Modern Physics Letters B

Using the extended Nagel–Schreckenberg (NS) model, we numerically study the impact of the heterogeneity of traffic with speed limit zone (SLZ) on the probability of occurrence of car accidents $(P_{\mathrm{\text{ac}}})$. SLZ in the heterogeneous traffic has an important effect, typically in the mixture velocities case. In the deterministic case, SLZ leads to the appearance of car accidents even in the low densities, in this region $P_{\mathrm{\text{ac}}}$ increases with increasing of fraction of fast vehicles $(F_{\mathrm{\text{f}}})$. In the nondeterministic case, SLZ decreases the effect of braking probability $P_{\mathrm{\text{b}}}$ in the low densities. Furthermore, the impact of multi-SLZ on the probability $P_{\mathrm{\text{ac}}}$ is also studied. In contrast with the homogeneous case [X. Li, H. Kuang, Y. Fan and G. Zhang, Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 25 (2014) 1450036], it is found that in the low densities the probability $P_{\mathrm{\text{ac}}}$ without SLZ $(n=0)$ is low than $P_{\mathrm{\text{ac}}}$ with multi-SLZ $(n>0)$. However, the existence of multi-SLZ in the road decreases the risk of collision in the congestion phase.

By means of first-principles density-functional calculations, we studied the surface energy of a nonstoichiometric MgO(1-11) slab, the interfacial energy and interfacial bonding characteristics of Mg-terminated and O-terminated Mg/MgO(1-11) interfaces with three stacking-site (TOP, HCP and FCC sites) models, and the effect of the thickness of Mg films on the O-terminated MgO(1-11) surface. The results indicate that the surface energies of the nonstoichiometric MgO(1-11) slab and interfacial energies of Mg/Mg(1-11) interface depend on Mg chemical potential. We found that the Mg-terminated MgO(1-11) surface is more stable than the O-terminated MgO(1-11) surface at high Mg chemical potential, and Mg/MgO(1-11) with FCC stacking-site model is the most stable configuration in the Mg/MgO(1-11) interfaces. The results of the electronic structure reveals that the interfacial bonding of Mg-terminated interface with FCC site model mainly consists of metallic bond and of the O-terminated interface with FCC site model is mainly ionic with a small degree of $\sigma$-type covalent bond. Although the interfacial energy of Mg-terminated Mg/MgO interface with FCC stacking-site model is slightly higher than that of O-terminated Mg/MgO interface, the molten Mg would epitaxially grow on the FCC sites of the Mg-terminated MgO(1-11) surface because of the high evaporation pressure of Mg at high temperature.

In PEM fuel cells, during electrochemical generation of electricity more than half of the chemical energy of hydrogen is converted to heat. This heat of reactions, if not exhausted properly, would impair the performance and durability of the cell. In general, large scale PEM fuel cells are cooled by liquid water that circulates through coolant flow channels formed in bipolar plates or in dedicated cooling plates. In this paper, a numerical method has been presented to study cooling and temperature distribution of a polymer membrane fuel cell stack. The heat flux on the cooling plate is variable. A three-dimensional model of fluid flow and heat transfer in cooling plates with 15 cm × 15 cm square area is considered and the performances of four different coolant flow field designs, parallel field and serpentine fields are compared in terms of maximum surface temperature, temperature uniformity and pressure drop characteristics. By comparing the results in two cases, the constant and variable heat flux, it is observed that applying constant heat flux instead of variable heat flux which is actually occurring in the fuel cells is not an accurate assumption. The numerical results indicated that the straight flow field model has temperature uniformity index and almost the same temperature difference with the serpentine models, while its pressure drop is less than all of the serpentine models. Another important advantage of this model is the much easier design and building than the spiral models.

The dielectrophoresis (DEP) interactions of a few particles in a uniform two-dimensional (2D) electrical field have well been studied by Maxwell stress tensor (MST) method. Multiple particle interactions in three-dimensional (3D) electrical field are investigated in this work using iterative dipole moment (IDM) method which is an analytic algorithm without complicated numerical computations to solve for electrical field. The interactive DEP forces of particles calculated by IDM are found to be well agreed with those of MST method and much simple to implement. Using IDM method, a series of examples of multiple particles interactions and particle chains in a 3D uniform DC electrical field is presented. Randomly distributed similar dense particles (either all positive DEP (pDEP) or all negative DEP (nDEP) particles) in 3D uniform electrical field can generally form chains in lines parallel to the electrical field, except the case that all similar particles are in a plane perpendicular to the electrical field where the particles repel each other and move away in the plane. Randomly distributed dissimilar dense particles (mixture of pDEP and nDEP particles) can form (1) chains in lines, (2) clusters in a plane or (3) 3D groups. The chains, clusters and groups are of staggered arrangements of pDEP and nDEP particles, which are perpendicular to the electrical field.

