We develop a numerical method to simulate a two-phase compressible flow with sharp phase interface on Eulerian grids. The scheme makes use of a levelset to depict the phase interface numerically. The overall scheme is basically a finite volume scheme. By approximately solving a two-phase Riemann problem on the phase interface, the normal phase interface velocity and the pressure are obtained, which is used to update the phase interface and calculate the numerical flux between the flows of two different phases. We adopt an aggregation algorithm to build cell patches around the phase interface to remove the numerical instability due to the breakdown of the CFL constraint by the cell fragments given by the phase interface depicted using the levelset function. The proposed scheme can handle problems with tangential sliping on the phase interface, topological change of the phase interface and extreme contrast in material parameters in a natural way. Though the perfect conservation of the mass, momentum and energy in global is not achieved, it can be quantitatively identified in what extent the global conservation is spoiled. Some numerical examples are presented to validate the numerical method developed.

A feature-dependent variational level set formulation is proposed for image segmentation. Two second order directional derivatives act as the external constraint in the level set evolution, with the directional derivative across the image features direction playing a key role in contour extraction and another only slightly contributes. To overcome the local gradient limit, we integrate the information from the maximal (in magnitude) second-order directional derivative into a common variational framework. It naturally encourages the level set function to deform (up or down) in opposite directions on either side of the image edges, and thus automatically generates object contours. An additional benefit of this proposed model is that it does not require manual initial contours, and our method can capture weak objects in noisy or intensity-inhomogeneous images. Experiments on infrared and medical images demonstrate its advantages.

The staggered discontinuous Galerkin (SDG) method has been recently developed for the numerical approximation of partial differential equations. An important advantage of such methodology is that the numerical solution automatically satisfies some conservation properties which are also satisfied by the exact solution. In this paper, we will consider the numerical approximation of the inviscid Burgers equation by the SDG method. For smooth solutions, we prove that our SDG method has the properties of mass and energy conservation. It is well-known that extra care has to be taken at locations of shocks and discontinuities. In this respect, we propose a local total variation (TV) regularization technique to suppress the oscillations in the numerical solution. This TV regularization is only performed locally where oscillation is detected, and is thus very efficient. Therefore, the resulting scheme will preserve the mass and energy away from the shocks and the numerical solution is regularized locally near shocks. Detailed description of the method and numerical results are presented.

Periodic structures involving crossed arrays of cylinders appear as special three-dimensional photonic crystals and cross-stacked gratings. Such a structure consists of a number of layers where each layer is periodic in one spatial direction and invariant in another direction. They are relatively simple to fabricate and have found valuable applications. For analyzing scattering properties of such structures, general computational electromagnetics methods can certainly be used, but special methods that take advantage of the geometric features are often much more efficient. In this paper, an efficient method based on operators mapping electromagnetic field components between two spatial directions is developed to analyze structures with crossed arrays of circular cylinders. The method is much simpler than an earlier method based on similar ideas, and it does not require evaluating slowly converging lattice sums.

In a convex domain K in ℝd, a transmitter and a receiver are placed at random according to the uniform distribution. The statistics of the power received by the receiver is an important quantity for the design of wireless communication systems. Bounds for the moments of the received power are given, which depend only on the volume and the surface area of the convex domain.

The statistical properties of a population of immigrant pairs of individuals subject to loss through emigration are calculated. Exact analytical results are obtained which exhibit characteristic even–odd effects. The population is monitored externally by counting the number of emigrants leaving in a fixed time interval. The integrated statistics for this process are evaluated and it is shown that under certain conditions only even numbers of individuals will be observed.

In the application of electromagnetic methods to the non-destructive testing of electrically conducting materials for cracks or inclusions an electric current is applied to the specimen and the presence of a flaw is indicated by the perturbations it produces in the electromagnetic field. A number of different variants of the method can be used. The presence of a flaw may be observed by measuring either electric or magnetic field perturbations and the nature of the interrogating field will be sensitive to the choice of frequency chosen for the applied current. It is well known that when alternating current is applied to conductors the current tends to be confined to a surface layer whose depth, δ, is measured by the length 1/(ωσμ)½ where σ is the conductivity, μ is the magnetic permeability and ω the angular frequency. An important dimensionless parameter in the characterisation of the field perturbations is the ratio δ/l, where l is a length typical of the flaw dimensions. The electromagnetic field is described as a thin-skin or a thick-skin field according as this ratio is small or large respectively. In practical applications there is a need to model both thin and thick-skin fields. In the examination of surface fatigue cracks in large scale structures fabricated by welding together ferrous steel members surface fatigue cracks with depths of order 1–10 mm have been interrogated with currents at 5–6 KHz at which the skin depth is of order 0·1 mm (Dover, Collins and Michael [1]).

In [2], Fabrikant and his colleagues obtain a closed form solution to a generalized potential problem for a surface of revolution. This they specialize to solve three electrostatic problems for a spherical cap, including one for which the boundary conditions are not axisymmetric. In all three the solutions are expressed in terms of elementary functions.

Maxwell's equations within a dielectric and/or a magnetic medium were first developed macroscopically and must be complemented by constitutive relations to obtain solutions. These relations connect D with E (and with B in optically active material) and H with B (and again with E in optically active material). The atomic and molecular theories of quantum mechanics allow a microscopic approach to derive these constitutive relations where the macroscopic electric and magnetic fields are averages of the microscopic fields e and b. In classical electromagnetic theory Lorentz [1] originally showed how to derive the Maxwell's macroscopic equations from electron theory using microscopic fields obeying the Maxwell's equations in vacuo but coupled to electronic and ionic sources. There are two distinct steps in this procedure. The first introduces microscopic polarization fields, both electric amd magnetic, p and m from which microscopic electric displacement vector field d and auxiliary magnetic field h are simply constructed. The resulting equations for the microscopic fields e, b, d, and h are called the atomic field equations. The second step is the statistical one where the macroscopic fields E, B, D, and H are defined as averages of the microscopic fields and these macroscopic fields are then shown to obey the phenomenological macroscopic Maxwell's equations. A historical appraisal may be found in the recent book by de Groot [2].