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We present a simple algorithm for differentiable rendering of surfaces represented by Signed Distance Fields (SDF), which makes it easy to integrate rendering into gradient-based optimization pipelines. To tackle visibility-related derivatives that make rendering non-differentiable, existing physically based differentiable rendering methods often rely on elaborate guiding data structures or reparameterization with a global impact on variance. In this article, we investigate an alternative that embraces nonzero bias in exchange for low variance and architectural simplicity. Our method expands the lower-dimensional boundary integral into a thin band that is easy to sample when the underlying surface is represented by an SDF. We demonstrate the performance and robustness of our formulation in end-to-end inverse rendering tasks, where it obtains results that are competitive with or superior to existing work.

Rendering volumetric scattering media, including clouds, fog, smoke, and other complex materials, is crucial for realism in computer graphics. Traditional path tracing, while unbiased, requires many long path samples to converge in scenes with scattering media, and a lot of work is wasted by paths that make a negligible contribution to the image. Methods to make better use of the information learned during path tracing range from photon mapping to radiance caching, but struggle to support the full range of heterogeneous scattering media. This paper introduces a new volumetric rendering algorithm that extends and adapts the previous \emph{path graph} surface rendering algorithm. Our method leverages the information collected through multiple-scattering transport paths to compute lower-noise estimates, increasing computational efficiency by reducing the required sample count. Our key contributions include an extended path graph for participating media and new aggregation and propagation operators for efficient path reuse in volumes. Compared to previous methods, our approach significantly boosts convergence in scenes with challenging volumetric light transport, including heterogeneous media with high scattering albedos and dense, forward-scattering translucent materials, under complex lighting conditions.

In this work, supersonic premixed H2/air combustion stabilised by a cavity flame-holder in a model scramjet combustor with a Mach 1.5 inflow is studied via direct numerical simulations. By applying turbulent and laminar inlet condition separately, we compare the flame stabilisation characteristics between these two cases to study the effect of inflow turbulence. The ignition and flame propagation process are similar in both cases.After combustion in the area near the cavity reaches quasi-stationary state, the results show that with inflow turbulence more robust vortices are developed in cavity shear layer and near the aft wall, resulting in a thicker reaction zone and larger flame surface which present more efficient combustion. In addition, the inlet turbulence enhances the entry of fresh mixture and this further supports flame stabilisation near the cavity. However, the fully developed cavity shear layer also leads to greater cavity resistance. As for the flame stabilization, with inlet turbulence more robust recirculation and stronger mass exchange process is observed and promote the radical transport. These results give a preliminary insight into the flame stabilization mechanism. The distribution of progress variable indicates that the flame stabilized toward products side with turbulent inlet.

Robotic manipulation of deformable objects gains great attention due to its wide applications including medical surgery, home assistance, and automatic food preparation. The ability to deform soft objects remains a great challenge for robots due to difficulties in defining the problem mathematically. In this paper, we address the problem of shaping a piece of dough-like deformable material into a 2D target shape presented upfront. We use a 6 degree-of-freedom WidowX-250 Robot Arm equipped with a rolling pin and information collected from an RGB-D camera and a tactile sensor. We present and compare several control policies, including a dough shrinking action, in extensive experiments across three kinds of deformable materials and across three target dough shape sizes, achieving the intersection over union (IoU) of 0.90. Our results show that: i) rolling dough from the highest dough point is more efficient than from the 2D/3D dough centroid; ii) it might be better to stop the roll movement at the current dough boundary as opposed to the target shape outline; iii) the shrink action might be beneficial only if properly tuned with respect to the expand action; and iv) the Play-Doh material is easier to shape to a target shape as compared to Plasticine or Kinetic sand. Video demonstrations of our work are available at https://youtu.be/ZzLMxuITdt4, Comment: To be published in International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems (ICCAS), 2022

In recent years, machine learning (ML) research methods have received increasing attention in the tokamak community. The conventional database (i.e., MDSplus for tokamak) of experimental data has been designed for small group consumption and is mainly aimed at simultaneous visualization of a small amount of data. The ML data access patterns fundamentally differ from traditional data access patterns. The typical MDSplus database is increasingly showing its limitations. We developed a new data management system suitable for tokamak machine learning research based on Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) data. The data management system is based on MongoDB and Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5). Currently, the entire data management has more than 3000 channels of data. The system can provide highly reliable concurrent access. The system includes error correction, MDSplus original data conversion, and high-performance sequence data output. Further, some valuable functions are implemented to accelerate ML model training of fusion, such as bucketing generator, the concatenating buffer, and distributed sequence generation. This data management system is more suitable for fusion machine learning model R\&D than MDSplus, but it can not replace the MDSplus database. The MDSplus database is still the backend for EAST tokamak data acquisition and storage.

Power electronic equipment regulated by the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) organization must pass the relevant steady-state magnetic field immunity test. The main body of magnetic field immunity test is magnetic field generator coil. Through mathematical derivation in this paper, the magnetic field calculation formulas of four-coil configuration under ideal and actual models are obtained. The traditional method of magnetic field performance calculation is compared with the general formula method under the ideal model. A global parameter optimization method based on Lagrange Multiplier by KKT conditions is proposed to obtain the coil parameters of high-uniformity magnetic field. The magnetic field distribution in the uniform zone is revealed by the finite element method. The model analysis is proved to be correct and effective by experimental results. The research of this paper provides a practical scheme for the coil design with high magnetic field and high-quality uniformity.

