In the present study, thermo-mechanical vibration behavior of non-uniform beams made of functionally graded (FG) porous material are investigated under different thermal loadings for the first time. It is observed that during the fabrication of functionally graded materials (FGMs) porosities and micro-voids can be occured inside the material, thus in this study vibration analysis of FG beams by considering the effect of these imperfections is performed. Material properties of the FG beam are assumed to be temperature-dependent and vary continuously through thickness direction according to a power-law scheme which is modified to approximate material properties for both even and uneven distributions of the porosities. Different thermal environmental conditions, including uniform, linear and non-linear temperature changes through the thickness direction are considered. The motion equations are derived based on the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory through Hamilton's principle and they are solved applying the differential transformation method (DTM). In order to show the accuracy of the present analysis, comparisons are made with previous researches and an excellent agreement is observed. The obtained results are presented for the thermo-mechanical vibration characteristics of the FG beams such as the influences of various temperature rises, gradient index, porosity volume fraction, taper ratio and the boundary conditions in detail.

The relative spatial position of each chain link and the phase angle of engaged tooth are not concerned in traditional sprocket designs. As such, the chain shifting might fail regularly. In this study, an optimized path of one chain for up-shifting is derived. Such path is formed by several bended chain links sustain yaw and roll. Empirically, appropriate bending, yaw and torsion angles for tooth chamfer, could be shorten the up-shifting distance and phase angle required, eventually facilitate not only more ascending points compactly arranged on sprocket but larger chain laterodeviation which curtails sprockets clearance and integrates the sprocket unit. Then again, the optimized shifting path promotes efficiency and decreases required movement yielded by derailleur tappet pressure.

Hydrogenated diamond like Carbon (H-DLC) is a promising lubricious coating that attracted a great deal of interest in recent years mainly because of its outstanding tribological properties. In this study, the nano-mechanical and -tribological properties of a range of H-DLC films were investigated. Specifically, four kinds of H-DLC coatings were produced on Si substrates in pure acetylene, pure methane, 25% methane + 75% hydrogen, 50% methane + 50% hydrogen discharge plasmas using a plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) system. Nano indentation was performed to measure the mechanical properties such as hardness and young's modulus and nanoscartching was performed to investigate the frictional behavior and wear mechanism of the H-DLC samples in open air. Moreover, Vickers indentation method was utilized to assess the fracture toughness of the samples. The results revealed that there is a strong correlation between the mechanical properties (hardness, young's modulus, fracture toughness) and the friction coefficient of DLC coatings and the source gas chemistry. Lower hydrogen to carbon ratio in source gas leads to higher hardness, young's modulus, fracture toughness and lower friction coefficient. Furthermore, lower wear volume of the coated materials was observed when the friction coefficient was lower. It was also confirmed that lower hydrogen content of the DLC coating leads to higher wear resistance under nanoscratch conditions.

Mechanical properties of the metals and their alloys are influenced by the material grain size at microscale. In the present study, the Johnson-Cook (JC) material model is modified to incorporate the effect of material's grain size along with the plasticity coupled damage model. 2D finite element (FE) simulations of turning process of an aerospace grade aluminium alloy 2024 (AA2024) were performed with different grain sizes using a commercial FE software, ABAQUS/Explicit. FE simulation results were compared with the published experimental data on turning process of AA2024. The proposed modified JC material model successfully simulated the increase in cutting force as a function of grain size refinement.

In this paper, the effective properties of particle-reinforced composites with a weakened interphase are investigated. The particle and interphase are regarded as an equivalent-inclusion, and the interphase zone around the particle is modeled as a linear elastic spring layer. A modified micro-mechanics model is proposed to obtain the effective elastic modulus. Moreover, a statistical debonding criterion is proposed to characterize the varying probability of the evolution of interphase debonding. Numerical examples are considered to illustrate the effect of imperfect interphases on the effective properties of particle-reinforced composites. It is found that the effective elastic properties obtained in the present work are in a good agreement with the existing data from the literatures.

This paper presents a new approach to simulate the propagation of elastic and cohesive cracks under mode-I loading based on the vector form intrinsic finite element method. The proposed approach can handle crack propagation without requiring global stiffness matrices and extra weak stiffness elements. The structure is simulated by mass particles whose motions are governed by the Newton's second law. Elastic and cohesive crack propagation are simulated by proposed VFIFE-J-integral and VFIFE-FCM methods, respectively. The VFIFE-J-integral method is based on vector form intrinsic finite element (VFIFE) and J-integral methods to calculate the stress intensity factors at the crack tips, and the VFIFE-FCM method combines VFIFE and fictitious crack models (FCM). When the stress state at the crack tip meets the fracture criterion, the mass particle at the crack tip is separated into two particles. The crack then extends in the plate until the plate splits into two parts. The proposed VFIFE-J-integral method was validated by elastic crack simulation of a notched plate, and the VFIFE-FCM method by cohesive crack propagation of a three point bending beam. As assembly of the global stiffness matrix is avoided and each mass particle motion is calculated independently, the proposed method is easy and efficient. Numerical comparisons demonstrate that the present results predicted by the VFIFE method are in agreement with previous analytical, numerical and experimental works.

This research targets investigation of the internal elastic field near the boundaries of 3D anisotropic bodies by the boundary element method (BEM). This analysis appears to be most important, especially for the interest in the internal solutions near corners or crack tips, where structural failure is most likely to occur. Although the BEM is very efficient for analyzing the problem, nearly singular integration will arise when the internal point of interest stays near the boundary. The present work is to show how the self-regularized boundary integral equation (BIE) can be applied to the interior analysis for 3D generally anisotropic bodies. So far, to the authors' best knowledge, no implementation work has been reported in the literature for successfully treating the near boundary solutions in 3D generally anisotropic solids. In the end, a few benchmark examples are presented to demonstrate the veracity of the present approach for the interior BEM analysis of 3D anisotropic elasticity.

An exact analytical solution to the three-dimensional elasticity problem for a transversely-isotropic composite layer is constructed by making use of the direct integration method along with the Fourier double-integral transform. The original problem is reduced to a system of governing partial-differential equations for separate stress-tensor components. The governing equations are accompanied with corresponding local and integral boundary conditions, obtained on the basis of the original local boundary conditions imposing the normal and shearing forces on the limiting planes of the layer. The numerical analysis of the obtained solution is presented for certain transversely-isotropic composite materials.

This study investigated the flow bifurcations of flows driven by a pressure gradient in a rectangular curved tube. When fluid flows within a curved tube, due to the centrifugal effect, secondary vortices can be induced in the cross section of the tube. The secondary flow states are dependent on the magnitude of the pressure gradient (q) and the aspect ratio (γ). In this study, the continuation method was applied to investigate the flow bifurcations in a curved tube with increasing pressure gradient (1 < q < 6000) and aspect ratio (0.9 < γ < 1.4).

The bifurcation diagrams are composed of solution branches, which are linked by limiting points or bifurcation points. The flow states in a solution branch belong to the same group. The ranges of the flow states and the relationship between the states can also be derived from the bifurcation diagrams. In this study, two types of bifurcation were found, one in the range of 0.9 < γ < 1.17, and another in the range of 1.18 < γ < 1.4. The ranges of stable flow solutions and the distributions of limit and bifurcation points in both pressure gradient and aspect ratio are derived in this study.

