Search results for "Power-law"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
Unique sleep-stage transitions determined by obstructive sleep apnea severity, age and gender
2019
In obstructive sleep apnea, patients' sleep is fragmented leading to excessive daytime sleepiness and co-morbidities like arterial hypertension. However, traditional metrics are not always directly correlated with daytime sleepiness, and the association between traditional sleep quality metrics like sleep duration and arterial hypertension is still ambiguous. In a development cohort, we analysed hypnograms from mild (n = 213), moderate (n = 235) and severe (n = 277) obstructive sleep apnea patients as well as healthy controls (n = 105) from the European Sleep Apnea Database. We assessed sleep by the analysis of two-step transitions depending on obstructive sleep apnea severity and anthropom…
Fractional-order constitutive equations in mechanics and thermodynamics
2019
This chapter is devoted to the application of fractional calculus in mechanics of materials and thermodynamics. The use of fractional calculus in mechanics is related to the definition of fractional-order constitutive equations leading to the class of fractional hereditariness. In this regard, a brief description of the classical rheological models of material hereditariness and a comparison with the fractional elements are reported. It is shown that a rheological hierarchy corresponding to the fractional order stress-strain relation may be defined. Such a model provides a multi-scale mechanical picture of the power-law hereditariness and it leads toward an unique definition of material fre…
Power-Laws hereditariness of biomimetic ceramics for cranioplasty neurosurgery
2019
Abstract We discuss the hereditary behavior of hydroxyapatite-based composites used for cranioplasty surgery in the context of material isotropy. We classify mixtures of collagen and hydroxiapatite composites as biomimetic ceramic composites with hereditary properties modeled by fractional-order calculus. We assume isotropy of the biomimetic ceramic is assumed and provide thermodynamic of restrictions for the material parameters. We exploit the proposed formulation of the fractional-order isotropic hereditariness further by means of a novel mechanical hierarchy corresponding exactly to the three-dimensional fractional-order constitutive model introduced.
Stochastic dynamics of nonlinear systems with a fractional power-law nonlinear term: The fractional calculus approach
2011
Fractional power-law nonlinear drift arises in many applications of engineering interest, as in structures with nonlinear fluid viscous–elastic dampers. The probabilistic characterization of such structures under external Gaussian white noise excitation is still an open problem. This paper addresses the solution of such a nonlinear system providing the equation governing the evolution of the characteristic function, which involves the Riesz fractional operator. An efficient numerical procedure to handle the problem is also proposed.
On the hardness of optimization in power-law graphs
2008
Our motivation for this work is the remarkable discovery that many large-scale real-world graphs ranging from Internet and World Wide Web to social and biological networks appear to exhibit a power-law distribution: the number of nodes y"i of a given degree i is proportional to i^-^@b where @b>0 is a constant that depends on the application domain. There is practical evidence that combinatorial optimization in power-law graphs is easier than in general graphs, prompting the basic theoretical question: Is combinatorial optimization in power-law graphs easy? Does the answer depend on the power-law exponent @b? Our main result is the proof that many classical NP-hard graph-theoretic optimizati…
Analysis of pipeline accidents in the United States from 1968 to 2009
2014
Pipelines are responsible for the transportation of a significant portion of the U.S. energy supply. Unfortunately, pipeline failures are common and the consequences can be catastrophic. Drawing on data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that covers approximately 40,000 incidents from 1968 to 2009, this paper explores the trends, causes and consequences of natural gas and hazardous liquid pipeline accidents. The analysis indicates that fatalities and injuries from pipeline accidents are generally decreasing over time, while property damage and, in some cases, the numbers of incidents are increasing over time. In five of the ten cases considered in this p…
THE MECHANICAL MODEL OF FRACTIONAL VISCOELASTICITY
2010
Viscoelastic materials have been more and more used nowadays for their low-cost productions as well as for their dissipative capabilities that may be coupled with others, more performing materials, to form complex-type engineering elements. The main feature of viscoelastic behavior is the relaxation of the stress state and the creep of the strain field that may be experienced, respectively, in hard or soft test devices. Such phenomenological consideration has been extensively analyzed yet at the beginning of the twentieth century and simple rheological models representing linear, constitutive, stress-velocity relations of the studied material have been proposed. Moreover the rheological rel…
Low-cost approximate reconstructing of heterogeneous microstructures
2016
We propose an approximate reconstruction of random heterogeneous microstructures using the two-exponent power-law (TEPL). This rule originates from the entropic descriptor (ED) that is a multi-scale measure of spatial inhomogeneity for a given microstructure. A digitized target sample is a cube of linear size L in voxels. Then, a number of trial configurations can be generated by a model of overlapping spheres of a fixed radius, which are randomly distributed on a regular lattice. The TEPL describes the averaged maximum of the ED as a function of the phase concentration and the radius. Thus, it can be used to determine the radius. The suggested approach is tested on surrogate samples of cer…
A discrete mechanical model of fractional hereditary materials
2013
Fractional hereditary materials are characterized for the presence, in the stress-strain relations, of fractional-order operators with order beta a[0,1]. In Di Paola and Zingales (J. Rheol. 56(5):983-1004, 2012) exact mechanical models of such materials have been extensively discussed obtaining two intervals for beta: (i) Elasto-Viscous (EV) materials for 0a parts per thousand currency sign beta a parts per thousand currency sign1/2; (ii) Visco-Elastic (VE) materials for 1/2a parts per thousand currency sign beta a parts per thousand currency sign1. These two ranges correspond to different continuous mechanical models. In this paper a discretization scheme based upon the continuous models p…
Exact mechanical models of fractional hereditary materials
2012
Fractional Viscoelasticity is referred to materials, whose constitutive law involves fractional derivatives of order β R such that 0 β 1. In this paper, two mechanical models with stress-strain relation exactly restituting fractional operators, respectively, in ranges 0 β 1 / 2 and 1 / 2 β 1 are presented. It is shown that, in the former case, the mechanical model is described by an ideal indefinite massless viscous fluid resting on a bed of independent springs (Winkler model), while, in the latter case it is a shear-type indefinite cantilever resting on a bed of independent viscous dashpots. The law of variation of all mechanical characteristics is of power-law type, strictly related to th…