Earlier this year, Elsevier's engineering group invited selected authors of the Top 25 most downloaded papers in each of our engineering journals to create an AudioSlides presentation for their paper and take part in an exciting contest.
AudioSlides are short, webcast-style presentations that are shown next to the online article on ScienceDirect. This format gives authors the opportunity to summarize their research in their own words, helping readers to quickly understand what a paper is about and appreciate its relevance. Learn more about AudioSlides here.
We were thrilled to receive a total of 67 presentations by the competition deadline, and overwhelmed that between 1st and 30th November, the YouTube channel where the AudioSlides are hosted received over 7,000 views.
The time has now come to reveal the winning presentation!
Our panel of journal editors, Eva Sorensen (Chemical Engineering Research and Design), David Taylor (Journal of Mechanics of Biomedical Materials) and Mike Forde (Construction and Building Materials) have selected the top 3 presentations from a 'most-viewed' short list of 20, and we're delighted to announce that the winning presentation is:
Linear electromagnetic devices for vibration damping and energy harvesting: Modeling and testing
Songye Zhu, Wen-ai Shen, You-lin Xu
Engineering Structures, Volume 34, January 2012, Pages 198–212
In this paper, the authors present a theoretical and experimental study of linear EM dampers connected with four representative circuits. The dynamic characteristics of linear EM dampers, including parasitic damping, EM damping, energy conversion efficiency and output power, are modeled and discussed systematically in each case. The modeling is further verified by a series of dynamic testing of a small-scale linear EM damper, which is cyclically tested on a MTS machine at different frequencies and amplitudes. A good match between the modeling and testing results clearly demonstrates that the described model can predict the performance of the linear EM damper and energy harvesting circuit very well. The promises and challenges of using EM dampers in future civil infrastructure for both vibration damping and energy harvesting are discussed based on the outcome of this study.
The two runner-ups are:
A multi-scale approach to model localized failure with softening
M. Hautefeuille, J.-B. Colliat, A. Ibrahimbegovic, H.G. Matthies, P. Villonc
Computers & Structures, Volumes 94–95, March 2012, Pages 83–95
The authors present a computational strategy for strongly coupled multi-scale analysis of heterogeneous material undergoing localized failure with softening. The proposed method can fit within the standard architecture of finite element codes, with the key idea to replace the standard computation of the element tangent stiffness matrices and the residual vectors by an assembly of micro-scale computations whose contributions are statically condensed at the coarser level.
A cost-effective cloud computing framework for accelerating multimedia communication simulations
Daniele Angeli, Enrico Masala
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Volume 72, Issue 10, October 2012, Pages 1373–1385
The authors proposes a new cost-effective framework based on cloud computing for accelerating the multimedia communication development process, in which resources are obtained on demand and paid only for their actual usage. Issues are addressed both analytically and practically running actual test cases, i.e., simulations of video communications on a packet lossy network, using a commercial cloud computing service. A software framework has also been developed to simplify the management of the virtual machines in the cloud.