Development of Reduced-Order Models for Engine Applications

Detailed chemical kinetics is critical for accurate prediction of complex flame behaviors, such as ignition and extinction in engine applications, but difficult to be applied in multi-dimensional flame simulations due to their large sizes. Reduced-order models are needed in such cases to enable high fidelity combustion simulations. This dissertation is focused on developing new model reduction strategies and reduced-order models for engine combustion applications. First, a linearized error propagation (LEP) method for skeletal mechanism reduction is proposed. LEP is based on Jacobian analysis of perfectly stirred reactors (PSR) and can more accurately predict the propagation of small reduction errors compared with the previous methods of directed relation graph (DRG) and DRG with error propagation (DRGEP). Skeletal models generated by using LEP are further validated for auto-ignition and 1-D laminar premixed flames to demonstrate the feasibility of reaction state sampling using only PSR for mechanism reduction. Second, a direct method is developed to accurately and efficiently compute the ignition and extinction turning points of PSR by solving a local optimization problem formulated based on analytic Jacobian. It is shown that the direct method features significantly better accuracy and efficiency compared with the continuation methods that march along the S-curves. Third, reduced and skeletal mechanisms for gasoline surrogates with and without ethanol are developed based on a 1389-species detailed mechanism developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The skeletal reduction was performed with DRG, sensitivity analysis, isomer lumping, and the time-scale based reduction is based on linearized quasi-steady-state approximations. The skeletal and reduced mechanisms are extensively validated against the detailed mechanism and available experimental data for ignition delay time and flame speed. The skeletal mechanism is employed in cooperative fuel research engine simulations and the results agree well with experimental data. Lastly, skeletal mechanisms are generated for three gasoline/bio-blend-stock surrogates respectively based on a 2878-species detailed LLNL mechanism for engine simulations. An upgraded solver combining analytical Jacobian and sparse matrix techniques is employed to accelerate the reduction process, such that the reduction time becomes linearly proportional to the mechanism size and a speedup factor of approximately 100 is achieved

Later prehistoric environmental maginality in western Ireland: multi-proxy investigations

'They just kept turning up And were thought of as foreign'-One-eyed and benign They lie about his house, Quernstones out of a bog. To lift the lid of the peat And find this pupil dreaming Of neolithic wheat! When he stripped off blanket bog The soft-piles centuries Fell open like a glib: There were the first plough-marks, The stone age fields, the tomb Corbelled, turfed and chambered, Floored with dry turf-coomb. A landscape fossilized, Its stone wall patterning Repeated before our eyes In the stone walls of Mayo Before I turn to go He talked about persistence, A congruence of lives, How, stubbed and cleared of stones, His home accrued growth rings Of iron, flint and bronze. So I talked of Mossbawn, A bogland name. 'But moss?' He crossed myoId home's music With older strains of Norse. I'd told how its foundation Was mutable as sound And how I could derive A forked root from that ground And make bawn an English fort, A planter's walled-in mound Or else find sanctuary And think of it as Irish, Persistent if outworn. 'But the Norse ring on your tree?' I passed through the eye of the quem, II Grist to an ancient mill, And in my mind's eye saw A world-tree of balanced stones, Querns piled like vertebrae, The marrow crushed to grounds

Artificial Intelligence in Image-Based Screening, Diagnostics, and Clinical Care of Cardiopulmonary Diseases

Cardiothoracic and pulmonary diseases are a significant cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of access to clinical care, the overburdened medical system, and the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in improving medicine. There are a variety of diseases affecting the cardiopulmonary system including lung cancers, heart disease, tuberculosis (TB), etc., in addition to COVID-19-related diseases. Screening, diagnosis, and management of cardiopulmonary diseases has become difficult owing to the limited availability of diagnostic tools and experts, particularly in resource-limited regions. Early screening, accurate diagnosis and staging of these diseases could play a crucial role in treatment and care, and potentially aid in reducing mortality. Radiographic imaging methods such as computed tomography (CT), chest X-rays (CXRs), and echo ultrasound (US) are widely used in screening and diagnosis. Research on using image-based AI and machine learning (ML) methods can help in rapid assessment, serve as surrogates for expert assessment, and reduce variability in human performance. In this Special Issue, “Artificial Intelligence in Image-Based Screening, Diagnostics, and Clinical Care of Cardiopulmonary Diseases”, we have highlighted exemplary primary research studies and literature reviews focusing on novel AI/ML methods and their application in image-based screening, diagnosis, and clinical management of cardiopulmonary diseases. We hope that these articles will help establish the advancements in AI

