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The immersed boundary method is one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the Immersed Boundary method is also known to require small time steps to maintain stability when solved with an explicit method. Many implicit or approximately implicit methods have been proposed in the literature to remove this severe time step stability constraint, but none of them give satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient semi-implicit scheme to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the Navier–Stokes equations. The construction of our semi-implicit scheme consists of two steps. First, we obtain a semiimplicit discretization which is proved to be unconditionally stable. This unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme is still quite expensive to implement in practice. Next, we apply the small scale decomposition to the unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme to construct our efficient semi-implicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit scheme can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. Our extensive numerical experiments show that our semiimplicit scheme has much better stability property than an explicit scheme. This offers a substantial computational saving in using the immersed boundary method.

This paper establishes a blowup criterion for the three-dimensional viscous, compressible, and heat conducting magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) flows. It is essentially shown that for the Cauchy problem and the initial-boundary-value one of the three-dimensional compressible MHD flows with initial density allowed to vanish, the strong or smooth solution exists globally if the density is bounded from above and the velocity satisfies Serrin’s condition. Therefore, if the Serrin norm of the velocity remains bounded, it is not possible for other kinds of singularities (such as vacuum states vanishing or vacuum appearing in the non-vacuum region or even milder singularities) to form before the density becomes unbounded. This criterion is analogous to the well known Serrin’s blowup criterion for the three-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, in particular, it is independent of the temperature and magnetic field and is just the same as that of the barotropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations. As a direct application, it is shown that the same result also holds for the strong or smooth solutions to the three-dimensional full compressible Navier-Stokes system describing the motion of a viscous, compressible, and heat conducting fluid.

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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a no-cure disease that has been frustrating the scientists for many years. Analyzing the disease has become an important but challenging research topic. The shape analysis of the sub-cortical structure of AD patients has been commonly used to understand this disease. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of using shape information on the hippocampal (HP) surfaces to detect some sub-structural changes in AD patients. We propose a quasi-conformal statistical shape analysis model, which allows us to study local regional geometric changes in the HPs amongst normal control (NC) and AD groups. A shape index defined by the quasi-conformality and surface curvatures is used to characterize region-specific shape variations of the HP surfaces. Feature vectors can be extracted for each HPs, with which a classification model can be built using machine learning methods to classify HPs into NC and AD subjects. Experiments have been carried out on 99 normal controls and 41 patients with AD. Results demonstrate that the proposed quasi-conformal based model is effective for classifying HPs into NC and AD groups with high classification accuracy (with highest overall classification accuracy reaching 87.86% in a leave-one-out experiment using the whole dataset).