Tracer and Timescale Methods for Passive and Reactive Transport in Fluid Flows

Geophysical, environmental, and urban fluid flows (i.e., flows developing in oceans, seas, estuaries, rivers, aquifers, reservoirs, etc.) exhibit a wide range of reactive and transport processes. Therefore, identifying key phenomena, understanding their relative importance, and establishing causal relationships between them is no trivial task. Analysis of primitive variables (e.g., velocity components, pressure, temperature, concentration) is not always conducive to the most fruitful interpretations. Examining auxiliary variables introduced for diagnostic purposes is an option worth considering. In this respect, tracer and timescale methods are proving to be very effective. Such methods can help address questions such as, "where does a fluid-born dissolved or particulate substance come from and where will it go?" or, "how fast are the transport and reaction phenomena controlling the appearance and disappearance such substances?" These issues have been dealt with since the 19th century, essentially by means of ad hoc approaches. However, over the past three decades, methods resting on solid theoretical foundations have been developed, which permit the evaluation of tracer concentrations and diagnostic timescales (age, residence/exposure time, etc.) across space and time and using numerical models and field data. This book comprises research and review articles, introducing state-of-the-art diagnostic theories and their applications to domains ranging from shallow human-made reservoirs to lakes, river networks, marine domains, and subsurface flow

Bio-Inspired Robotics

Modern robotic technologies have enabled robots to operate in a variety of unstructured and dynamically-changing environments, in addition to traditional structured environments. Robots have, thus, become an important element in our everyday lives. One key approach to develop such intelligent and autonomous robots is to draw inspiration from biological systems. Biological structure, mechanisms, and underlying principles have the potential to provide new ideas to support the improvement of conventional robotic designs and control. Such biological principles usually originate from animal or even plant models, for robots, which can sense, think, walk, swim, crawl, jump or even fly. Thus, it is believed that these bio-inspired methods are becoming increasingly important in the face of complex applications. Bio-inspired robotics is leading to the study of innovative structures and computing with sensory–motor coordination and learning to achieve intelligence, flexibility, stability, and adaptation for emergent robotic applications, such as manipulation, learning, and control. This Special Issue invites original papers of innovative ideas and concepts, new discoveries and improvements, and novel applications and business models relevant to the selected topics of ``Bio-Inspired Robotics''. Bio-Inspired Robotics is a broad topic and an ongoing expanding field. This Special Issue collates 30 papers that address some of the important challenges and opportunities in this broad and expanding field

Mobile Robots Navigation

Mobile robots navigation includes different interrelated activities: (i) perception, as obtaining and interpreting sensory information; (ii) exploration, as the strategy that guides the robot to select the next direction to go; (iii) mapping, involving the construction of a spatial representation by using the sensory information perceived; (iv) localization, as the strategy to estimate the robot position within the spatial map; (v) path planning, as the strategy to find a path towards a goal location being optimal or not; and (vi) path execution, where motor actions are determined and adapted to environmental changes. The book addresses those activities by integrating results from the research work of several authors all over the world. Research cases are documented in 32 chapters organized within 7 categories next described

Single positive pion electroproduction in the first and second resonance regions using CLAS

The study of single pion electroproduction can provide valuable information on the structure of the nucleon and its excited states. Although these reactions have been studied for decades, never has the npi + channel been measured over the complete phase space of the reaction. The CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) located in Hall B of Jefferson Lab is well-suited for conducting these measurements. The CLAS data were taken using a 1.515 GeV electron beam incident on a liquid H 2 target. The cross sections have been extracted, and their &phis;-dependence has been fit to obtain the sigmaTT, sigma TL and the sigmaT + epsilonsigma L linear combination of the structure functions. An analysis program based on the Mainz unitary isobar model was used to analyze the experimental data from the pi+ channel only. The resonant amplitudes for P33(1232), S11(1535) and D13(1520) were obtained from the fit

Robot Manipulators

Robot manipulators are developing more in the direction of industrial robots than of human workers. Recently, the applications of robot manipulators are spreading their focus, for example Da Vinci as a medical robot, ASIMO as a humanoid robot and so on. There are many research topics within the field of robot manipulators, e.g. motion planning, cooperation with a human, and fusion with external sensors like vision, haptic and force, etc. Moreover, these include both technical problems in the industry and theoretical problems in the academic fields. This book is a collection of papers presenting the latest research issues from around the world

Nuclear physics research at the University of Richmond. Progress report, November 1, 1994--October 31, 1995

Summarized in this report is the progress achieved during the period from November 1, 1994 to October 31, 1995. The experimental work described in this report is in electromagnetic and heavy-ion nuclear physics. The effort in electromagnetic nuclear physics is in preparation for the research program at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) and is focused on the construction and use of the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS). The heavy-ion experiments were performed at the Argonne National Laboratory ATLAS facility and SUNY, Stony Brook. The physics interests driving these efforts at CEBAF are in the study of the structure, interactions, and nuclear-medium modifications of mesons and baryons. This year, an extension of the experiment to measure the magnetic form factor of the neutron was approved by the CEBAF Program Advisory Committee Nine (PAC9) for beam at 6 GeV. The authors also submitted updates to PAC9 on the experiments to measure inclusive {eta} photoproduction in nuclei and electroproduction of the {Lambda}, {Lambda}*(1520), and f{sub 0}(975). In addition to these experiments, the authors collaborated on a proposal to measure rare radiative decays of the {phi} meson which was also approved by PAC9. Their contributions to the construction of the CLAS include the development of the drift-chamber gas system, drift-chamber software, and controls software. Major has been leading the effort in the construction of the gas system. In the last year, the Hall B gas shed was constructed and the installation of the gas system components built at the University of Richmond has begun. Over the last six years, the efforts in low-energy heavy-ion physics have decreased due to the change in focus to electromagnetic nuclear physics at CEBAF. Most of the heavy-ion work is completed and there are now new experiments planned. Included in this report are two papers resulting from collaborations on heavy-ion experiments