Laser cladding has been widely used in direct laser fabrication and laser refabrication for metal parts. It is a high precision and complicated process due to multiple process parameters involved. These parameters are strongly tied to each other and their effects are still far from being completely understood. In order to make the optimal choice, a feasible mathematical model is established to describe the interaction between laser and powder particles and to predict and control the cross sectional area. Additionally, analysis concentrating on the effect of the various parameters on the cross sectional area is made. Results show that laser power, powder feed rate, scan speed and radius of focused powder stream are the main factors. Correlations between main process parameters and cross sectional area of an individual clad track have been found. The model also provides predictions of range of process parameters for melting powder to form specific cross sectional area, which will guide the experiment and greatly reduce the cost of the experimental investigations.

We show that the gradient mapping of the squared norm of FischerBurmeister function is globally Lipschitz continuous and semismooth, which provides a theoretical basis for solving nonlinear second-order cone complementarity problems via the conjugate gradient method and the semismooth Newtons method.

Simulation of electromagnetic wave propagation in metamaterials leads to more complicated time domain Maxwell's equations than the standard Maxwell's equations in free space. In this paper, we develop and analyze a non-dissipative discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the Maxwell's equations in Drude metamaterials. Previous discontinuous Galerkin methods in the literature for electromagnetic wave propagation in metamaterials were either non-dissipative but sub-optimal, or dissipative and optimal. Our method uses a different and simple choice of numerical fluxes, achieving provable non-dissipative stability and optimal error estimates simultaneously. We prove the stability and optimal error estimates for both semi- and fully discrete DG schemes, with the leap-frog time discretization for the fully discrete case. Numerical results are given to demonstrate that the DG method can solve metamaterial Maxwell's equations effectively.

In this paper, we study a time-domain spherical cloaking model recently introduced by Zhao and Hao (2009). This model is quite complicated and is composed of four coupled differential equations. Here we first prove the existence and uniqueness of a solution for this model. Then we obtain a stability result, which analysis is quite involved due to the coupling between the four variables. To our best knowledge, this is the first well-posedness study carried out for the time-domain cloaking model with metamaterials.

In this paper, we consider the time dependent Maxwell’s equations in dispersive media on a bounded three-dimensional domain. Global superconvergence is obtained for semi-discrete mixed finite element methods for three most popular dispersive media models: the isotropic cold plasma, the one-pole Debye medium, and the two-pole Lorentz medium. Global superconvergence for a standard finite element method is also presented. To our best knowledge, this is the first superconvergence analysis obtained for Maxwell’s equations when dispersive media are involved.