• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.45.1-45.1
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• 2016

Spatially rotating magnetic fields have been observed in the solar wind and in the Earth's magnetopause as well as in reversed field pinch (RFP) devices. Such field configurations have a similarity with extended current layers having a spatially varying plasma pressure instead of the spatially varying guide field. It is thus expected that magnetic reconnection may take place in a rotating magnetic field no less than in an extended current layer. We have investigated the spontaneous evolution of a collisionless plasma system embedding a rotating magnetic field with a two-and-a-half-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. In magnetohydrodynamics, magnetic flux can be decreased by diffusion in O-lines. In kinetic physics, however, an asymmetry of the velocity distribution function can generate new magnetic flux near O- and X-lines, hence a dynamo effect. We have found that a magnetic-flux-reducing diffusion phase and a magnetic-flux-increasing dynamo phase are alternating with a certain period. The temperature of the system also varies with the same period, showing a similarity to sawtooth oscillations in tokamaks. We have shown that a modified theory of sawtooth oscillations can explain the periodic behavior observed in the simulation. A strong guide field distorts the current layer as was observed in laboratory experiments. This distortion is smoothed out as magnetic islands fade away by the O-line diffusion, but is soon strengthened by the growth of magnetic islands. These processes are all repeating with a fixed period. Our results suggest that a rotating magnetic field configuration continuously undergoes deformation and relaxation in a short time-scale although it might look rather steady in a long-term view.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.315-321
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• 2012

In this study, a sequential multiscale homogenization method to characterize the effective thermal conductivity of nano particulate polymer nanocomposites is proposed through a molecular dynamics(MD) simulations and a finite element-based homogenization method. The thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites embedding different-sized nanoparticles at a fixed volume fraction of 5.8% are obtained from MD simulations. Due to the Kapitza thermal resistance, the thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites decreases as the size of the embedded nanoparticle decreases. In order to describe the nanoparticle size effect using the homogenization method with accuracy, the Kapitza interface in which the temperature discontinuity condition appears and the effective interphase zone formed by highly densified matrix polymer are modeled as independent phases that constitutes the nanocomposites microstructure, thus, the overall nanocomposites domain is modeled as a four-phase structure consists of the nanoparticle, Kapitza interface, effective interphase, and polymer matrix. The thermal conductivity of the effective interphase is inversely predicted from the thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites through the multiscale homogenization method, then, exponentially fitted to a function of the particle radius. Using the multiscale homogenization method, the thermal conductivities of the nanocomposites at various particle radii and volume fractions are obtained, and parametric studies are conducted to examine the effect of the effective interphase on the overall thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites.