Parallel Algorithms for FE-BE Coupling

When non linear physical systems of infinite extent are modelled, such as tunnels and perforations, it is necessary to simulate suitably the solution in the infinite as well as the non linearity. The finite element method (FEM) is a well known procedure for simulating the non linear behavior. However, the treatment of the infinite field with domain truncations is often questionable. On the other hand, the boundary element method (BEM) is suitable to simulate the infinite behavior without truncations. Because of this, by the combination of both methods, suitable use of the advantages of each one may be obtained. Several possibilities of FEM-BEM coupling and their performance in some practical cases are discussed in this paper. Parallelizable coupling algorithms based on domain decomposition are developed and compared with the most traditional coupling methods.

Interference of parallel cylindrical Langmuir probes

Current to a cylindrical probe of arbitrary cross section is discussed. Previous results for circular cylinders at the high bias and moderate radius R of interest for electrodynamic bare tethers, for which space charge may be ignored over a large neighborhood of the probe, depend in separate ways on both R and perimeter p. These results are extended to a general convex cross section by introducing certain equivalent radius Req. For any concave cross section, results use a proper equivalent perimeter peq , in addition to Req. Finally, for the joint cross section of separate parallel probes, certain effective perimeter peff replaces peq. Rules to determine Req. peq. and peff are used to discuss collection interference among two or more parallel cylinders when brought from far away to contact

Practical Characterization of Input-Parallel-Connected Converters with a Common Input Filter

The paper presents a method to analyze robust stability and transient performance of a distributed power system consisting of commercial converter modules interconnected through a common input filter. The method is based on the use of four transfer functions, which are measurable from the converter input and output terminals. It is shown that these parameters provide important information on the power module sensitivity to the interactions caused by the external impedances. Practical characterization for the described system structure is performed introducing special transfer functions utilized for the interactions assessment. Experimental results are provided to support the presented analysis procedure.

Automatized connection of the layers of planar transformers with parallel windings to improve the component behavior

Transformers with parallel windings are commonly used to reduce the losses in the windings. Windings losses depend on the winding positioning and the frequency effects because each winding affects the current sharing of itself and the neighboring windings. In this paper a methodology for determining the connections of the parallel windings that reduces the power losses (and temperature) in the windings of multi-winding transformers is presented. Other applications of the method, such as balanced current sharing and voltage drop reduction are also explored. In this paper a methodology for determining the connections of the parallel windings that reduces the power losses (and temperature) in the windings of multi-winding transformers is presented. Other applications of the method, such as balanced current sharing and voltage drop reduction are also explored.

Mesh traversal and sorting for efficient memory usage in scientific codes

Applications that operate on meshes are very popular in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. In the past, many techniques have been developed in order to optimize the memory accesses for these datasets. Different loop transformations and domain decompositions are com- monly used for structured meshes. However, unstructured grids are more challenging. The memory accesses, based on the mesh connectivity, do not map well to the usual lin- ear memory model. This work presents a method to improve the memory performance which is suitable for HPC codes that operate on meshes. We develop a method to adjust the sequence in which the data are used inside the algorithm, by means of traversing and sorting the mesh. This sorted mesh can be transferred sequentially to the lower memory levels and allows for minimum data transfer requirements. The method also reduces the lower memory requirements dra- matically: up to 63% of the L1 cache misses are removed in a traditional cache system. We have obtained speedups of up to 2.58 on memory operations as measured in a general- purpose CPU. An improvement is also observed with se- quential access memories, where we have observed reduc- tions of up to 99% in the required low-level memory size.

Effect of impacting radius of curvature on firmness sensing of fruits in a sorting system.

Fruits of two varieties of both apples and pear were tested to measure their response to small energy impact applied by a impact tester with two spherical tips of different radious of curvature ( RA = 2.48 cm and RB = 0.98 cm) and equal mass were used. In the four varieties studied, the size of bruise was smaller with a spherical tip RA than with tip RB . The non-destructive impact test would cause less damage with a spherical impactor with a radious bigger than 0.98 cm.

Models for internal quality sorting of fruit, based on time-domain laser reflectance spectroscopy (TDRS).

Non-destructive measurement of fruit quality has been an important objective through recent years (Abbott, 1999). Near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) is applicable to the cuantification of chemicals in foods and NIK "laser spectroscopy" can be used to estimate the firmness of fruits. However, die main limitation of current optical techniques that measure light transmission is that they do not account for the coupling between absorption and scattering inside the tissue, when quantifying the intensity o f reemitted light. The solution o f this l i m i t a t i o n was the goal o f the present work.

An Inexpensive Method for Kinematic Calibration of a Parallel Robot by Using One Hand-Held Camera as Main Sensor

This paper presents a novel method for the calibration of a parallel robot, which allows a more accurate configuration instead of a configuration based on nominal parameters. It is used, as the main sensor with one camera installed in the robot hand that determines the relative position of the robot with respect to a spherical object fixed in the working area of the robot. The positions of the end effector are related to the incremental positions of resolvers of the robot motors. A kinematic model of the robot is used to find a new group of parameters, which minimizes errors in the kinematic equations. Additionally, properties of the spherical object and intrinsic camera parameters are utilized to model the projection of the object in the image and thereby improve spatial measurements. Finally, several working tests, static and tracking tests are executed in order to verify how the robotic system behaviour improves by using calibrated parameters against nominal parameters. In order to emphasize that, this proposed new method uses neither external nor expensive sensor. That is why new robots are useful in teaching and research activities.

Parallel workflows to personalize clinical guidelines recommendations: application to gestational diabetes mellitus

The MobiGuide system provides patients with personalized decision support tools, based on computerized clinical guidelines, in a mobile environment. The generic capabilities of the system will be demonstrated applied to the clinical domain of Gestational Diabetes (GD). This paper presents a methodology to identify personalized recommendations, obtained from the analysis of the GD guideline. We added a conceptual parallel part to the formalization of the GD guideline called "parallel workflow" that allows considering patient?s personal context and preferences. As a result of analysing the GD guideline and eliciting medical knowledge, we identified three different types of personalized advices (therapy, measurements and upcoming events) that will be implemented to perform patients? guiding at home, supported by the MobiGuide system. These results will be essential to determine the distribution of functionalities between mobile and server decision support capabilities.

Forward micro-inverter with primary-parallel secondary-series multicore transformer

This paper presents a primary-parallel secondary-series multicore forward micro-inverter for photovoltaic AC-module application. The proposed solution changes the number of active phases depending on the grid voltage, thus enabling the usage of low-profile unitary turns ratio transformers. Therefore, the transformers are well coupled and the overall performance of the inverter is improved. Due to the multiphase solution the number of devices increases but, the current stress and losses per device are reduced contributing to an easier thermal management. Furthermore, the decoupling capacitor is split between the phases, contributing to a low-profile solution without electrolytic capacitors suitable to be mounted in the frame of a PV module.

Laminar counterflow parallel-plate heat exchangers: Exact and approximate solutions

Multilayered, counterflow, parallel-plate heat exchangers are analyzed numerically and theoretically. The analysis, carried out for constant property fluids, considers a hydrodynamically developed laminar flow and neglects longitudinal conduction both in the fluid and in the plates. The solution for the temperature field involves eigenfunction expansions that can be solved in terms of Whittaker functions using standard symbolic algebra packages, leading to analytical expressions that provide the eigenvalues numerically. It is seen that the approximate solution obtained by retaining the first two modes in the eigenfunction expansion provides an accurate representation for the temperature away from the entrance regions, specially for long heat exchangers, thereby enabling simplified expressions for the wall and bulk temperatures, local heat-transfer rate, overall heat-transfer coefficient, and outlet bulk temperatures. The agreement between the numerical and theoretical results suggests the possibility of using the analytical solutions presented herein as benchmark problems for computational heat-transfer codes.

FTCS finite difference scheme GPGPU parallel computing for the heat conduction equation = Programación en paralelo GPGPU del método en diferencias finitas FTCS para la ecuación del calor

