SEARCH · Engineering Papers
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
In this animation of a 3D plasmon ruler, the plasmonic assembly acts as a transducer to deliver optical information about the structural dynamics of an attached protein. (courtesy of Paul Alivisatos group)
Here, we present new in-situ measurements of particle rotations and energy dissipation during compression of 3D packings of stiff, frictional particles. Two confined, uniaxial compression tests with different degrees of lateral confinement are discussed. X-ray computed tomography and 3D X-ray diffraction were combined to provide inter-particle forces, slip and roll distances, twist angles, and energy dissipation at all inter-particle contacts. Each of these measured quantities followed exponential distributions above their respective mean values and power-law distributions below their mean values in both experiments. Changes in these distributions during experiments suggest that the quantities generally became more homogeneous with increasing overall sample stress. Contact roll and slip distances, twist angles, and energy dissipation were all more heterogeneous than inter-particle normal force magnitudes in both experiments. Energy dissipation due to inter-particle slipping accounted for 95% of the total energy dissipated in both experiments. Dissipation mechanisms at inter-particle contacts bearing more than the mean normal force were responsible for approximately 70% of each sample’s dissipated energy at each load step, even though these contacts constituted approximately 40% of the total number of contacts.
Systems with long-range interactions (those which decay at large distances as r{sup -l}, with l≥d, where d is the dimensionality of the considered space), like gravitational or charged ones, present difficulties when treated by conventional statistical mechanics perturbation methods. In this work a self-gravitating fluid of rotating spherical particles is considered. The corresponding inter-particle potential model is a long-ranged one and was obtained from the application of the Newtonian limit to the Kerr metric. This potential has been expressed as a finite sum of hard-core Yukawa potentials. This new potential mimics the original long-ranged one and can be treated with conventional statistical mechanics methods. The first-order mean spherical approximation is applied to this potential to obtain the thermodynamic response functions.
Molecular quantum electrodynamics is used to obtain an expression for the retarded dispersion energy shift between three arbitrarily electrically polarizable atoms or molecules. A generalized Craig-Power Hamiltonian that depends quadratically on the electric displacement field is employed together with third-order diagrammatic perturbation theory. This approach simplifies the calculation relative to the use of the usual multipolar coupling Hamiltonian that is linear in the displacement field. Specific higher multipole non-additive contributions are then extracted. These include dipole-dipole-quadrupole, dipole-quadrupole-quadrupole, and dipole-dipole-octupole potentials valid for oriented and isotropic species with arbitrary separation distances between particles, extending recent work in which these energy shifts were given for equilateral triangle and collinear geometries. Near-zone limiting forms are found to agree with earlier works in which static inter-particle couplings were used.
The age of the nearest particle pair is introduced as the difference between the current time and the most recent time when the nearest particle pair was formed. The evolution equation for the age-included nearest pair distribution function is derived. With the assumption of random destruction of the nearest particle pairs, the evolution equation predicts the exponential probability distribution of the ages of the nearest particle pairs. Particle-resolved numerical simulations with moving particles are performed to verify this prediction. The equation is then used to derive the evolution equation for the particle–fluid–particle (PFP) stress, which is known to be related to hyperbolicity of the two-fluid equations. It is found that the relaxation time of the age probability distribution is also the relaxation time for the PFP stress. Guided by the closure terms in the PFP stress evolution equation, we study kinematics of the nearest particle pairs in the particle-resolved simulations for flows caused by sedimentation of the particles with initially isotropic and homogeneous particle distributions. At the steady states, the particle Reynolds numbers are around 20. Anisotropy and inhomogeneity of particle distributions are seen to develop in these flows. The mean distances to the nearest particles and evolution of the distribution of the Voronoi cell volumes are studied. We also found the PFP stress is closely related to the changes in these inter-particle scale quantities.