Polymer nanocomposites have attracted great interest in recent years because of their potential as tailored materials with enhanced properties. Recent experiments have shown that polymer nanocomposites are able to achieve significant improvement in dielectrical, thermal, mechanical and other physical properties compared with their parent polymer systems. More importantly, these outstanding...
The goal of this thesis is to design practical algorithms for nonlinear optimization in the case when the objective function is stochastic or nonsmooth. The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 describes an active-set method for the minimization of an objective function that is structurally nonsmooth, viz., it...