A new viscous-inviscid semi-inverse (VISI) interaction method has been developed for predicting the flow field arising from a combination of inviscid potential flow and viscous flow. The technique involves matching the bounding velocities for each region by iteratively solving for the displacement thickness, δ*(x). The formula used to update δ*(x) after each iteration is generated by linearly perturbing the governing equations. Application of the VISI procedure to predict the unseparated flow past a flat plate gives excellent results, producing numerical solutions essentially indistinguishable from the appropriate analytical solution in less than 0.5 seconds of CPU time on an Amdahl 5850 computer. Application of the technique to external flow over a backward facing step (BFS) indicates that the region of strong interaction between the viscous and inviscid flows is much larger than reported for internal flow. Calculated reattachment lengths, LR, are clearly influenced by the thickness of the boundary layer upstream of the step, thicker boundary layers producing longer reattachment lengths. Good accuracy is achieved for a relatively coarse distribution of control points, and rapid convergence (< 2 seconds on the Amdahl 5850) usually occurs. Finite-difference predictions using an elliptic code (TEACH-T), modified at the outer boundary to simulate external flow, have also been made for the BFS, largely as a basis of comparison for the VISI results. Comparison of results for the two models (VISI and TEACH) gives similar trends in LR as a function of Rh and x₈, (a measure of the displacement thickness at the step). The values of LR obtained with the VISI method, however, are 15-80% longer than those from TEACH. Direct comparison with experiments is difficult because the experimental data does not clearly identify the effects of x₈, in the resulting values of LR. Trends appear to be the same for all computed and observed cases however. Disagreement between the VISI and TEACH results is thought to be due to a combination of neglecting velocities in the recirculation region in the VISI model, and numerical error and inaccurate boundary conditions in the TEACH code. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Mechanical Engineering, Department of / Graduate

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Thermal and fingering convection in a horizontal porous layer underlying a fluid layer was studied using linear stability analysis, experiment (for the thermal convection case only), and nonlinear simulation. For the thermal convection case, the linear analysis shows that when the fluid layer is thin, convection is largely confined to the porous layer. When the fluid layer thickness exceeds 15% of the porous layer thickness, convection is localized in the fluid layer and the critical wavelength is dramatically reduced. Experimental investigations were then conducted in a test box 24 cm x 12 cm x 4 cm high to substantiate the predictions. The ratio of the thickness of the fluid layer to that of the porous layer, d, varied from 0 to 1. The results were in good agreement with predictions. To investigate supercritical convection, a nonlinear computational study was carried out. It was found that for d ≤ 0.13, the Nusselt number increases sharply with the thermal Rayleigh number, whereas at larger values of d, the increase is more moderate. Heat transfer rates predicted for d = 0.1 and 0.2 are in good agreement with the experimental results. For salt-finger convection at R(m) ≤ 1, the critical value of the solute Rayleigh number R(sm) decreases as d increases; the convection is unicellular. For 5 ≤ R(m) ≤ 10, the critical R(sm) initially decreases with d, and then remains almost constant for larger values of d; multicellular convection prevails at high d. For 20 ≤ R(m) ≤ 50, the critical R(sm) first decreases and then increases as d increases from 0 to 0.1. When d > 0.1, the critical R(sm) decreases slowly with d and remains almost constant for d ≥ 0.4. In the nonlinear computations for R(m) = 1, periodic convection sets in at a value of R(sm) between ten and eleven times the critical value. For the case of R(m) = 50, an aperiodic oscillation occurs when R(sm) is between four and five times the critical value. For the superposed layer cases d = 1 and 0.5, the convection characteristics are similar to those of thermal convection when R(m) = 0.01. For R(m) = 1, it was found that the onset of salt-finger convection is oscillatory. For R(m) = 50, the nonlinear code failed to obtain satisfactory results.

