Ensemble (fluid Mechanics)
{{Unreferenced, date=November 2008 In continuum mechanics, an ensemble is an imaginary collection of notionally identical experiments. Each member of the ensemble will have nominally identical boundary conditions and fluid properties. If the flow is turbulent, the details of the fluid motion will differ from member to member because the experimental setup will be microscopically different; and these slight differences become magnified as time progresses. Members of an ensemble are, by definition, statistically independent of one another. The concept of ensemble is useful in thought experiments and to improve theoretical understanding of turbulence. A good image to have in mind is a typical fluid mechanics experiment such as a mixing box. Imagine a million mixing boxes, distributed over the earth; at a predetermined time, a million fluid mechanics engineers each start one experiment, and monitor the flow. Each engineer then sends his or her results to a central database. Such ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Continuum Mechanics
Continuum mechanics is a branch of mechanics that deals with the mechanical behavior of materials modeled as a continuous mass rather than as discrete particles. The French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was the first to formulate such models in the 19th century. Explanation A continuum model assumes that the substance of the object fills the space it occupies. Modeling objects in this way ignores the fact that matter is made of atoms, and so is not continuous; however, on length scales much greater than that of inter-atomic distances, such models are highly accurate. These models can be used to derive differential equations that describe the behavior of such objects using physical laws, such as mass conservation, momentum conservation, and energy conservation, and some information about the material is provided by constitutive relationships. Continuum mechanics deals with the physical properties of solids and fluids which are independent of any particular coordinate sys ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Boundary Conditions
In mathematics, in the field of differential equations, a boundary value problem is a differential equation together with a set of additional constraints, called the boundary conditions. A solution to a boundary value problem is a solution to the differential equation which also satisfies the boundary conditions. Boundary value problems arise in several branches of physics as any physical differential equation will have them. Problems involving the wave equation, such as the determination of normal modes, are often stated as boundary value problems. A large class of important boundary value problems are the Sturm–Liouville problems. The analysis of these problems involves the eigenfunctions of a differential operator. To be useful in applications, a boundary value problem should be well posed. This means that given the input to the problem there exists a unique solution, which depends continuously on the input. Much theoretical work in the field of partial differential e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Turbulent
In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between those layers. Turbulence is commonly observed in everyday phenomena such as surf, fast flowing rivers, billowing storm clouds, or smoke from a chimney, and most fluid flows occurring in nature or created in engineering applications are turbulent. Turbulence is caused by excessive kinetic energy in parts of a fluid flow, which overcomes the damping effect of the fluid's viscosity. For this reason turbulence is commonly realized in low viscosity fluids. In general terms, in turbulent flow, unsteady vortices appear of many sizes which interact with each other, consequently drag due to friction effects increases. This increases the energy needed to pump fluid through a pipe. The onset of turbulence can be predicted by the dimensionless Re ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Statistically Independent
Independence is a fundamental notion in probability theory, as in statistics and the theory of stochastic processes. Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if, informally speaking, the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other or, equivalently, does not affect the odds. Similarly, two random variables are independent if the realization of one does not affect the probability distribution of the other. When dealing with collections of more than two events, two notions of independence need to be distinguished. The events are called pairwise independent if any two events in the collection are independent of each other, while mutual independence (or collective independence) of events means, informally speaking, that each event is independent of any combination of other events in the collection. A similar notion exists for collections of random variables. Mutual independence implies pairwise independence, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Thought Experiment
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. History The ancient Greek ''deiknymi'' (), or thought experiment, "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean mathematics, where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought-experiment. Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the German term ' (lit. thought experiment) circa 1812. Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term ' in 1820. By 1883 Ernst Mach used the term ' in a different way, to denote exclusively the conduct of a experiment that would be subsequently performed as a by his students. Physical and mental experimentation could then be contrasted: Mach asked his students to provide him with explanations whenever the results from their subsequent, real, physical experiment differed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mixing Box
Mix, mixes or mixing may refer to: Persons & places * Mix (surname) ** Tom Mix (1880-1940), American film star * nickname of Mix Diskerud (born Mikkel, 1990), Norwegian-American soccer player * Mix camp, an informal settlement in Namibia * Mix, Louisiana, an unincorporated community * Mix Run, Pennsylvania, village Audio * Audio mixing (recorded music), the process of combining and balancing multiple sound sources * DJ mix, a sequence of musical tracks mixed to appear as one continuous track * ''Mix'' (magazine), a periodical for the professional recording and sound production technology industry Music * ''Mixes'' (Kylie Minogue album), the 1998 remix album by Australian singer-songwriter Kylie Minogue * ''Mix'' (Stellar album), the 1999 debut studio album by New Zealand pop rock band Stellar * ''Mixes'' (Transvision Vamp album), 1992 * ''Mixes'', an album by C418 * Mixtape, a compilation of songs or tracks * Remix, a variation of a song * Mix, short way to refer to Mixo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes Equations
The Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations (RANS equations) are time-averaged equations of motion for fluid flow. The idea behind the equations is Reynolds decomposition, whereby an instantaneous quantity is decomposed into its time-averaged and fluctuating quantities, an idea first proposed by Osborne Reynolds. The RANS equations are primarily used to describe turbulent flows. These equations can be used with approximations based on knowledge of the properties of flow turbulence to give approximate time-averaged solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations. For a stationary flow of an incompressible Newtonian fluid, these equations can be written in Einstein notation in Cartesian coordinates as: \rho\bar_j \frac = \rho \bar_i + \frac \left - \bar\delta_ + \mu \left( \frac + \frac \right) - \rho \overline \right The left hand side of this equation represents the change in mean momentum of a fluid element owing to the unsteadiness in the mean flow and the convection by the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Statistical Ensemble (mathematical Physics)
In physics, specifically statistical mechanics, an ensemble (also statistical ensemble) is an idealization consisting of a large number of virtual copies (sometimes infinitely many) of a system, considered all at once, each of which represents a possible state that the real system might be in. In other words, a statistical ensemble is a set of systems of particles used in statistical mechanics to describe a single system. The concept of an ensemble was introduced by J. Willard Gibbs in 1902. A thermodynamic ensemble is a specific variety of statistical ensemble that, among other properties, is in statistical equilibrium (defined below), and is used to derive the properties of thermodynamic systems from the laws of classical or quantum mechanics. Physical considerations The ensemble formalises the notion that an experimenter repeating an experiment again and again under the same macroscopic conditions, but unable to control the microscopic details, may expect to observe a ran ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |