The buckling of an elastic plate with arbitrary shape flush-mounted on a rigid wall and deforming under the action of a uniform tangential load due to an overpassing simple shear flow is considered. Working under the auspices of the theory of elastic instability of plates governed by the linear von Kármán equation, an eigenvalue problem is formulated for the buckled state resulting in a fourth-...

This work proposes and analyzes a sparse grid stochastic collocation method for solving elliptic partial differential equations with random coefficients and forcing terms (input data of the model). This method can be viewed as an extension of the Stochastic Collocation method proposed in [Babuška-Nobile-Tempone, Technical report, MOX, Dipartimento di Matematica, 2005] which consists of a Galerk...

cl matcont and matcont are matlab continuation packages for the interactive numerical study of a range of parameterized nonlinear dynamical systems, in particular ODEs. matcont is an interactive graphical package and cl matcont is a commandline version. Both packages allow to compute curves of equilibria, limit points, Hopf points, limit cycles, flip, fold and torus bifurcation points of limit ...

-Gradient elution in nonlinear chromatography is a very powerful tool for the separation of components having a wide range of retentivity. It is not only used for chemical analysis, but also used in preparativeand large-scale chromatography for the separation of many macromolecules, such as proteins. In this work, a general rate model has been presented for the study of gradient elution in nonl...

This paper presents the simultaneous solution of the optimal sequencing and optimal dynamic transitions of two multigrade polymerization CSTRs. The simultaneous formulation results in a Mixed-Integer Dynamic Optimization (MIDO) problem. The profiles of the state variables during dynamic transitions are discretized using orthogonal collocation on finite elements, transforming the MIDO problem in...

In this work the distillation column sequencing problem is addressed through the Generalized Modular Framework, based on formal superstructure optimization techniques. The proposed method overcomes structural complexities through the use of systematically composed structural models incorporating all the feasible sequencing alternatives. The generated sequences are evaluated with respect to thei...

This contribution describes the development of various strategies for the dynamic optimization of a batch reactor in order to obtain a robust model, suitable for nonlinear (NLP) or mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. Different Orthogonal Collocation on Finite Element (OCFE) schemes and various formulations of the MINLP model have been studied to increase its robustness. It has...