Modern Developments in Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) – Applications and Perspectives in Clinical Neuroscience

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is being increasingly used in neuroscience and clinics. Modern advances include but are not limited to the combination of TMS with precise neuronavigation as well as the integration of TMS into a multimodal environment, e.g., by guiding the TMS application using complementary techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), or magnetoencephalography (MEG). Furthermore, the impact of stimulation can be identified and characterized by such multimodal approaches, helping to shed light on the basic neurophysiology and TMS effects in the human brain. Against this background, the aim of this Special Issue was to explore advancements in the field of TMS considering both investigations in healthy subjects as well as patients

The mind is the tabernacle of the consciousness soul: A journey visiting the roles of consciousness, communication, education, and technology in human and curriculum development by integrating Dewey, Gebser, and Steiner: Past, present, future

This descriptive philosophical study examines 355+ question seeds of thought and discourse on consciousness, communication, education, and technology, much in the contexts of philosophical structures of human beings from 4,000,000 B.C. hominid man to the future of humankind and genetic enhancement. Curriculum and consciousness discussion of American John Dewey (1859–1952), Polish-born Jean Gebser (1905–1975), and Austrian-born Rudolf Steiner (1865–1920) is interwoven, finding commonalities of these philosophers and that of Daniel J. K. Bardy. Language being developed only 50,000 years ago is the defining point for Homo sapiens as the tool of linguistic communication, mutated forward much like the protrusion development of the jaw line of the species to accommodate for articulation and pronunciation development. The first of four cornerstone movements in the dissertation includes finding that the truth of Rudolf Steiner\u27s Waldorf curriculum is embedded in the magical and mythical consciousness underpinnings laid out by Jean Gebser. Cornerstone number two is philosopher and rhetorician John Dewey\u27s synonymous use of education and communication and the constant battle of dualities of the current mental rational consciousness. Alison Biskup\u27s and Helen Keller\u27s mind matrixes and their connections to language learning and communication processes of hominid man are cornerstone number three. Cornerstone number four is the inter-informational level of communication and our own intrapersonal awareness that communication and education is the coming together of three layers: (a) the five stages of human consciousness—archaic, magical mythical, mental rational, and arational/integral; (b) the eight levels of communication—interpersonal, interpersonal, triad, small group, large group, one-to-many/many-to-one, global, and inter-informational; (c) the six variables of the communication process—sender, message, channel (through the six senses of taste, touch, hearing, vision, olfactory, intuit), receiver, feedback, and noise (physical/external, internal, semantic, and ethnocentric). Branching from the fourth cornerstone is a discussion on technostress and human consciousness relating real-time events to mediated communication, which manipulates real time, thus tricking our consciousness into stress and anxiety periods while waiting for the magic of technology to solve the problem

Very High Resolution (VHR) Satellite Imagery: Processing and Applications

Recently, growing interest in the use of remote sensing imagery has appeared to provide synoptic maps of water quality parameters in coastal and inner water ecosystems;, monitoring of complex land ecosystems for biodiversity conservation; precision agriculture for the management of soils, crops, and pests; urban planning; disaster monitoring, etc. However, for these maps to achieve their full potential, it is important to engage in periodic monitoring and analysis of multi-temporal changes. In this context, very high resolution (VHR) satellite-based optical, infrared, and radar imaging instruments provide reliable information to implement spatially-based conservation actions. Moreover, they enable observations of parameters of our environment at greater broader spatial and finer temporal scales than those allowed through field observation alone. In this sense, recent very high resolution satellite technologies and image processing algorithms present the opportunity to develop quantitative techniques that have the potential to improve upon traditional techniques in terms of cost, mapping fidelity, and objectivity. Typical applications include multi-temporal classification, recognition and tracking of specific patterns, multisensor data fusion, analysis of land/marine ecosystem processes and environment monitoring, etc. This book aims to collect new developments, methodologies, and applications of very high resolution satellite data for remote sensing. The works selected provide to the research community the most recent advances on all aspects of VHR satellite remote sensing

From Machair to Mountains

South Uist in the Outer Hebrides has some of the best preserved archaeological remains within Britain and even further afield. Three distinct ecological zones - grassland machair plain, peaty blackland and mountains - each bear the imprint of human occupation over many millennia. The machair strip, long uninhabited, is filled with hundreds of settlement mounds, occupied from the Beaker period 4,000 years ago until a few centuries ago. The blacklands bear the traces of past farming practices as well as the remains of medieval settlements, more recent blackhouses and lochs containing duns, brochs and crannogs. In the hills lie the upstanding remains of shielings, Iron Age wheel houses and Neolithic chambered tombs.<br/>The results of large-scale excavations of Bronze Age houses (Cladh Hallan), an Iron Age broch (Dun Vulan), Viking settlements (Bornais and Cille Pheadair) and post-medieval blackhouses (Airigh Mhuillin), combined with extensive surveys and small-scale excavations that have identified hundreds of new sites, are being brought together in a series of volumes to provide an invaluable record and assessment of South Uist's archaeology covering the last 6,000 years. The large set-piece excavations are to be published in separate monographs. The results of the surveys and small-scale excavations are presented here

From Machair to Mountains

South Uist in the Outer Hebrides has some of the best preserved archaeological remains within Britain and even further afield. Three distinct ecological zones - grassland machair plain, peaty blackland and mountains - each bear the imprint of human occupation over many millennia. The machair strip, long uninhabited, is filled with hundreds of settlement mounds, occupied from the Beaker period 4,000 years ago until a few centuries ago. The blacklands bear the traces of past farming practices as well as the remains of medieval settlements, more recent blackhouses and lochs containing duns, brochs and crannogs. In the hills lie the upstanding remains of shielings, Iron Age wheel houses and Neolithic chambered tombs.<br/>The results of large-scale excavations of Bronze Age houses (Cladh Hallan), an Iron Age broch (Dun Vulan), Viking settlements (Bornais and Cille Pheadair) and post-medieval blackhouses (Airigh Mhuillin), combined with extensive surveys and small-scale excavations that have identified hundreds of new sites, are being brought together in a series of volumes to provide an invaluable record and assessment of South Uist's archaeology covering the last 6,000 years. The large set-piece excavations are to be published in separate monographs. The results of the surveys and small-scale excavations are presented here

Rethinking the henge monuments of the British Isles

PhD ThesisThe henge monuments of Britain and Ireland are some of the best, and yet most poorly understood, monuments of Neolithic/Bronze Age Europe. Defined as later Neolithic enclosures with a circular bank, inner ditch, and usually one or two entrances, henges have been considered as a single category of site since they were first identified in the 1930s. As the category grew, and further attempts to sort the variety into subtypes created new terms, it became increasingly apparent that the wide variation in their size and architecture meant that they cannot simply be assumed to share a single use and meaning. Drawing from the large number of sites currently described as henge monuments, this thesis highlights the effect of classification on loosening the rigidity in the definition of site ‘types’, explores the problematic nature of typology within archaeology, and examines its longlasting effect on understanding and public perception of sites. This thesis uses a relational approach to typology to argue that there are small regional ‘types’ visible within the variation of the henge class, but that a clear henge type can only be considered loosely. It also examines the importance of a biographical approach, in understanding why sites were constructed and how such an approach can be combined with a typological approach to extend the interpretation and investigate sites at a range of scales. The thesis discusses the development of, and the variation within henge monuments, whilst also showing that there are similarities across a wider range of Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age circular enclosures at different periods. A database of all sites previously and currently considered to be henge monuments, collated using a variety of sources (e.g. HERs, catalogues, and excavation reports) accompanies this thesis, and provides the first such catalogue since Harding and Lee’s influential 1987 publication