Abstract Various biologically inspired approaches to problem solving using a social metaphor have been proposed. For example, both Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) have been employed to solve problems in optimization and design. Both approaches employ simple social interactions between agents to produce emergent social structures that are used to solve a given...

We present a derivation of a stochastic model of Navier Stokes equations that relies on a decomposition of the velocity fields into a differentiable drift component and a time uncorrelated uncertainty random term. This type of decomposition is reminiscent in spirit to the classical Reynolds decomposition. However, the random velocity fluctuations considered here are not differentiable with resp...

Thinkers and philosophers have constantly benefited from different         approaches of reasoning to explore and justify their ideas. Theses reasoning            approaches are considered as the principle instruments in speculative activities of the thinkers. To this end to achieve the procedure of thinking and the way philosophers achieve objectives, it is necessary to recognize their reasoni...

The effect of airfoil shape parameterization on optimum design and its influence on the convergence of the evolutionary optimization process is presented. Three popular airfoil parametric methods including PARSEC, Sobieczky and B-Spline (Bezier curve) are studied and their efficiency and results are compared with those of a new method. The new method takes into consideration the characteristics...

Heat and mass convection ............................................................................................................................. 1 Heat convection: what it is ........................................................................................................................ 1 Types of heat convection .......................................................................

The validity of potential flow analogy by the Hele-Shaw flow of non-Newtonian fluids is examined through experiments using two shear-thinning elastic polymer solutions for three different flow configurations, i.e. flows around a circular cylinder and a square cylinder and flows through an abruptly converging-diverging channel (slit). Although the polymer solutions are highly shear-thinning and ...

A particle accelerated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) boundary element method (BEM) technique is proposed that allows the total sound pressure field produced by low Mach number flow past a rigid body to be predicted. An incompressible CFD solver is used to calculate the transient hydrodynamic flow field. The CFD/BEM coupling technique is then used to compute the acoustic pressure and pressu...

An enthalpy-balance fuel-grain regression model is presented. The regression model, based on the longitudinally averaged fuel recession rates, is shown to accurately predict the chamber pressure, thrust and specific impulse performance of small and medium scale hybrid rocket motors. The key to the model predictions is the longitudinal enthalpy balance between the fuel grain heat of ablation and...

We study the global and local convergence of a generic half-quadratic optimization algorithm inspired from the dual energy formulation of Geman and Reynolds [IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 14 (1992), pp. 367–383]. The target application is the minimization of C convex and nonconvex objective functionals arising in regularized image reconstruction. Our global convergence proofs are bas...

This article proposes a node-centered pressure-based method for predicting flows at all speeds on unstructured grids. The compressible version of the SIMPLE algorithm is extended to unstructured grids. For memory and computing time efficiency of arbitrary cell topologies, a node-centered scheme with edge-based data structure is applied to the segregated unstructured-grid algorithm. Convection t...