arXiv subjects

Ralf Müller

Publications and source records attributed to Ralf Müller.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Extending the Lattice Boltzmann Method to Non-linear Solid Mechanics

This work outlines a Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) for geometrically and constitutively nonlinear solid mechanics to simulate large deformations under dynamic loading conditions. The method utilizes the moment chain approach, where the non-linear constitutive law is incorporated via a forcing term. Stress and deformation measures are expressed in the reference configuration. Finite difference schemes are employed for gradient and divergence computations, and Neumann- and Dirichlet-type boundary conditions are introduced. Numerical studies are performed to assess the proposed method and illustrate its capabilities. Benchmark tests for weakly dynamic uniaxial tension and simple shear across a range of Poisson's ratios demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme and serve as validation of the implementation. Furthermore, a dynamic test case involving the propagation of bending waves in a cantilever beam highlights the potential of the method to model complex dynamic phenomena.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2023

Glass fracture surface energy calculated from crystal structure and bond-energy data

We present a novel method to predict the fracture surface energy, γ, of isochemically crystallizing silicate glasses using readily available crystallographic structure data of their crystalline counterpart and tabled diatomic chemical bond energies, D0. The method assumes that γ equals the fracture surface energy of the most likely cleavage plane of the crystal. Calculated values were in excellent agreement with those calculated from glass density, network connectivity and D0 data in earlier work. This finding demonstrates a remarkable equivalence between crystal cleavage planes and glass fracture surfaces.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

A Lattice Boltzmann Method for Elastic Solids Under Plane Strain Deformation

The Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), e.g. in [ 1] and [2 ], can be interpreted as an alternative method for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Consequently, although the LBM is usually applied to solve fluid flows, the above interpretation of the LBM as a general numerical tool, allows the LBM to be extended to solid mechanics as well. In this spirit, the LBM has been studied in recent years. First publications [3], [4] presented an LBM scheme for the numerical solution of the dynamic behavior of a linear elastic solid under simplified deformation assumptions. For so-called anti-plane shear deformation, the only non-zero displacement component is governed by a two-dimensional wave equation. In this work, an existing LBM for the two-dimensional wave equation is extended to more general plane strain problems. The proposed algorithm reduces the plane strain problem to the solution of two separate wave equations for the volume dilatation and the non-zero component of the rotation vector, respectively. A particular focus is on the implementation of types of boundary conditions that are commonly encountered in engineering practice for solids: Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. Last, several numerical experiments are conducted that highlight the performance of the new LBM in comparison to the Finite Element Method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2022

Dynamic Propagation of Mode III Cracks in a Lattice Boltzmann Method for Solids

This work presents concepts and algorithms for the simulation of dynamic fractures with a Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for linear elastic solids. This LBM has been presented previously and solves the wave equation, which is interpreted as the governing equation for antiplane shear deformation. Besides the steady growth of a crack at a prescribed crack velocity, a fracture criterion based on stress intensity factors (SIF) has been implemented. This is the first time, that crack propagation with a mechanically relevant criterion is regarded in the context of LBMs. Numerical results are examined to validate the proposed method. The concepts of crack propagation introduced here are not limited to mode III cracks or the simplified deformation assumption of antiplane shear. By introducing a rather simple processing step into the existing LBM at the level of individual lattice sites, the overall performance of the LBM is maintained. Our findings underline the validity of the LBM as a numerical tool to simulate solids in general as well as dynamic fractures in particular.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2022

A Novel Antenna Placement Algorithm for Compressive Sensing MIMO Radar

In colocated compressive sensing MIMO radar, the measurement matrix is specified by antenna placement. To guarantee an acceptable recovery performance, this measurement matrix should satisfy certain properties, e.g., a small coherence. Prior work in the literature often employs randomized placement algorithms which optimize the prior distribution of antenna locations. The performance of these algorithms is suboptimal, as they can be easily enhanced via expurgation. In this paper, we suggest an iterative antenna placement algorithm which determines the antenna locations deterministically. The proposed algorithm locates jointly the antenna elements on the transmit and receive arrays, such that the coherence of the resulting measurement matrix is minimized. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms significantly the benchmark, even after expurgation.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions in a Lattice Boltzmann Method for Elastodynamics

Recently, Murthy et al. [2017] and Escande et al. [2020] adopted the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) to model the linear elastodynamic behaviour of isotropic solids. The LBM is attractive as an elastodynamic solver because it can be parallelised readily and lends itself to finely discretised dynamic continuum simulations, allowing transient phenomena such as wave propagation to be modelled efficiently. This work proposes simple local boundary rules which approximate the behaviour of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions with an LBM for elastic solids. Both lattice-conforming and non-lattice-conforming, curved boundary geometries are considered. For validation, we compare results produced by the LBM for the sudden loading of a stationary crack with an analytical solution. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of the LBM for the transient tension loading of a plate with a circular hole, using Finite Element (FEM) simulations as a reference.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2021

Intelligent Surface-Aided Transmitter Architectures for Millimeter Wave Ultra Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we study two novel massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter architectures for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications which comprise few active antennas, each equipped with a dedicated radio frequency (RF) chain, that illuminate a nearby large intelligent reflecting/transmitting surface (IRS/ITS). The IRS (ITS) consists of a large number of low-cost and energy-efficient passive antenna elements which are able to reflect (transmit) a phase-shifted version of the incident electromagnetic field. Similar to lens array (LA) antennas, IRS/ITS-aided antenna architectures are energy efficient due to the almost lossless over-the-air connection between the active antennas and the intelligent surface. However, unlike for LA antennas, for which the number of active antennas has to linearly grow with the number of passive elements (i.e., the lens aperture) due to the non-reconfigurablility (i.e., non-intelligence) of the lens, for IRS/ITS-aided antennas, the reconfigurablility of the IRS/ITS facilitates scaling up the number of radiating passive elements without increasing the number of costly and bulky active antennas. We show that the constraints that the precoders for IRS/ITS-aided antennas have to meet differ from those of conventional MIMO architectures. Taking these constraints into account and exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channels, we design two efficient precoders; one based on maximizing the mutual information and one based on approximating the optimal unconstrained fully digital (FD) precoder via the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Furthermore, we develop a power consumption model for IRS/ITS-aided antennas that takes into account the impacts of the IRS/ITS imperfections, namely the spillover loss, taper loss, aperture loss, and phase shifter loss.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Soft Interference Cancellation for Random Coding in Massive Gaussian Multiple-Access

In 2017, Polyanskiy [1] showed that the trade-off between power and bandwidth efficiency for massive Gaussian random access is governed by two fundamentally different regimes: low power and high power. For both regimes, tight performance bounds were found by Zadik et al. [2], in 2019. This work utilizes recent results on the exact block error probability of Gaussian random codes in additive white Gaussian noise to propose practical methods based on iterative soft decoding to closely approach the bounds in [2]. In the low power regime, this work finds that orthogonal random codes can be applied directly. In the high power regime, a more sophisticated effort is needed. This work shows that power-profile optimization by means of linear programming as pioneered by Caire et al. [3], in 2001, is a promising strategy to apply. The proposed combination of orthogonal random coding and iterative soft decoding even outperforms the existence bounds of Zadik et al. [2] in the low power regime and is very close to the non-existence bounds for message lengths around 100 and above. Finally, the approach of power optimization by linear programming proposed for the high power regime is found to benefit from power imbalances due to fading which makes is even more attractive for typical mobile radio channels.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Linear Computation Coding

We introduce the new concept of computation coding. Similar to how rate-distortion theory is concerned with the lossy compression of data, computation coding deals with the lossy computation of functions. Particularizing to linear functions, we present an algorithm to reduce the computational cost of multiplying an arbitrary given matrix with an unknown column vector. The algorithm decomposes the given matrix into the product of codebook wiring matrices whose entries are either zero or signed integer powers of two. For a typical implementation of deep neural networks, the proposed algorithm reduces the number of required addition units several times. To achieve the accuracy of 16-bit signed integer arithmetic for 4k-vectors, no multipliers and only 1.5 adders per matrix entry are needed.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Benchmarking for Metaheuristic Black-Box Optimization: Perspectives and Open Challenges

Research on new optimization algorithms is often funded based on the motivation that such algorithms might improve the capabilities to deal with real-world and industrially relevant optimization challenges. Besides a huge variety of different evolutionary and metaheuristic optimization algorithms, also a large number of test problems and benchmark suites have been developed and used for comparative assessments of algorithms, in the context of global, continuous, and black-box optimization. For many of the commonly used synthetic benchmark problems or artificial fitness landscapes, there are however, no methods available, to relate the resulting algorithm performance assessments to technologically relevant real-world optimization problems, or vice versa. Also, from a theoretical perspective, many of the commonly used benchmark problems and approaches have little to no generalization value. Based on a mini-review of publications with critical comments, advice, and new approaches, this communication aims to give a constructive perspective on several open challenges and prospective research directions related to systematic and generalizable benchmarking for black-box optimization.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2020

Comparison of Windowed-Decoder Configurations for Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes Under Equal-Complexity Constraints

Spatially Coupled Low-Density Parity-Check (SC-LDPC) codes offer excellent decoding performance and can be elegantly decoded with a Windowed Decoder (WD). We determine an efficient WD configuration with low control overhead. For fair comparisons, we normalize all configurations to the same maximal computational complexity, which is an important measure of the decoding effort in packet-based data communication systems. We determine an optimized configuration from a joint evaluation of the window size, the window update strategy, and parity check-based Early Termination (ET). Firstly, we use a variable node-centered update strategy, which omits updates of messages in some parts of the decoding window. With the complexity normalization, the window size can be increased compared to a check node-centered update strategy, which uniformly updates all messages in the decoding window. Secondly, we only require the satisfaction of the top-most parity-check equations in each window to move to the next position more quickly. Using a surprisingly large window size, the resulting WD halves the average decoding complexity of the block decoder while maintaining a rather small gap in the decoding performance.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Reexamination of Tolman's law and the Gibbs adsorption equation for curved interfaces