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) static magnetic field (SMF) test facility requires a DC power supply with low voltage, high current, and high stability. Due to the limitation ofswitching loss, there is a contradiction between the output current capability and the output ripple. Large output current usually leads to low switching frequency, and low switching frequency will generate a large number of harmonics. To solve the problems, a topology based on the interleaving parallel buck converter is used and tested in this paper. Moreover, the topology is realized with only a small number of switching metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs). This article introduces the system design scheme and control method in detail. The analysis of harmonic and simulation are carried out. The validity of proposed scheme and control strategy were confirmed by experiments, the power supply system can supply large current of 15kA and has ability of low ripple.

Inter-component communication (ICC) is a widely used mechanism in mobile apps, which enables message-based control flow transferring and data passing between Android components. Effective ICC resolution requires precisely identifying entry points, analyzing data values of ICC fields, modeling related framework APIs, etc. Due to various control-flow- and data-flow-related characteristics involved and the lack of oracles for real-world apps, the comprehensive evaluation of ICC resolution techniques is challenging. To fill this gap, we collect multiple-type benchmark suites with 4,104 apps, covering hand-made apps, open-source, and commercial ones. Considering their differences, various evaluation metrics, e.g., number count, graph structure, and reliable oracle based metrics, are adopted on-demand. As the oracle for real-world apps is unavailable, we design a dynamic analysis approach to extract the real ICC links triggered during GUI exploration. By auditing the code implementations, we carefully check the extracted ICCs and confirm 1,680 ones to form a reliable oracle set, in which each ICC is labeled with 25 code characteristic tags. The evaluation performed on six state-of-the-art ICC resolution tools shows that 1) the completeness of static ICC resolution results on real-world apps is not satisfactory, as up to 38%-85% ICCs are missed by tools; 2) many wrongly reported ICCs are sent from or received by only a few components and the graph structure information can help the identification; 3) the efficiency of fundamental tools, like ICC resolution ones, should be optimized in both engineering and research aspects. By investigating both the missed and wrongly reported ICCs, we discuss the strengths of different tools for users and summarize eight common FN/FP patterns in ICC resolution for tool developers.

The scale-resolving simulation of high speed compressible flow through direct numerical simulation (DNS) or large eddy simulation (LES) requires shock-capturing schemes to be more accurate for resolving broadband turbulence and robust for capturing strong shock waves. In this work, we develop a new paradigm of dissipation-controllable, shock capturing scheme to resolve multi-scale flow structures in high speed compressible flow. This novel paradigm of shock-capturing scheme is named as PnTm-BVD-CD. The proposed PnTm-BVD-CD scheme has following desirable properties. First, it can capture large-scale discontinuous structures such as strong shock waves without obvious non-physical oscillations while resolving sharp contact, material interface and shear layer. Secondly, the numerical dissipation property of PnTm-BVD-CD can be effectively controlled between n+1 order upwind-biased scheme and non-dissipative n+2 order central scheme through a simple tunable parameter $\lambda$. Thirdly, with $\lambda=0.5$ the scheme can recover to n+2 order non-dissipative central interpolation for smooth solution over all wavenumber, which is preferable for solving small-scale structures in DNS as well as resolvable-scale in explicit LES. Finally, the under-resolved small-scale can be solved with dissipation controllable algorithm through so-called implicit LES (ILES) approach.

In numerical investigations of stringent problems in science and engineering research, non-physical negative density or pressure may emerge and cause blow-ups of the computation. We build on the realization that the positivity of density and pressure can be preserved in an efficient way of exploiting the advantage of discontinuous Galerkin and finite volume (DG/FV) hybrid computation framework. We thus present an effective and simple method with great practical significance to maintain the positivity of density and pressure in solving the reactive Euler equations. The approach is able to maximize the multiscale capability of the DG method by achieving both positivity-preserving and oscillation-free solution in the subgrid level. In the designed scheme, a priori detection and computation with hyperbolic tangent function prevent the occurrence of negativity in the flux evaluation, while a posteriori detection and computation with the first-order Godunov scheme guarantee the positivity of subcell solution. The a priori computation achieves bounded reconstruction and less oscillatory solution so that the a posteriori computation can be active in few cells where the extremely complex computation condition appears. Furthermore, the valuable information from the reconstruction process is utilized to design the indication strategy that identifies the DG and FV cells, and the technique of adaptively choosing reconstruction candidates is adopted to overcome the excessive numerical dissipation in the shock-capturing scheme. Numerical tests, including demanding examples in stiff detonation simulation, demonstrate the positivity-preserving, non-oscillatory and subcell resolution property of the present method.

Solving compressible flows containing discontinuities remains a major challenge for numerical methods especially on unstructured grids. Thus in this work, we make contributions to shock capturing schemes on unstructured grids with aim of resolving discontinuities with low numerical dissipation. Different from conventional shock capturing schemes which only use polynomials as interpolation functions on unstructured grids, the proposed scheme employs the linear polynomial as well as non-polynomial as reconstruction candidates. For linear polynomial, the second order MUSCL scheme with the MLP (Multi-dimensional Limiting Process) slope limiter is adopted. The multi-dimensional THINC (Tangent of Hyperbola for INterface Capturing) function with quadratic surface representation and Gaussian quadrature, so-called THINC/QQ, is used as the non-polynomial reconstruction candidate. With these reconstruction candidates, a multi-stage boundary variation diminishing (BVD) algorithm which aims to minimize numerical dissipation is designed on unstructured grids to select the final reconstruction function. The resulted shock capturing scheme is named as MUSCL-THINC/QQ-BVD. The performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through solving compressible single-phase and multi-phase problems where the discontinuity is the typical flow structure. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme is capable of capturing sharp discontinuous profiles without numerical oscillations as well as resolving vortices associated with Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities along shear layers and material interfaces. In comparison with schemes only replying on high order polynomials, the proposed scheme shows significant improvement of resolution across discontinuities. Thus, this work provides an accurate and robust shock-capturing scheme to resolve discontinuities in compressible flows., Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures