recombination limit discrimination for most energies, and reveal a surprising improvement in discrimination below 20 keV, which is crucial for a high-sensi...

We propose a new algorithm for solving the Weighted Histogram Analysis Method (WHAM) equations to estimate free energies out of a set of Monte Carlo (MC) or Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. The algorithm, based on free energy differences, provides a more natural way of approaching the problem and improves convergence compared to the widely used direct iteration method. We also study how par...

A new set of Skyrme parameters is obtained from a fit to the binding energies, rms charge radii, and single-particle energies of both normal and exotic spherical nuclei. Nuclear matter and neutron matter properties are used to put constraints on the parameters which are not well determined from the nuclear data. Special problems with the Nolen-Schiffer anomaly and the spin-orbit interaction are...