Modeling and Dynamic Characteristics of a Novel High-Pressure and Large-Flow Water Hydraulic Proportional Valve

In the field of fully mechanized coal mining equipment, the hydraulic valve used in the hydraulic support is an on/off directional valve. There are many problems caused by the valve such as large pressure shock and discontinuous flow control. Therefore, a novel two-position three-way hydraulic proportional valve suitable for high-pressure and large-flow conditions is proposed to overcome the above problems. The novel valve utilizes a two-stage structure and the displacement follow-up principle is adopted between the pilot stage and the main stage to meet proportional control. In this paper, a simulation model of the novel proportional valve was established after a simplified analysis of the structural principle. Its reliability and the feasibility of the design were verified by the test results under different working conditions. Then, the step response characteristics of the proportional valve under different strokes were predicted and analyzed. Nonlinear characteristics were presented, and the closing time was shorter than the opening time because of the influence of nonlinear flow force. Under different ramp signals, the displacement of the main inlet spool was always approximately equal to the displacement of the pilot stage. Then, the motion relationship between the pilot stage and the main stage was studied, and the influence of the structural parameters on the stability was analyzed.

Global optimization for the multilevel European gas market system with nonlinear flow models on trees

The European gas market is implemented as an entry-exit system, which aims to decouple transport and trading of gas. It has been modeled in the literature as a multilevel problem, which contains a nonlinear flow model of gas physics. Besides the multilevel structure and the nonlinear flow model, the computation of so-called technical capacities is another major challenge. These lead to nonlinear adjustable robust constraints that are computationally intractable in general. We provide techniques to equivalently reformulate these nonlinear adjustable constraints as finitely many convex constraints including integer variables in the case that the underlying network is tree-shaped. We further derive additional combinatorial constraints that significantly speed up the solution process. Using our results, we can recast the multilevel model as a single-level nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear problem, which we then solve on a real-world network, namely the Greek gas network, to global optimality. Overall, this is the first time that the considered multilevel entry-exit system can be solved for a real-world sized network and a nonlinear flow model.

Heat Transfer and Flow Characteristics of Pseudoplastic Nanomaterial Liquid Flowing over the Slender Cylinder with Variable Characteristics

The present article investigates heat transfer and pseudoplastic nanomaterial liquid flow over a vertical thin cylinder. The Buongiorno model is used for this analysis. The problem gains more significance when temperature-dependent variable viscosity is taken into account. Using suitable similarity variables, nonlinear flow equations are first converted into ordinary differential equations. The generating structure is solved by the MATLAB BVP4C algorithm. Newly developed physical parameters are focused. It is observed that the heat transfer rate and the skin friction coefficient is increased remarkably because of mixing nano-particles in the base fluid by considering γb=1, 2, 3, 4 and λ=1, 1.5, 2, 2.5,3. It is found that the temperature field increases by inclining the values of thermophoresis and Brownian motion parameters. It is also evaluated that the velocity field decreases by increasing the values of the curvature parameter, Weissenberg number and buoyancy ratio characteristics.

Navigation of micro-swimmers in steady flow: the importance of symmetries

Marine micro-organisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies is that the time series of environmental cues in nonlinear flow is complex and that it depends on the decisions taken by the organism. One way of determining and evaluating optimal strategies is reinforcement learning. In a proof-of-principle study, Colabrese et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 118, 2017, 158004) used this method to find out how a micro-swimmer in a vortex flow can navigate towards the surface as quickly as possible, given a fixed swimming speed. The swimmer measured its instantaneous swimming direction and the local flow vorticity in the laboratory frame, and reacted to these cues by swimming either left, right, up or down. However, usually a motile micro-organism measures the local flow rather than global information, and it can only react in relation to the local flow because, in general, it cannot access global information (such as up or down in the laboratory frame). Here we analyse optimal strategies with local signals and actions that do not refer to the laboratory frame. We demonstrate that symmetry breaking is required to find such strategies. Using reinforcement learning, we analyse the emerging strategies for different sets of environmental cues that micro-organisms are known to measure.

Plume spreading test case for coastal ocean models

We present a test case of river plume spreading to evaluate numerical methods used in coastal ocean modeling. It includes an estuary–shelf system whose dynamics combine nonlinear flow regimes with sharp frontal boundaries and linear regimes with cross-shore geostrophic balance. This system is highly sensitive to physical or numerical dissipation and mixing. The main characteristics of the plume dynamics are predicted analytically but are difficult to reproduce numerically because of numerical mixing present in the models. Our test case reveals the level of numerical mixing as well as the ability of models to reproduce nonlinear processes and frontal zone dynamics. We document numerical solutions for the Thetis and FESOM-C models on an unstructured triangular mesh, as well as ones for the GETM and FESOM-C models on a quadrilateral mesh. We propose an analysis of simulated plume spreading which may be useful in more general studies of plume dynamics. The major result of our comparative study is that accuracy in reproducing the analytical solution depends less on the type of model discretization or computational grid than it does on the type of advection scheme.