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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect that polymer coat has on the impact behavior of grinding sphere and to find possible subsection of parameter space in which grinding sphere wear could be reduced.

Numerical analysis is based on axisymmetric finite elements that were developed using symbolic tool AceGen. Comparing stress response of elastic and visco‐elastic material revealed that for high strain rates observed in impacts both behave the same and that is why elastic elements were used in simulations.

Impact velocity, coat thickness and polymer material properties were varied in a parametric case study of polymer‐coated sphere impact. Decrease of the pressure on the surface of grinding sphere indicates that polymer layer can be effective in reducing grinding media wear, but in order to maintain adequate impact pressure to do the grinding the impact velocity has to be increased. Both upper and lower limit for impact velocity were determined for some arbitrary pressure threshold values. This shows that combining measured threshold values of specific material with results from presented numerical tool could provide valuable guides for finding optimum stirred media milling operation parameters.

In this work, the authors develop numerical tools with the aim of supporting experimental development of polymer coat capable of reducing grinding media wear.

The aim of this paper is to present a novel data transfer technique to simulate, by G/XFEM, a cohesive crack propagation coupled with a smeared damage model. The efficiency of this technique is evaluated in terms of processing time, number of Newton–Raphson iterations and accuracy of structural response.

The cohesive crack is represented by the G/XFEM enrichment strategy. The elements crossed by the crack are divided into triangular cells. The smeared crack model is used to describe the material behavior. In the nonlinear solution of the problem, state variables associated with the original numerical integration points need to be transferred to new points created with the triangular subdivision. A nonlocal strategy is tailored to transfer the scalar and tensor variables of the constitutive model. The performance of this technique is numerically evaluated.

When compared with standard Gauss quadrature integration scheme, the proposed strategy may deliver a slightly superior computational efficiency in terms of processing time. The weighting function parameter used in the nonlocal transfer strategy plays an important role. The equilibrium state in the interactive-incremental solution process is not severely penalized and is readily recovered. The advantages of such proposed technique tend to be even more pronounced in more complex and finer meshes.

This work presents a novel data transfer technique based on the ideas of the nonlocal formulation of the state variables and specially tailored to the simulation of cohesive crack propagation in materials governed by the smeared crack constitutive model.

In electrochemotherapy, flexible electrodes, composed by an array of needles, are applied to human tissues to treat large surface tumors. The positioning of the needles in the tissue depends on the surface curvature. The parallel needle case is preferred, as their relative inclinations strongly affect the actual distribution of electric field. Nevertheless, in some case, small inclinations are unavoidable. The purpose of this paper is to study the electric field distribution for non-parallel needles.

The effect of electrode position is evaluated systematically by means of numerical models and experiments on phantoms for two different angles (5° and 30°) and compared with the case of parallel needles. Potato model was used as phantom, as this tissue becomes dark after few hours from electroporation. The electroporation degree was gauged from the color changings on the potatoes.

The distribution of electric field in different needle configuration is found by means of finite element analysis (FEA) and experiments on potatoes. The electric field level of inclined needles was compared with parallel needle case. In particular, the electric field distribution in the case of inclined needles could be very different with respect to the one in the case of parallel needles. The degree of enhancement for different inclinations is visualized by potato color intensity. The FEA suggested that the needle parallelism has to be maintained as possible as if the tips are closer to each other, the electric field intensity could be different with respect to the one in the case of parallel needles.

This paper analyzes the effect of inclined electrodes considering also the non-linearity of tissues.