In manuscript arXiv:1703.08719 [cond-mat.soft], it was claimed that the well-known deduction of Tolman's law is not rigorous, since Tolman's argument implies that two different definitions of the surface tension, called $γ$ and $\barγ$ in the manuscript, coincide. This claim is retracted as it can be shown by free-energy minimization that $γ= \barγ$ indeed holds for the Laplace radius. Joachim Groß, Philipp Rehner, Carlos Vega, Øivind Wilhelmsen, and the anonymous reviewers of The Journal of Chemical Physics contributed to finding the mistake in the manuscript.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2018

Scalable and Energy-Efficient Millimeter Massive MIMO Architectures: Reflect-Array and Transmit-Array Antennas

Hybrid analog-digital architectures are considered as promising candidates for implementing millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems since they enable a considerable reduction of the required number of costly radio frequency (RF) chains by moving some of the signal processing operations into the analog domain. However, the analog feed network, comprising RF dividers, combiners, phase shifters, and line connections, of hybrid MIMO architectures is not scalable due to its prohibitively high power consumption for large numbers of transmit antennas. Motivated by this limitation, in this paper, we study novel massive MIMO architectures, namely reflect-array (RA) and transmit-array (TA) antennas. We show that the precoders for RA and TA antennas have to meet different constraints compared to those for conventional MIMO architectures. Taking these constraints into account and exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channels, we design an efficient precoder for RA and TA antennas based on the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Furthermore, in order to fairly compare the performance of RA and TA antennas with conventional fully-digital and hybrid MIMO architectures, we develop a unified power consumption model. Our simulation results show that unlike conventional MIMO architectures, RA and TA antennas are highly energy efficient and fully scalable in terms of the number of transmit antennas.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Replica Symmetry Breaking in Compressive Sensing

For noisy compressive sensing systems, the asymptotic distortion with respect to an arbitrary distortion function is determined when a general class of least-square based reconstruction schemes is employed. The sampling matrix is considered to belong to a large ensemble of random matrices including i.i.d. and projector matrices, and the source vector is assumed to be i.i.d. with a desired distribution. We take a statistical mechanical approach by representing the asymptotic distortion as a macroscopic parameter of a spin glass and employing the replica method for the large-system analysis. In contrast to earlier studies, we evaluate the general replica ansatz which includes the RS ansatz as well as RSB. The generality of the solution enables us to study the impact of symmetry breaking. Our numerical investigations depict that for the reconstruction scheme with the "zero-norm" penalty function, the RS fails to predict the asymptotic distortion for relatively large compression rates; however, the one-step RSB ansatz gives a valid prediction of the performance within a larger regime of compression rates.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

On Optimum Asymptotic Multiuser Efficiency of Randomly Spread CDMA

We extend the result by Tse and Verdú on the optimum asymptotic multiuser efficiency of randomly spread CDMA with Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) input. Random Gaussian and random binary antipodal spreading are considered. We obtain the optimum asymptotic multiuser efficiency of a $K$-user system with spreading gain $N$ when $K$ and $N\rightarrow\infty$ and the loading factor, $\frac{K}{N}$, grows logarithmically with $K$ under some conditions. It is shown that the optimum detector in a Gaussian randomly spread CDMA system has a performance close to the single user system at high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) when $K$ and $N\rightarrow\infty$ and the loading factor, $\frac{K}{N}$, is kept less than $\frac{\log_3K}{2}$. Random binary antipodal matrices are also studied and a lower bound for the optimum asymptotic multiuser efficiency is obtained. Furthermore, we investigate the connection between detecting matrices in the coin weighing problem and optimum asymptotic multiuser efficiency. We obtain a condition such that for any binary input, an $N\times K$ random matrix whose entries are chosen randomly from a finite set, is a detecting matrix as $K$ and $N\rightarrow \infty$.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2015

Outage Capacity of Rayleigh Product Channels: a Free Probability Approach

The Rayleigh product channel model is useful in capturing the performance degradation due to rank deficiency of MIMO channels. In this paper, such a performance degradation is investigated via the channel outage probability assuming slowly varying channel with delay-constrained decoding. Using techniques of free probability theory, the asymptotic variance of channel capacity is derived when the dimensions of the channel matrices approach infinity. In this asymptotic regime, the channel capacity is rigorously proven to be Gaussian distributed. Using the obtained results, a fundamental tradeoff between multiplexing gain and diversity gain of Rayleigh product channels can be characterized by closed-form expression at any finite signal-to-noise ratio. Numerical results are provided to compare the relative outage performance between Rayleigh product channels and conventional Rayleigh MIMO channels.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Blind pilot decontamination

A subspace projection to improve channel estimation in massive multi-antenna systems is proposed and analyzed. Together with power-controlled hand-off, it can mitigate the pilot contamination problem without the need for coordination among cells. The proposed method is blind in the sense that it does not require pilot data to find the appropriate subspace. It is based on the theory of large random matrices that predicts that the eigenvalue spectra of large sample covariance matrices can asymptotically decompose into disjoint bulks as the matrix size grows large. Random matrix and free probability theory are utilized to predict under which system parameters such a bulk decomposition takes place. Simulation results are provided to confirm that the proposed method outperforms conventional linear channel estimation if bulk separation occurs.

cs.IT↗