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The paper considers the problem of transverse impact on a thin preloaded fiber. The commonly accepted theory of transverse impact on a thin fiber is based on the classical works of Rakhmatulin and Smith. The simple relations obtained from the Rakhmatulin – Smith theory are widely used in engineering practice. However, there are numerous evidences that experimental results may differ significantly from estimations based on these relations. A brief overview of the factors that cause the differences is given in this article.

This paper focuses on the shear wave velocity, as it is the only feature that can be directly observed and measured using high-speed cameras or similar methods. The influence of the fiber preload on the wave speed is considered. This factor is important, since it inevitably arises in the experimental results. The reliable fastening and precise positioning of the fiber during the experiments requires its preload. This work shows that the preload significantly affects the shear wave velocity in the impacted fiber.

Numerical calculations were performed for Kevlar 29 and Spectra 1000 yarns. Shear wave velocities are obtained for different levels of initial tension. A direct comparison of numerical results and analytical estimations with experimental data is presented. The speed of the transverse wave in free and preloaded fibers differed by a factor of two for the setup parameters considered. This fact demonstrates that measurements based on high-speed imaging and analysis of the observed shear waves should take into account the preload of the fibers.

This paper proposes a formula for a quick estimation of the shear wave velocity in preloaded fibers. The formula is obtained from the basic relations of the Rakhmatulin – Smith theory under the assumption of a large initial deformation of the fiber. The formula can give significantly better results than the classical approximation, this fact is demonstrated using the data for preloaded Kevlar 29 and Spectra 1000. The paper also shows that direct numerical calculation has better corresponding with the experimental data than any of the considered analytical estimations.

The paper considers a method for studying panel data based on the use of agglomerative hierarchical clustering — grouping objects based on the similarities and differences in their features into a hierarchy of clusters nested into each other. We used 2 alternative methods for calculating Euclidean distances between objects — the distance between the values averaged over observation interval, and the distance using data for all considered years. Three alternative methods for calculating the distances between clusters were compared. In the first case, the distance between the nearest elements from two clusters is considered to be distance between these clusters, in the second — the average over pairs of elements, in the third — the distance between the most distant elements. The efficiency of using two clustering quality indices, the Dunn and Silhouette index, was studied to select the optimal number of clusters and evaluate the statistical significance of the obtained solutions. The method of assessing statistical reliability of cluster structure consisted in comparing the quality of clustering on a real sample with the quality of clustering on artificially generated samples of panel data with the same number of objects, features and lengths of time series. Generation was made from a fixed probability distribution. At the same time, simulation methods imitating Gaussian white noise and random walk were used. Calculations with the Silhouette index showed that a random walk is characterized not only by spurious regression, but also by “spurious clustering”. Clustering was considered reliable for a given number of selected clusters if the index value on the real sample turned out to be greater than the value of the 95% quantile for artificial data. A set of time series of indicators characterizing production in the regions of the Russian Federation was used as a sample of real data. For these data only Silhouette shows reliable clustering at the level p < 0.05. Calculations also showed that index values for real data are generally closer to values for random walks than for white noise, but it have significant differences from both. Since three-dimensional feature space is used, the quality of clustering was also evaluated visually. Visually, one can distinguish clusters of points located close to each other, also distinguished as clusters by the applied hierarchical clustering algorithm.

Mechanical properties of eukaryotic cells play an important role in life cycle conditions and in the development of pathological processes. In this paper we discuss the problem of parameters identification and verification of viscoelastic constitutive models based on force spectroscopy data of living cells. It is proposed to use one-dimensional continuous wavelet transform to calculate the relaxation function. Analytical calculations and the results of numerical simulation are given, which allow to obtain relaxation functions similar to each other on the basis of experimentally determined force curves and theoretical stress-strain relationships using wavelet differentiation algorithms. Test examples demonstrating correctness of software implementation of the proposed algorithms are analyzed. The cell models are considered, on the example of which the application of the proposed procedure of identification and verification of their parameters is demonstrated. Among them are a structural-mechanical model with parallel connected fractional elements, which is currently the most adequate in terms of compliance with atomic force microscopy data of a wide class of cells, and a new statistical-thermodynamic model, which is not inferior in descriptive capabilities to models with fractional derivatives, but has a clearer physical meaning. For the statistical-thermodynamic model, the procedure of its construction is described in detail, which includes the following. Introduction of a structural variable, the order parameter, to describe the orientation properties of the cell cytoskeleton. Setting and solving the statistical problem for the ensemble of actin filaments of a representative cell volume with respect to this variable. Establishment of the type of free energy depending on the order parameter, temperature and external load. It is also proposed to use an oriented-viscous-elastic body as a model of a representative element of the cell. Following the theory of linear thermodynamics, evolutionary equations describing the mechanical behavior of the representative volume of the cell are obtained, which satisfy the basic thermodynamic laws. The problem of optimizing the parameters of the statisticalthermodynamic model of the cell, which can be compared both with experimental data and with the results of simulations based on other mathematical models, is also posed and solved. The viscoelastic characteristics of cells are determined on the basis of comparison with literature data.

