Computational Design and 3D Weaving of 2D-Printable Conformal Flexible Electronics Using Harmonic Foliation Theory

This paper proposes a new way of designing and fabricating conformal flexible electronics on free-form surfaces, which can generate woven flexible electronics designs conforming to free-form 3D shapes with 2D printed electronic circuits. Utilizing our recently proposed foliation-based 3D weaving techniques, we can reap unprecedented advantages in conventional 2D electronic printing. The method is based on the foliation theory in differential geometry, which divides a surface into parallel leaves. Given a surface with circuit design, we first calculate a graph-value harmonic map and then create two sets of harmonic foliations perpendicular to each other. As the circuits are processed as the texture on the surface, they are separated and attached to each leaf. The warp and weft threads are then created and manually woven to reconstruct the surface and reconnect the circuits. Notably, The circuits are printed in 2D, which uniquely differentiates the proposed method from others. Compared with costly conformal 3D electronic printing methods requiring 5-axis CNC machines, our method is more reliable, more efficient, and economical. Moreover, the Harmonic foliation theory assures smoothness and orthogonality between every pair of woven yarns, which guarantees the precision of the flexible electronics woven on the surface. The proposed method provides an alternative solution to the design and physical realization of surface electronic textiles for various applications, including wearable electronics, sheet metal craft, architectural designs, and smart woven-composite parts with conformal sensors in the automotive and aerospace industry. The performance of the proposed method is depicted using two examples.

Harmonic branched coverings and uniformization of CAT(k) spheres

Let S be a surface with a metric d satisfying an upper curvature bound in the sense of Alexandrov (i.e. via triangle comparison). We show that an almost conformal harmonic map from a surface into ( S , d ) {(S,d)} is a branched covering. As a consequence, if ( S , d ) {(S,d)} is homeomorphically equivalent to the 2-sphere 𝕊 2 {\mathbb{S}^{2}} , then it is conformally equivalent to 𝕊 2 {\mathbb{S}^{2}} .

Nematic–Isotropic Phase Transition in Liquid Crystals: A Variational Derivation of Effective Geometric Motions

In this work, we study the nematic–isotropic phase transition based on the dynamics of the Landau–De Gennes theory of liquid crystals. At the critical temperature, the Landau–De Gennes bulk potential favors the isotropic phase and nematic phase equally. When the elastic coefficient is much smaller than that of the bulk potential, a scaling limit can be derived by formal asymptotic expansions: the solution gradient concentrates on a closed surface evolving by mean curvature flow. Moreover, on one side of the surface the solution tends to the nematic phase which is governed by the harmonic map heat flow into the sphere while on the other side, it tends to the isotropic phase. To rigorously justify such a scaling limit, we prove a convergence result by combining weak convergence methods and the modulated energy method. Our proof applies as long as the limiting mean curvature flow remains smooth.

$$\alpha $$-Dirac-harmonic maps from closed surfaces

Abstract$$\alpha $$ α -Dirac-harmonic maps are variations of Dirac-harmonic maps, analogous to $$\alpha $$ α -harmonic maps that were introduced by Sacks–Uhlenbeck to attack the existence problem for harmonic maps from closed surfaces. For $$\alpha >1$$ α > 1 , the latter are known to satisfy a Palais–Smale condition, and so, the technique of Sacks–Uhlenbeck consists in constructing $$\alpha $$ α -harmonic maps for $$\alpha >1$$ α > 1 and then letting $$\alpha \rightarrow 1$$ α → 1 . The extension of this scheme to Dirac-harmonic maps meets with several difficulties, and in this paper, we start attacking those. We first prove the existence of nontrivial perturbed $$\alpha $$ α -Dirac-harmonic maps when the target manifold has nonpositive curvature. The regularity theorem then shows that they are actually smooth if the perturbation function is smooth. By $$\varepsilon $$ ε -regularity and suitable perturbations, we can then show that such a sequence of perturbed $$\alpha $$ α -Dirac-harmonic maps converges to a smooth coupled $$\alpha $$ α -Dirac-harmonic map.

Existence of (Dirac-)harmonic Maps from Degenerating (Spin) Surfaces

We study the existence of harmonic maps and Dirac-harmonic maps from degenerating surfaces to a nonpositive curved manifold via the scheme of Sacks and Uhlenbeck. By choosing a suitable sequence of $$\alpha $$ α -(Dirac-)harmonic maps from a sequence of suitable closed surfaces degenerating to a hyperbolic surface, we get the convergence and a cleaner energy identity under the uniformly bounded energy assumption. In this energy identity, there is no energy loss near the punctures. As an application, we obtain an existence result about (Dirac-)harmonic maps from degenerating (spin) surfaces. If the energies of the map parts also stay away from zero, which is a necessary condition, both the limiting harmonic map and Dirac-harmonic map are nontrivial.

Local Regularity for the Harmonic Map and Yang–Mills Heat Flows

We establish new local regularity results for the harmonic map and Yang–Mills heat flows on Riemannian manifolds of dimension greater than 2 and 4, respectively, obtaining criteria for the smooth local extensibility of these flows. As a corollary, we obtain new characterisations of singularity formation and use this to obtain a local estimate on the Hausdorff measure of the singular sets of these flows at the first singular time. Finally, we show that smooth blow-ups at rapidly forming singularities of these flows are necessarily nontrivial and admit a positive lower bound on their heat ball energies. These results crucially depend on some local monotonicity formulæ for these flows recently established by Ecker (Calc Var Partial Differ Equ 23(1):67–81, 2005) and the Afuni (Calc Var 555(1):1–14, 2016; Adv Calc Var 12(2):135–156, 2019).

On Finite Energy Solutions of 4-harmonic and ES-4-harmonic Maps

Abstract4-harmonic and ES-4-harmonic maps are two generalizations of the well-studied harmonic map equation which are both given by a nonlinear elliptic partial differential equation of order eight. Due to the large number of derivatives it is very difficult to find any difference in the qualitative behavior of these two variational problems. In this article we prove that finite energy solutions of both 4-harmonic and ES-4-harmonic maps from Euclidean space must be trivial. However, the energy that we require to be finite is different for 4-harmonic and ES-4-harmonic maps pointing out a first difference between these two variational problems.