Aggregate implements an efficient fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based algorithm to approximate compound probability distributions. Leveraging FFT-based methods offers advantages over recursion and simulation-based approaches, providing speed and accuracy to otherwise time-consuming calculations. Combining user-friendly features and an expressive domain-specific language called DecL, Aggregate enables practitioners and nonprogrammers to work with complex distributions effortlessly. The software verifies the accuracy of its FFT-based numerical approximations by comparing their first three moments to those calculated analytically from the specified frequency and severity. This moment-based validation, combined with carefully chosen default parameters, allows users without in-depth knowledge of the underlying algorithm to be confident in the results. Aggregate supports a wide range of frequency and severity distributions, policy limits and deductibles, and reinsurance structures and has applications in pricing, reserving, risk management, teaching, and research. It is written in Python.

Effective and accurate high-degree spline interpolation is still a challenging task in today’s applications. Higher degree spline interpolation is not so commonly used, because it requires the knowledge of higher order derivatives at the nodes of a function on a given mesh.

In this article, our goal is to demonstrate the continuity of the piecewise polynomials and their derivatives at the connecting points, obtained with a method initially developed by Beaudoin (1998, 2003) and Beauchemin (2003). This new method, involving the discrete Fourier transform (DFT/FFT), leads to higher degree spline interpolation for equally spaced data on an interval $[0,T]$. To do this, we analyze the singularities that may occur when solving the system of equations that enables the construction of splines of any degree. We also note an important difference between the odd-degree splines and even-degree splines. These results prove that Beaudoin and Beauchemin’s method leads to spline interpolation of any degree and that this new method could eventually be used to improve the accuracy of spline interpolation in traditional problems.

This paper describes the extensive numerical investigation carried out on a 203-mm spin-stabilised projectile to study the effects of Magnus force at high angles of attack on the stability and flight-trajectory parameters, for further validation and incorporation in a 6-DOF trajectory solver for flight-stability analysis. Magnus force typically influences the course of flight by causing the projectile to drift from its intended path in addition to generation of inbuilt dynamic instabilities in pitch and yaw orientation and is a function of AoA and spin rate. This study is a consolidation of the authors’ previous research on the same caliber projectile but with time-accurate analysis. It has been found that typically, the Magnus force and moment calculation requires time-accurate Navier Stokes equations to be solved numerically for accurate prediction(1,2). Hence, to complete the extraction of static and dynamic coefficients derivatives, unstructured time-accurate CFD analysis on multiple configurations, ranging from subsonic to supersonic Mach regimes, has been evaluated using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and found to be suitable for capturing the desired effects. However, the LES simulation requires non-dimensional wall distance (y+) of the order of 0.5 – 1, with LES_IQ > 75% thus, is computationally-intensive. In addition, to cover the entire flight envelope from Charge 1 (249 m/s) to Charge 7 (595 m/s), at spin rate from 500 rad/s to 750 rad/s, 30 cases have been evaluated to generate the time-accurate coefficient library for integration with 6-DOF solver analysis. The results obtained have been compared with the available experimental data and found to be in reasonable agreement. The results of 6-DOF solver, incorporating the extracted coefficients, were compared with firing-table results, which further validated the computational methodology. This study provides an insight on how opposite flow interacts with the attached boundary layer due to spin rate and generates a turbulent interacting flow with variation in vortical structures for Q-Criterion vortex-flow visualization.

A numerical method is presented for the computation of externally forced Stokes flows bounded by the plane z=0 and satisfying periodic boundary conditions in the x and y directions. The motivation for this work is the simulation of flows generated by cilia, which are hair-like structures attached to the surface of cells that generate flows through coordinated beating. Large collections of cilia on a surface can be modeled using a doubly-periodic domain. The approach presented here is to derive a regularized version of the fundamental solution of the incompressible Stokes equations in Fourier space for the periodic directions and physical space for the z direction. This analytical expression for û(k,m;z) can then be used to compute the fluid velocity u(x,y,z) via a two-dimensional inverse fast Fourier transform for any fixed value of z. Repeating the computation for multiple values of z leads to the fluid velocity on a uniform grid in physical space. The zero-flow condition at the plane z=0 is enforced through the use of images. The performance of the method is illustrated by numerical examples of particle transport by nodal cilia, which verify optimal particle transport for parameters consistent with previous studies. The results also show that for two cilia in the periodic box, out-of-phase beating produces considerablemore particle transport than in-phase beating.

