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In physics, a force is an influence that can cause an object to change its velocity, i.e., to accelerate, unless counterbalanced by other forces. The concept of force makes the everyday notion of pushing or pulling mathematically precise. Because the magnitude and direction of a force are both important, force is a vector quantity. It is measured in the SI unit of newton (N) and often represented by the symbol F. Force plays a central role in classical mechanics, figuring in all three of Newton's laws of motion, which specify that the force on an object is equal to the product of the object's mass and the acceleration that it undergoes. Types of forces often encountered in classical mechanics include elastic, frictional, contact or "normal" forces, and gravitational. The rotational version of force is torque, which produces changes in the rotational speed of an object. In an extended body, each part often applies forces on the adjacent parts; the distribution of such forces through

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Contactless optical trapping and manipulation of nanoparticles utilizing SIBA mechanism and EDL force

Mahdi Sahafi

On-chip optical tweezers based on evanescent fields overcome the diffraction limit of the free-space optical tweezers and can be a promising technique for developing lab-on-a-chip devices. While such trapping allows for low-cost and precise manipulation, it suffers from unavoidable contact with the device surface, which eliminates one of the major advantages of the optical trapping. Here, we use a 1D photonic crystal cavity to trap nanoparticles and propose a novel method to control and manipulate the particle distance from the cavity utilizing a self-induced back-action (SIBA) mechanism and electrical-double-layer (EDL) force. It is numerically shown that a 200 nm radius silica particle can be trapped near the cavity with a potential well deeper than 178k(B)T by 1 mW of input power without any contact with the surface and easily moved vertically with nanometer precision by wavelength detuning. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

2019

An Adaptive Landing Gear for Extending the Operational Range of Helicopters

Tobias Löw

Conventional skid or wheel based helicopter landing gears severely limit off-field landing possibilities, which are crucial when operating in scenarios such as mountain rescue. In this context, slopes beyond 8° and small obstacles can already pose a substantial hazard. An adaptive landing gear is proposed to overcome these limitations. It consists of four legs with one degree of freedom each. The total weight was minimized to demonstrate economic practicability. This was achieved by an innovative actuation, composed of a parallel arrangement of motor and brake, which relieves the motor from large impact loads during hard landings. The loads are alleviated by a spring-damper system acting in series to the actuation. Each leg is individually force controlled for optimal load distribution on compliant ground and to avoid tipping. The operation of the legs is fully autonomous during the landing phase. A prototype was designed and successfully tested on an unmanned helicopter with a maximum take-off weight of 78 kg. Finally, the implementation of the landing gear concept on aircraft of various scales was discussed.

IEEE2019

On surface tension modelling using the level set method

The paper describes and compares the performance of two options for numerically representing the surface tension force in combination with the level set interface-tracking method. In both models, the surface tension is represented as a body force, concentrated near the interface, but the technical implementation is different: the first model is based on a traditional level set approach in which the force is distributed in a band around the interface using a regularized delta function, whereas in the second, the force is partly distributed in a band around the interface and partly localized to the actual computational cells containing the interface. A comparative Study, involving analysis of several two-phase flows with moving interfaces, shows that in general the two surface tension models produce results of similar accuracy. However, in the particular case of merging and pinching-off of interfaces, the traditional level set model of surface tension produces an error that results in non-converging solutions for film-like interfaces (i.e. ones involving large contact areas). In contrast, the second model, based on the localized representation of the surface tension force, displays consistent first-order convergence.

Wiley-Blackwell2009

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