The effects of backward inclination angle on flow characteristics and jet dispersion properties of a stack-issued jet in crossflow were studied by means of instantaneous and long-exposure photography, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and tracer-gas concentration detections at a Reynolds number of 2,400, a jet-to-crossflow momentum flux ratio of 1.0, and the backward inclination angles θ = 0° - 60°. Three characteristic flow patterns featured by different near-wake flow structures were found within the surveyed span of the backward inclination angle: low (θ ≤ 25°), mediate (25° < θ < 50°), and high (θ ≥ 50°). In the range of low backward inclination angle, mushroom vortices appeared in the upwind shear layer. Jet fluids were entrained into the jet- and tube-wakes because the near wake region was characterized by a jet-wake vortex and a downwash flow. In the range of mediate backward inclination angle, forward-rolling vortices were formed in the upwind shear layer. Jet fluids were entrained into the jet wake but not appearing in the tube wake because the near wake was characterized by an isolated tube wake and up-going flows. In the range of high backward inclination angle, small-sized forward-rolling vortices were observed in the upwind shear layer. Jet fluids were not observed in both the jet- and tube-wakes because all flows went forward without reversal or vortex, which was similar to that in a jet in co-flow. Large turbulence intensities occurred around the jet-wake vortex and along sides of the tube wake bifurcation line, therefore the mixing at the low backward inclination angles presented better properties than those at mediate and high backward inclination angles owing to the featured flow structures and turbulence intensities.

A compact hybrid rocket motor design that incorporates a dual-vortical-flow (DVF) concept is proposed. The oxidizer (nitrous oxide, N2O) is injected circumferentially into various sections of the rocket motor, which are sectored by several solid fuel “rings” (made of hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, HTPB) that are installed along the central axis of the motor. The proposed configuration not only increases the residence time of the oxidizer flow, it also implies an inherent “roll control” capability of the motor. Based on a DVF motor geometry with a designed thrust level of 11.6 kN, the characteristics of the turbulent reacting flow within the motor and its rocket performance were analyzed with a comprehensive numerical model that implements both real-fluid properties and finite-rate chemistry. Data indicate that the vacuum specific impulse (Isp) of the DVF motor could reach 278 s. The result from a preliminary ground test of a lab-scale DVF hybrid rocket motor (with a designed thrust level of 3,000 N) also shows promising performance. The proposed DVF concept is expected to partly resolve the issue of scalability, which remains challenging for hybrid rocket motors development.

Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is adopted to compute two and three-dimensional lid driven cavity flows to examine the influence of memory management on the computational performance using Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Both single and multi-relaxation time LBM are adopted. The computations are conducted on nVIDIA GeForce Titan, Tesla C2050 and GeForce GTX 560Ti. The performance using global memory deteriorates greatly when multi relaxation time (MRT) LBM is used, which is due to the scheme requesting more information from the global memory than its single relaxation time (SRT) LBM counterpart. On the other hand, adopting on chip memory the difference using MRT and SRT is not significant. Also, performance of LBM streaming procedure using offset reading surpasses offset writing ranging from 50% to 100% and this applies to both SRT and MRT LBM. Finally, comparisons using different GPU platforms indicate that Titan as expected outperforms other devices, and attains 227 and 193 speedup over its Intel Core i7-990 CPU counterpart and four times faster than GTX 560Ti and Tesla C2050 for three dimensional cavity flow simulations respectively with single and double precisions.

Flexoelectricity, the coupling of strain gradient to polarization, enhances the properties of piezoelectric response desirable for advanced MEMS dramatically even in centrosymmetric dielectrics. In this paper, the general formulations of the flexoelectric couple stress theory presented by Hadjesfandiari in orthogonal curvilinear coordinate system are derived, and are then specified for the case of cylindrical coordinates. A size-dependent flexoelectric model of circular plate is established based on the current formulations in cylindrical coordinates. The governing equations, boundary conditions and initial conditions are derived by applying Hamilton's principle. The static bending and free vibration problems of a simply supported axisymmetric circular plate are carried out to illustrate the applicability of the present model. Numerical results reveal that a homogeneous electric field between the up and down surfaces of the circular plate is induced indeed. The generated deflection, induced voltage and natural frequency show obvious size effect, but the size effect is almost diminishing as the thickness of the plate is far greater than the material length scale parameter. As the increase of the flexoelectric coefficient, the induced voltage increases evidently and the generated deflection and the natural frequency increase weakly.