The European Physical Journal Special Topics

Self-propelled droplets are a special kind of self-propelled matter that are easily fabricated by standard microfluidic tools and locomote for a certain time without external sources of energy. The typical driving mechanism is a Marangoni flow due to gradients in the interfacial energy on the droplet interface. In this article we review the hydrodynamic prerequisites for self-sustained locomotion and present two examples to realize those conditions for emulsion droplets, i.e. droplets stabilized by a surfactant layer in a surrounding immiscible liquid. One possibility to achieve self-propelled motion relies on chemical reactions affecting the surface active properties of the surfactant molecules. The other relies on micellar solubilization of the droplet phase into the surrounding liquid phase. Remarkable cruising ranges can be achieved in both cases and the relative insensitivity to their own ‘exhausts’ allows to additionally study collective phenomena.

The main issue of this work is related with the design of a class of nonlinear observer in order to synchronize chaotic dynamical systems in a master-slave scheme, considering different initial conditions. The oscillator of Chen is proposed as a benchmark model and a bounded-type observer is proposed to reach synchronicity between both two chaotic systems. The proposed observer contains a proportional and sigmoid form of a bounded function of the synchronization error in order to provide asymptotic synchronization with a satisfactory performance. Some numerical simulations were carrying out in order to show the operation of the proposed methodology, with possible applications to secure data communications issues.

In this work a study through numerical simulation of dendritic growth for the system Fe-Mn under the influence of a forced flow field is presented. The investigations are based on an extension of the quantitative phase-field approach developed by Echebarria et. al. Phy. Rev. E 061604 (2004), to simulate the solidification of Fe-Mn under the influence of a forced flow field. The simulations are performed for isothermal conditions and the investigation concentrates on the effects of forced flow on the dendrite morphology during the growth dynamics. The effects of forced flow on microsegregation are also discussed.

This article comments on the Visioneer (Envisioning a Socio- Economic Knowledge Collider) Project as described in the following white papers [1–3].

In this paper, a new chaotic oscillator consists of a single op-amp, two capacitors, one resistor, one inductor, and memristive diode bridge cascaded with an inductor is proposed. The proposed chaotic oscillator has a line of equilibria. In the new oscillator circuit, negative feedback, i.e. inverting terminal of the op-amp is used, and the non-inverting terminal is grounded. The new oscillator has chaotic, periodic, quasi-periodic behaviours, as seen from the Lyapunov spectrum plots. Some more theoretical and numerical tools are used to present the dynamical behaviours of the new oscillator like bifurcation diagram, phase plot. Further, a non-singular terminal sliding mode control (N-TSMC) is designed for the suppression of the chaotic states of the new oscillator. An application of the new oscillator is shown by designing a chaos-based random number generator. Raspberry Pi 3 is used for the realisation of the random number generator.

Silicon is ubiquitous in our advanced technological society, yet our current understanding of change to its mechanical response at extreme pressures and strain-rates is far from complete. This is due to its brittleness, making recovery experiments difficult. High-power, short-duration, laser-driven, shock compression and recovery experiments on [001] silicon (using impedance-matched momentum traps) unveiled remarkable structural changes observed by transmission electron microscopy. As laser energy increases, corresponding to an increase in peak shock pressure, the following plastic responses are are observed: surface cleavage along {111} planes, dislocations and stacking faults; bands of amorphized material initially forming on crystallographic orientations consistent with dislocation slip; and coarse regions of amorphized material. Molecular dynamics simulations approach equivalent length and time scales to laser experiments and reveal the evolution of shock-induced partial dislocations and their crucial role in the preliminary stages of amorphization. Application of coupled hydrostatic and shear stresses produce amorphization below the hydrostatically determined critical melting pressure under dynamic shock compression.

X-pinches are very good sources of x-rays and can be used for studying radiative properties of high density and temperature plasmas with scale from a few μm to several mm in size. An X-pinch is formed by the touch-crossing of two or more wires between the electrodes of a high-current pulsed-power generator. As a result of current quickly vaporizing and strongly ionizing the wire material, X-pinch yields short (few nsec) x-ray bursts from one or few bright plasma spots near the wire cross point. Other distinct features of X-pinches are strong electron beams, which make them attractive objects for x-ray spectropolarimetry, as well as plasmas jets for astrophysical applications. Recently, we spectroscopically studied x-ray L-shell and K-shell radiation from variety of X-pinches from different materials and load configurations. In the present work, the results of x-ray spectroscopy and imaging of X-pinches from stainless steel are presented. The application of these results to astrophysics is highlighted.