Getting a qualified medical examination can be difficult for people in remote areas because medical staff available can either be inaccessible or it might lack expert knowledge at proper level. Telemedicine technologies can help in such situations. On one hand, such technologies allow highly qualified doctors to consult remotely, thereby increasing the quality of diagnosis and plan treatment. On the other hand, computer-aided analysis of the research results, anamnesis and information on similar cases assist medical staff in their routine activities and decision-making.

Creating telemedicine system for a particular domain is a laborious process. It’s not sufficient to pick proper medical experts and to fill the knowledge base of the analytical module. It’s also necessary to organize the entire infrastructure of the system to meet the requirements in terms of reliability, fault tolerance, protection of personal data and so on. Tools with reusable infrastructure elements, which are common to such systems, are able to decrease the amount of work needed for the development of telemedicine systems.

An interactive tool for creating distributed telemedicine systems is described in the article. A list of requirements for the systems is presented; structural solutions for meeting the requirements are suggested. A composition of such elements applicable for distributed systems is described in the article. A cardiac telemedicine system is described as a foundation of the tool

The paper presents the results of applying a scheme of very high accuracy and resolution to obtain numerical solutions of the Navier – Stokes equations of a compressible gas describing the occurrence and development of instability of a two-dimensional laminar boundary layer on a flat plate. The peculiarity of the conducted studies is the absence of commonly used artificial exciters of instability in the implementation of direct numerical modeling. The multioperator scheme used made it possible to observe the subtle effects of the birth of unstable modes and the complex nature of their development caused presumably by its small approximation errors. A brief description of the scheme design and its main properties is given. The formulation of the problem and the method of obtaining initial data are described, which makes it possible to observe the established non-stationary regime fairly quickly. A technique is given that allows detecting flow fluctuations with amplitudes many orders of magnitude smaller than its average values. A time-dependent picture of the appearance of packets of Tollmien – Schlichting waves with varying intensity in the vicinity of the leading edge of the plate and their downstream propagation is presented. The presented amplitude spectra with expanding peak values in the downstream regions indicate the excitation of new unstable modes other than those occurring in the vicinity of the leading edge. The analysis of the evolution of instability waves in time and space showed agreement with the main conclusions of the linear theory. The numerical solutions obtained seem to describe for the first time the complete scenario of the possible development of Tollmien – Schlichting instability, which often plays an essential role at the initial stage of the laminar-turbulent transition. They open up the possibilities of full-scale numerical modeling of this process, which is extremely important for practice, with a similar study of the spatial boundary layer.

Variational inequalities constitute a broad class of problems with applications in a number of fields, including game theory, economics, and machine learning. Today’s practical applications of VIs are becoming increasingly computationally demanding. It is therefore necessary to employ distributed computations to solve such problems in a reasonable time. In this context, workers have to exchange data with each other, which creates a communication bottleneck. There are three main techniques to reduce the cost and the number of communications: the similarity of local operators, the compression of messages and the use of local steps on devices. There is an algorithm that uses all of these techniques to solve the VI problem and outperforms all previous methods in terms of communication complexity. However, this algorithm is limited to unbiased compression. Meanwhile, biased (contractive) compression leads to better results in practice, but it requires additional modifications within an algorithm and more effort to prove the convergence. In this work, we develop a new algorithm that solves distributed VI problems using data similarity, contractive compression and local steps on devices, derive the theoretical convergence of such an algorithm, and perform some experiments to show the applicability of the method.