The development of the helium ion microscope (HIM) enables the imaging of both hard, inorganic materials and soft, organic or biological materials. Advantages include outstanding topographical contrast, superior resolution down to <0.5 nm at high magnification, high depth of field, and no need for conductive coatings. The instrument relies on helium atom adsorption and ionization at a cryogenically cooled tip that is atomically sharp. Under ideal conditions this arrangement provides a beam of ions that is stable for days to weeks, with beam currents in the order of picoamperes. Over time, however, this stability is lost as gaseous contamination builds up in the source region, leading to adsorbed atoms of species other than helium, which ultimately results in beam current fluctuations. This manifests itself as horizontal stripe artifacts in HIM images. We investigate post-processing methods to remove these artifacts from HIM images, such as median filtering, Gaussian blurring, fast Fourier transforms, and principal component analysis. We arrive at a simple method for completely removing beam current fluctuation effects from HIM images while maintaining the full integrity of the information within the image.

Homogeneous isotropic turbulence has been playing a key role in the research of turbulence theory. And the pseudo-spectral method is the most popular numerical method to simulate this type of flow fields in a periodic box, where fast Fourier transform (FFT) is mostly effective. However, the bottle-neck in this method is the memory of computer, which motivates us to construct a memory-saving algorithm for spectral method in present paper. Inevitably, more times of FFT are needed as compensation. In the most memory-saving situation, only 6 three-dimension arrays are employed in the code. The cost of computation is increased by a factor of 4, and that 38 FFTs are needed per time step instead of the previous 9 FFTs. A simulation of isotropic turbulence on 20483 grid can be implemented on a 256G distributed memory clusters through this method.

Variational image segmentation based on the Mumford and Shah model [31], together with implementation by the piecewise constant level-set method (PCLSM) [26], leads to fully nonlinear Total Variation (TV)-Allen-Cahn equations. The commonly-used numerical approaches usually suffer from the difficulties not only with the non-differentiability of the TV-term, but also with directly evolving the discontinuous piecewise constant-structured solutions. In this paper, we propose efficient dual algorithms to overcome these drawbacks. The use of a splitting-penalty method results in TV-Allen-Cahn type models associated with different “double-well” potentials, which allow for the implementation of the dual algorithm of Chambolle [8]. Moreover, we present a new dual algorithm based on an edge-featured penalty of the dual variable, which only requires to solve a vectorial Allen-Cahn type equation with linear ∇(div)-diffusion rather than fully nonlinear diffusion in the Chambolle’s approach. Consequently, more efficient numerical algorithms such as time-splitting method and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) can be implemented. Various numerical tests show that two dual algorithms are much faster and more stable than the primal gradient descent approach, and the new dual algorithm is at least as efficient as the Chambolle’s algorithm but is more accurate. We demonstrate that the new method also provides a viable alternative for image restoration.

We present a fast Poisson solver on spherical shells. With a special change of variable, the radial part of the Laplacian transforms to a constant coefficient differential operator. As a result, the Fast Fourier Transform can be applied to solve the Poisson equation with operations. Numerical examples have confirmed the accuracy and robustness of the new scheme.

The first paper on the FFT multislice method was published in 1977, a quarter of a century ago. The formula was extended in 1982 to include a large tilt of an incident beam relative to the specimen surface. Since then, with advances of computing power, the FFT multislice method has been successfully applied to coherent CBED and HAADF-STEM simulations. However, because the multislice formula is built on some physical approximations and approximations in numerical procedure, there seem to be controversial conclusions in the literature on the multislice method. In this report, the physical implication of the multislice method is reviewed based on the formula for the tilted illumination. Then, some results on the coherent CBED and the HAADF-STEM simulations are presented.