Robust Design Optimization (RDO) represents a really interesting opportunity when the specifications of the design are careful and accurate: the possibility to optimize an industrial object for the real usage situation, improving the overall performances while reducing the risk of occurrence of off-design con- ditions, strictly depends on the availability of the information about the probability of occurrence of the various operative conditions during the lifetime of the design.

Vesicles are involved in a vast variety of transport processes in living organisms. Additionally, they serve as a model for the dynamics of cell suspensions. Predicting the rheological properties of their suspensions is still an open question, as even the interaction of pairs is yet to be fully understood. Here we analyse the effect of a single vesicle, undergoing tank-treading motion, on its surrounding shear flow by studying the induced disturbance field delta(V) over right arrow, the difference between the velocity field in its presence and absence.

The melting of glaciers coming with climate change threatens the heritage of the last glaciation of Europe likely contained in subglacial lakes in Greenland and Svalbard. This aspect urges specialists to focus their studies (theoretical, numerical, and on-field) on such fascinating objects. Along this line, we have approached the validation of the conjecture of the existence of a subglacial lake beneath the Amundsenisen Plateau at South-Spitzbergen, Svalbard, where ground penetrating radar measurements have revealed several flat signal spots, the sign of the presence of a body of water.

The development of high-efficiency porous catalyst membranes critically depends on our understanding of where the majority of the chemical conversions occur within the porous structure. This requires mapping of chemical reactions and mass transport inside the complex nanoscale architecture of porous catalyst membranes which is a multiscale problem in both the temporal and spatial domains.

The segmentation of speckled images, as the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, is usually recognized as a very complex problem, because of the speckle, multiplicative noise, which produces granular images. In segmentation problems, based on level set method, the evolution of the curve is determined by a speed function, which is fundamental to achieve a good segmentation. In this paper we propose a study of the new speed function obtained by the linear combination of image average intensity and image gradient speed functions.

An algorithm for coupling a classical Finite Volume (FV) approach, that discretize the Navier-Stokes equations on a block structured Eulerian grid, with the weakly-compressible SPH is presented. The coupling procedure aims at applying each solver in the region where its intrinsic characteristics can be exploited in the most efficient and accurate way: the FV solver is used to resolve the bulk flow and the wall regions, whereas the SPH solver is implemented in the free surface region to capture details of the front evolution.

We present a computational method for commodity hardware-based clinical cardiovascular diagnosis based on accurate simulation of cardiovascular blood flow. Our approach leverages the flexibility of the Lattice Boltzmann method to implementation on high-performance, commodity hardware, such as Graphical Processing Units. We developed the procedure for the analysis of real-life cardiovascular blood flow case studies, namely, anatomic data acquisition, geometry and mesh generation, flow simulation and data analysis and visualization.

In this paper we deal with high oscillatory systems and numerical methods for the approximation of their solutions. Some classical schemes developed in the literature are recalled and a recent approach based on the expression of the oscillatory solution by means of the exponential map is considered. Moreover we introduce a new method based on the Cayley map and provide some numerical tests in order to compare the different approaches

The nucleation mechanisms of methane hydrates are studied using well-tempered metadynamics and restrained molecular dynamics. The collective variables we used to follow the process are the methane-methane and methane-water coordination numbers, from which we computed the corresponding Landau free energy surface. This surface is characterized by two minima, corresponding to the two-phase methane bubble/water solution and clathrate crystal, and a transition state.