No abstract

International audienceThis paper investigates the use of TELEMAC (a Finite Element-based hydrodynamics suite) on massively parallel computer architectures. The performance of TELEMAC is illustrated using two separate test cases. The first considers the use of TELEMAC-2D for simulating tidal currents in the vicinity of a renewable energy marine turbine farm, in order to provide reliable estimates of the expected energy yield. The second demonstrates the use of TELEMAC-3D for assessing the effects of fresh water discharges on the salinity distribution in a coastal lagoon. The simulations have been performed with meshes ranging from 2 to 12 million elements, and good scaling performance is achieved on a variety of different computer architectures

Abstract-Despite all the dynamics methods effectively used in robotics control, few tackle the intricacies of the human musculoskeletal system itself. During movements, a huge amount of energy can be stored passively in the biomechanics of the muscle system. Controlling such a system in a way that takes advantage of the stored energy has lead to the Equilibrium-point hypothesis (EPH). In this paper, we propose a two-phase model based on the EPH. Our model is simple and general enough to be extended to various motions over all body parts. In the first phase, gradient descent is used to obtain one kinematics endpoint in joint space, given a task in Cartesian space. In the second phase where the movements are actually executed, we use damped springs to simulate muscles to drive the limb joints. The model is demonstrated by a humanoid doing walking, reaching, and grasping.

Biomimetic motions are derived from the many different functional materials and/or intricate and highly organized structure of the biological material from the molecular to the nanoscale, microscale and macroscale.

The conventional Navier-Stokes-Fourier equations with no-slip boundary conditions are unable to capture the phenomenon of gas thermal transpiration. While kinetic approaches such as the direct simulation Monte Carlo method and direct solution of the Boltzmann equation can predict thermal transpiration, these methods are often beyond the reach of current computer technology, especially for complex three-dimensional flows. We present a computationally efficient nonequilibrium thermal lattice Boltzmann model for simulating temperature-gradient-induced flows. The good agreement between our model and kinetic approaches demonstrates the capabilities of the proposed lattice Boltzmann method.