Recent experiments have shown the fundamental role that random fluctuations play in many chemical systems in living cells, such as gene regulatory networks. Mathematical models are thus indispensable to describe such systems and to extract relevant biological information from experimental data. Recent decades have seen a considerable amount of modelling effort devoted to this task. However, current methodologies still present outstanding mathematical and computational hurdles. In particular, models which retain the discrete nature of particle numbers incur necessarily severe computational overheads, greatly complicating the tasks of characterising statistically the noise in cells and inferring parameters from data. In this thesis we study analytical approximations and inference methods for stochastic reaction dynamics. The chemical master equation is the accepted description of stochastic chemical reaction networks whenever spatial effects can be ignored. Unfortunately, for most systems no analytic solutions are known and stochastic simulations are computationally expensive, making analytic approximations appealing alternatives. In the case where spatial effects cannot be ignored, such systems are typically modelled by means of stochastic reaction-diffusion processes. As in the non-spatial case an analytic treatment is rarely possible and simulations quickly become infeasible. In particular, the calibration of models to data constitutes a fundamental unsolved problem. In the first part of this thesis we study two approximation methods of the chemical master equation; the chemical Langevin equation and moment closure approximations. The chemical Langevin equation approximates the discrete-valued process described by the chemical master equation by a continuous diffusion process. Despite being frequently used in the literature, it remains unclear how the boundary conditions behave under this transition from discrete to continuous variables. We show that this boundary problem results in the chemical Langevin equation being mathematically ill-defined if defined in real space due to the occurrence of square roots of negative expressions. We show that this problem can be avoided by extending the state space from real to complex variables. We prove that this approach gives rise to real-valued moments and thus admits a probabilistic interpretation. Numerical examples demonstrate better accuracy of the developed complex chemical Langevin equation than various real-valued implementations proposed in the literature. Moment closure approximations aim at directly approximating the moments of a process, rather then its distribution. The chemical master equation gives rise to an infinite system of ordinary differential equations for the moments of a process. Moment closure approximations close this infinite hierarchy of equations by expressing moments above a certain order in terms of lower order moments. This is an ad hoc approximation without any systematic justification, and the question arises if the resulting equations always lead to physically meaningful results. We find that this is indeed not always the case. Rather, moment closure approximations may give rise to diverging time trajectories or otherwise unphysical behaviour, such as negative mean values or unphysical oscillations. They thus fail to admit a probabilistic interpretation in these cases, and care is needed when using them to not draw wrong conclusions. In the second part of this work we consider systems where spatial effects have to be taken into account. In general, such stochastic reaction-diffusion processes are only defined in an algorithmic sense without any analytic description, and it is hence not even conceptually clear how to define likelihoods for experimental data for such processes. Calibration of such models to experimental data thus constitutes a highly non-trivial task. We derive here a novel inference method by establishing a basic relationship between stochastic reaction-diffusion processes and spatio-temporal Cox processes, two classes of models that were considered to be distinct to each other to this date. This novel connection naturally allows to compute approximate likelihoods and thus to perform inference tasks for stochastic reaction-diffusion processes. The accuracy and efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by means of several examples. Overall, this thesis advances the state of the art of modelling methods for stochastic reaction systems. It advances the understanding of several existing methods by elucidating fundamental limitations of these methods, and several novel approximation and inference methods are developed.

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A generalized approximate hand method of analysis is presented for determining the lateral deflections and internal forces in complex multi-storey structures subject to lateral loading. The buildings may include symmetric or asymmetric combinations of coupled walls, rigid frames, shear walls, wall-frames, rigid frames with central walls, frames with single and multi-storey bracing systems as well as cores that are either open or partially closed by floor beams. The deformations taken into account include bending, axial, shear and torsion. / The analysis is based on the continuous medium technique in which the bents in the structure are replaced by idealized assemblies representing their characteristic modes of behaviour. The proposed method is restricted to structures with uniform geometry up the height and linear elastic behaviour of the structural members. / Design equations are presented for the conventional lateral loading cases: a concentrated load at the top of the structure, a uniformly distributed load, and a triangularly distributed load with maximum intensity at the top. The simplicity of this method allows the sway of a structure, the maximum storey sway and its location in the height of the structure to be determined graphically. This procedure enables not only a rapid estimate of the deflections in the structure but together with an assessment of the internal forces it provides a design office method of comparing the efficiencies of different structural alternatives in the preliminary design of tall building structures.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Ahmet Vecdet Arslan. / Ph.D.