En el presente artículo se muestran las ventajas de la programación en paralelo resolviendo numéricamente la ecuación del calor en dos dimensiones a través del método de diferencias finitas explícito centrado en el espacio FTCS. De las conclusiones de este trabajo se pone de manifiesto la importancia de la programación en paralelo para tratar problemas grandes, en los que se requiere un elevado número de cálculos, para los cuales la programación secuencial resulta impracticable por el elevado tiempo de ejecución. En la primera sección se describe brevemente los conceptos básicos de programación en paralelo. Seguidamente se resume el método de diferencias finitas explícito centrado en el espacio FTCS aplicado a la ecuación parabólica del calor. Seguidamente se describe el problema de condiciones de contorno y valores iniciales específico al que se va a aplicar el método de diferencias finitas FTCS, proporcionando pseudocódigos de una implementación secuencial y dos implementaciones en paralelo. Finalmente tras la discusión de los resultados se presentan algunas conclusiones. In this paper the advantages of parallel computing are shown by solving the heat conduction equation in two dimensions with the forward in time central in space (FTCS) finite difference method. Two different levels of parallelization are consider and compared with traditional serial procedures. We show in this work the importance of parallel computing when dealing with large problems that are impractical or impossible to solve them with a serial computing procedure. In the first section a summary of parallel computing approach is presented. Subsequently, the forward in time central in space (FTCS) finite difference method for the heat conduction equation is outline, describing how the heat flow equation is derived in two dimensions and the particularities of the finite difference numerical technique considered. Then, a specific initial boundary value problem is solved by the FTCS finite difference method and serial and parallel pseudo codes are provided. Finally after results are discussed some conclusions are presented.

Parallel sets and morphological measurements of CT images of soil pore structure in a vineyard

Important physical and biological processes in soil-plant-microbial systems are dominated by the geometry of soil pore space, and a correct model of this geometry is critical for understanding them. We analyze the geometry of soil pore space with the X-ray computed tomography (CT) of intact soil columns. We present here some preliminary results of our investigation on Minkowski functionals of parallel sets to characterize soil structure. We also show how the evolution of Minkowski morphological measurements of parallel sets may help to characterize the influence of conventional tillage and permanent cover crop of resident vegetation on soil structure in a Spanish Mediterranean vineyard.

Neurite, a finite difference large scale parallel program for the simulation of the electrical signal propagation in neurites under mechanical loading

With the growing body of research on traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury, computational neuroscience has recently focused its modeling efforts on neuronal functional deficits following mechanical loading. However, in most of these efforts, cell damage is generally only characterized by purely mechanistic criteria, function of quantities such as stress, strain or their corresponding rates. The modeling of functional deficits in neurites as a consequence of macroscopic mechanical insults has been rarely explored. In particular, a quantitative mechanically based model of electrophysiological impairment in neuronal cells has only very recently been proposed (Jerusalem et al., 2013). In this paper, we present the implementation details of Neurite: the finite difference parallel program used in this reference. Following the application of a macroscopic strain at a given strain rate produced by a mechanical insult, Neurite is able to simulate the resulting neuronal electrical signal propagation, and thus the corresponding functional deficits. The simulation of the coupled mechanical and electrophysiological behaviors requires computational expensive calculations that increase in complexity as the network of the simulated cells grows. The solvers implemented in Neurite-explicit and implicit-were therefore parallelized using graphics processing units in order to reduce the burden of the simulation costs of large scale scenarios. Cable Theory and Hodgkin-Huxley models were implemented to account for the electrophysiological passive and active regions of a neurite, respectively, whereas a coupled mechanical model accounting for the neurite mechanical behavior within its surrounding medium was adopted as a link between lectrophysiology and mechanics (Jerusalem et al., 2013). This paper provides the details of the parallel implementation of Neurite, along with three different application examples: a long myelinated axon, a segmented dendritic tree, and a damaged axon. The capabilities of the program to deal with large scale scenarios, segmented neuronal structures, and functional deficits under mechanical loading are specifically highlighted.

Morphological Functions with Parallel Sets for the Pore Space of X-ray CT Images of Soil Columns

During the last few decades, new imaging techniques like X-ray computed tomography have made available rich and detailed information of the spatial arrangement of soil constituents, usually referred to as soil structure. Mathematical morphology provides a plethora of mathematical techniques to analyze and parameterize the geometry of soil structure. They provide a guide to design the process from image analysis to the generation of synthetic models of soil structure in order to investigate key features of flow and transport phenomena in soil. In this work, we explore the ability of morphological functions built over Minkowski functionals with parallel sets of the pore space to characterize and quantify pore space geometry of columns of intact soil. These morphological functions seem to discriminate the effects on soil pore space geometry of contrasting management practices in a Mediterranean vineyard, and they provide the first step toward identifying the statistical significance of the observed differences.