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Some classes of bone fractures are routinely stabilized and aligned by the use of intramedullary nails. The identification of the pose, i.e., the position and the orientation of the drill holes hidden by a bone and the tissue is currently obtained by X-ray with all the well-known disadvantages of this technology. The idea of substituting this methodology with an eddy-current-based one has been explored in the previous work, but, in spite of interesting features, the developed technique suffered from some shortcomings. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that is very computationally efficient and provides real-time identification performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 3-D mortar domain decomposition approach based on the cell method (CM) for analyzing electro-thermal contact problems is presented. The computational domain is subdivided into non-overlapping regions discretized according to the CM, where variables and field equations are expressed directly in integral form suitable for coupling the contact problem to the electro-thermal one in the bulk regions. Voltage and temperature discontinuities at contact interfaces are modeled by diagonal conductance matrices. The electrical and thermal continuity between contacting regions is enforced by means of dual Lagrange multipliers. Nonlinear equations are cast into a saddle-point form ensuring existence and uniqueness of the solution. Problem size is reduced by the Schur complement approach. A 3-D finite-element software for multiphysics problems is used to validate the mortar cell method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling polymeric proton-exchange membranes (PEM) at the heart of fuel cells requires the solution of highly nonlinear partial differential equations in very thin and flat domains. Recently, the Proper Generalized Decomposition methods have emerged as particularly promising methods for these types of problems. This paper introduces the basics of this novel class of approaches to PEM modeling and highlights their potential benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Competitive costs, rapid recharge, and high-energy density make small direct methanol fuel cells promising power sources for electronic equipment. Cell performance depends on several parameters, including current density, methanol concentration, and catalyst loadings. In this paper, a 1-D analytical model able to simulate the cell performance is interfaced to a stochastic optimization procedure in order to maximize the battery duration while minimizing methanol crossover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cell Method is an approach to the numerical calculation of fields that has been recently applied to the coupled computation of electric and thermal conduction using a linear interpolation of both the electric and temperature fields. In this paper a quadratic interpolation approach is presented. It is aimed at the achievement of an accurate field distribution computation particularly in complex domains such as biological structures. Such condition are encountered in the prediction of the thermal distribution obtained in hyper-thermic treatments. Some results for a real case are presented in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]