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International audience; Intermediate filaments are long elastic fibers that are transported by the microtubule-associated motor proteins kinesin and dynein inside the cell. How elastic filaments are efficiently transported by antagonistic motors is not well understood and is difficult to measure with current experimental techniques. Adapting the tug-of-war paradigm for vesiclelike cargos, we develop a mathematical model to describe the motion of an elastic filament punctually bound to antagonistic motors. As observed in cells, up to three modes of transport are obtained; dynein-driven retrograde, kinesin-driven anterograde fast motions, and a slow motion. Motor properties and initial conditions that depend on intracellular context regulate the transport of filaments. Filament elasticity is found to affect both the mode and the efficiency of transport. We further show that the coordination of motors along the filament emerges from the interplay between intracellular context and elastic properties of filaments.

International audience; Spacecrafts such as Stardust (NASA, 2006) are protected by an ablative Thermal Protection System (TPS) for their hypersonic atmospheric entry. A new generation of TPS material, called Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA), has been introduced with the Stardust mission. This new generation of low density carbon-phenolic composites is now widely used in the aerospace industry. Complex heat and mass transfer phenomena coupled to phenolic pyrolysis and pyrolysis gas chemistry occur in the material during atmospheric entry. Computer programs, as the Porous material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFoam (PATO) released open source by NASA, allow to study the material response. In this study, a non-intrusive Anchored Analysis of Variance (Anchored-ANOVA) method has been interfaced with PATO to perform low-cost sensitivity analysis on this problem featuring a large number of uncertain parameters. Then, a Polynomial-Chaos method has been employed in order to compute the statistics of some quantities of interest for the atmospheric entry of the Stardust capsule, by taking into account uncertainties on effective material properties and pyrolysis gas composition. This first study including pyrolysis gas composition uncertainties shows their key contribution to the variability of the quantities of interest.

In this second part, images acquired from the specific trials developed in order to study the phenomenon of bubble sweep-down are analysed. A post-processing method has been developed to analyse the two air entrainment mechanisms described in the first part, for several test configurations. Bubble clouds are described in terms of depth, area and velocity for both vortex shedding and breakingwave bubble clouds. A parametric study is also performed to calculate the influence of each test parameter on the frequency of bubble generation. It is demonstrated that the occurrence of bubble clouds is proportional to the wave height, with a considerable influence of the phase shift between waves and motions. The overall results provide new elements for the understanding and the study of the phenomenon, with the final objective of obtaining a reliable tool that facilitates the design of research vessels. The authors gratefully acknowledge the DGA (the French Government Agency for Defense) and Ifremer for the financial support of this co-financed Ph.D. thesis. We also would like to thank Thomas Bacchetti and Jean-Valery Facq for their assistance in the design and set-up of these experiments, and Alcino Ferreira for the proof-reading of the final paper.

The PrandtlPlane (PrP) aircraft wing-box least-weight design is presented in this work. This design problem is formulated as a constrained non-linear programming problem (CNLPP), by integrating static, buckling, fatigue and manufacturability requirements, under different loading conditions. The solution search is carried out by means of a suitable multi-scale optimisation (MSO) approach. The physical responses involved into the CNLPP formulation are evaluated at the wing-box architecture level (macroscopic scale) and at the stiffened panel level (component scale), as well. The scale transition is ensured by means of a suitable global-local (GL) modelling approach, while the CNLPP is solved by means of an in-house genetic algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested on the PrP wing-box structure, but the presented strategy can be easily extended to conventional aircraft wings. This paper presents part of the activities carried out within the research project PARSIFAL (PrandtlPlane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes), which has been funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Grant Agreement n.723149).