In this paper, we investigated the structural properties of metallic glasses (MGs). We emphasized our study on monatomic Al and binary TiAl₃ systems. The calculations are performed by using the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation based on semi-empirical many-body potentials derived from the embedded atom method. The structure is analyzed using the radial distribution function (RDF), the common neighbor analysis (CNA) and the coordination numbers (CNs). Our results demonstrated that it is possible to form MGs in both systems upon fast cooling from the liquid state. This is confirmed by the fact that the system energy and/or volume during the cooling stage decrease continuously with a slight change and by atomic scale analysis using the RDF, CNA and CN analyzing techniques. Furthermore, this specific study shows that under the same conditions, the icosahedral structures appeared in TiAl₃ are more abundant than in pure Al. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Using method on the base of minimizing of thermodynamic potential in “crystal-vapor” system as a function of defect concentration the equilibrium concentration of point defects and free charge carriers in zinc telluride (ZnTe) crystals have been calculated depending on the technological factors of two-temperature annealing (annealing temperature $T$ and vapor pressure $P_{\mathrm{\text{Zn}}}$ of zinc or $P_{\mathrm{\text{Te}}}$ of tellurium). It is shown that the dominant defects are zinc vacancies the charge state of which depends on the technological conditions of annealing.

The structural properties, phase transitions, and electronic structures of Cu₂ZnSnS₄ (CZTS) in the three structures have been researched using the first-principles density functional theory (DFT). The results indicate that the energies of stannite (ST) and pre-mixed Cu–Au (PMCA) CZTS are higher than those of kesterite (KS) CZTS, indicating that the KS CZTS is more stable. We found the phase transition pressure between the KS and ST structures of CZTS is about 32 GPa. Moreover, for KS- and PMCA-CZTS, there exists in the mischcrystal phase between 52 GPa and 65 GPa. The band structures show that the KS- and ST-CZTS are direct band gap semiconductors. The band gaps of three-type CZTS increase with increasing pressure, and the maximum band gap of KS and ST structures for CZTS occurs at 50 GPa. However, PMCA CZTS possesses metal property. Furthermore, the PMCA CZTS translates from metal to the indirect semiconductor with increasing pressure. The results play an important role in future experimental and theoretical work for CZTS materials.

In this paper, we evaluate the transport properties of a Thue–Morse AB-stacked bilayer graphene superlattice with different interlayer potential biases. Based on the transfer matrix method, the transmission coefficient, the conductance, and the Fano factor are numerically calculated and discussed. We find that the symmetry of the transmission coefficient with respect to normal incidence depends on the structural symmetry of the system and the new transmission peak appears in the energy band gap opening region. The conductance and the Fano factor can be greatly modulated not only by the Fermi energy and the interlayer potential bias but also by the generation number. Interestingly, the conductance exhibits the plateau of almost zero conductance and the Fano factor plateaus with Poisson value occur in the energy band gap opening region for large interlayer potential bias.

A new structure of microstructure reflection three-port beam splitter grating is described in this paper. The grating includes two dielectric layers and a metal slab on the substrate, where incident waves are reflected into the zeroth-order and the ± first-order with polarization-independent property. With the optimized grating profile, reflection efficiencies’ ratios between the first-order and the zeroth-order can reach 0.998 and 1.001 for TE and TM polarizations, respectively. Especially, the reflection grating can diffract efficiencies more than 30% into the ± first-order and the zeroth-order with the incident angular bandwidth of −1.9–1.9${}^{\circ }$ for TM polarization, which can have merits compared with single-layer transmission grating.

In this paper, effects of variable viscosity with heat transfer on solid particle motion of dusty Jeffrey fluid model through a planar channel has been examined. The governing flow problem for fluid phase and dusty phase is formulated with the help of momentum and energy equation. The resulting coupled ordinary differential equations have been solved analytically and closed form solutions are presented. The influence of all the physical parameters are sketched for velocity profile, pressure rise and temperature profile. Numerical computation is used to evaluate the expression for pressure rise. The present analysis is also presented for Newtonian fluid by taking ${\lambda }_1\to 0$ as a special case of our study. It is found that due to the influence of variable viscosity, the fluid velocity changes in the center of the channel and shows opposite behavior near the walls. It is also found that temperature profile increases for larger values of Prandtl number (Pr) and Eckert number (Ec).

For simple plasma diagnostics for laser-induced plasma (LIP) under the condition of optically thin, taking the Cu I spectral lines produced by the laser-induced copper plasma, we investigate a simple method for temperature and electron density diagnostics, and we obtain the plasma temperature which has 10⁴ K order of magnitude and the averaged electron density is $3.8\times 10^{18}{\mathrm{\text{cm}}}^{-3}$, which are in agreement with that obtained by other methods. This investigation will be significant for spectral diagnostics for LIP.

In this paper, an all-optical reservoir computing (RC) setup is proposed for identifying the types of optical packet headers in optical packet switching (OPS) network. The numerical simulation identification results of 3 bits and 32 bits optical headers with the bit rate of 10 Gbps are as low as 0.625% and 2.25%, respectively. The identification errors with the variation of the feedback strength and feedback delay are presented separately. Hence, the optimal feedback parameters are obtained. The all-optical feedback RC setup is robust to the white Gaussian noise. The recognition error is acceptable when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is greater than 15 dB.