Siting Issues for Solar Thermal Power Plants with Small Community Applications

Technologies for solar thermal plants are being developed to provide energy alternatives for the future. Implementation of these plants requires consideration of siting issues as well as power system technology. While many conventional siting considerations are applicable, there is also a set of unique siting issues for solar thermal plants. Early experimental plants will have special siting considerations. The siting issues associated with small, dispersed solar thermal power plants in the 1 to 10 MWe power range for utility/small community applications are considered. Some specific requirements refer to the first 1 MWe engineering experiment for the Small Power Systems Applications (SPSA) Project. The siting issues themselves are discussed in three categories: (1) system resource requirements, (2) environmental effects on the system, and (3) potential impact of the plant on the environment. Within these categories, specific issues are discussed in a qualitative manner. Examples of limiting factors for some issues are taken from studies of other solar systems

The Boston University Collegium in Early Music, December 2, 1983

This is the concert program of the The Boston University Collegium in Early Music performance on Friday, December 2, 1983 at 8:00 p.m., at Marsh Chapel, 735 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were Capriccio sopra il Cucho from "First Book of Capriccios, Ricercars, and Canzonas" by Girolamo Frescobaldi, La Messa delli Apostoli from "Fiori musicali" by G. Frescobaldi, Toccata Quinta, sopra i pedali per l'organo, e senza from "Second Book of Toccatas, Canzonas, etc." by G. Frescobaldi, Missa Rosa Playsant by Jacob Obrecht, and La Pazzia Senile by Adriano Banchieri. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Our water resources and their conservation

Life history, habits, structure, industry, conservation efforts for: Blue Crabs; Oyster; Fin fishes - shad, rock, croaker; Sport fish and fishing - marine and fresh-water; other aquatic forms - Diamondback terrapin, muskrat. Problems that confront husbandry and conservation of the commercial species, while many of the fish types found in the Chesapeake Bay are superior from the sportive viewpoint. (PDF contains 103 pages

The Underground Proving Ground: Women and Men in an Appalachian Coal Mine

A report submitted by Suzanne E. Tallichet to the Research and Creative Productions Committee in 1996 on women\u27s integration into underground coal mining in Appalachia

Lattice-Boltzmann simulations of cerebral blood flow

Computational haemodynamics play a central role in the understanding of blood behaviour in the cerebral vasculature, increasing our knowledge in the onset of vascular diseases and their progression, improving diagnosis and ultimately providing better patient prognosis. Computer simulations hold the potential of accurately characterising motion of blood and its interaction with the vessel wall, providing the capability to assess surgical treatments with no danger to the patient. These aspects considerably contribute to better understand of blood circulation processes as well as to augment pre-treatment planning. Existing software environments for treatment planning consist of several stages, each requiring significant user interaction and processing time, significantly limiting their use in clinical scenarios. The aim of this PhD is to provide clinicians and researchers with a tool to aid in the understanding of human cerebral haemodynamics. This tool employs a high performance fluid solver based on the lattice-Boltzmann method (coined HemeLB), high performance distributed computing and grid computing, and various advanced software applications useful to efficiently set up and run patient-specific simulations. A graphical tool is used to segment the vasculature from patient-specific CT or MR data and configure boundary conditions with ease, creating models of the vasculature in real time. Blood flow visualisation is done in real time using in situ rendering techniques implemented within the parallel fluid solver and aided by steering capabilities; these programming strategies allows the clinician to interactively display the simulation results on a local workstation. A separate software application is used to numerically compare simulation results carried out at different spatial resolutions, providing a strategy to approach numerical validation. This developed software and supporting computational infrastructure was used to study various patient-specific intracranial aneurysms with the collaborating interventionalists at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neuroscience (London), using three-dimensional rotational angiography data to define the patient-specific vasculature. Blood flow motion was depicted in detail by the visualisation capabilities, clearly showing vortex fluid ow features and stress distribution at the inner surface of the aneurysms and their surrounding vasculature. These investigations permitted the clinicians to rapidly assess the risk associated with the growth and rupture of each aneurysm. The ultimate goal of this work is to aid clinical practice with an efficient easy-to-use toolkit for real-time decision support

Digging by Debating: Linking massive datasets to specific arguments

We will develop and implement a multi-scale workbench, called "InterDebates", with the goal of digging into data provided by hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of digitized books, bibliographic databases of journal articles, and comprehensive reference works written by experts. Our hypotheses are: that detailed and identifiable arguments drive many aspects of research in the sciences and the humanities; that argumentative structures can be extracted from large datasets using a mixture of automated and social computing techniques; and, that the availability of such analyses will enable innovative interdisciplinary research, and may also play a role in supporting better-informed critical debates among students and the general public. A key challenge tackled by this project is thus to uncover and represent the argumentative structure of digitized documents, allowing users to find and interpret detailed arguments in the broad semantic landscape of books and articles

Advanced space system concepts and their orbital support needs (1980 - 2000). Volume 2: Final report

The results are presented of a study which identifies over 100 new and highly capable space systems for the 1980-2000 time period: civilian systems which could bring benefits to large numbers of average citizens in everyday life, much enhance the kinds and levels of public services, increase the economic motivation for industrial investment in space, expand scientific horizons; and, in the military area, systems which could materially alter current concepts of tactical and strategic engagements. The requirements for space transportation, orbital support, and technology for these systems are derived, and those requirements likely to be shared between NASA and the DoD in the time period identified. The high leverage technologies for the time period are identified as very large microwave antennas and optics, high energy power subsystems, high precision and high power lasers, microelectronic circuit complexes and data processors, mosaic solid state sensing devices, and long-life cryogenic refrigerators

Biology-Inspired Approach for Communal Behavior in Massively Deployed Sensor Networks

Research in wireless sensor networks has accelerated rapidly in recent years. The promise of ubiquitous control of the physical environment opens the way for new applications that will redefine the way we live and work. Due to the small size and low cost of sensor devices, visionaries promise smart systems enabled by deployment of massive numbers of sensors working in concert. To date, most of the research effort has concentrated on forming ad hoc networks under centralized control, which is not scalable to massive deployments. This thesis proposes an alternative approach based on models inspired by biological systems and reports significant results based on this new approach. This perspective views sensor devices as autonomous organisms in a community interacting as part of an ecosystem rather than as nodes in a computing network. The networks that result from this design make local decisions based on local information in order for the network to achieve global goals, thus we must engineer for emergent behavior in wireless sensor networks. First we implemented a simulator based on cellular automata to be used in algorithm development and assessment. Then we developed efficient algorithms to exploit emergent behavior for finding the average of distributed values, synchronizing distributed clocks, and conducting distributed binary voting. These algorithms are shown to be convergent and efficient by analysis and simulation. Finally, an extension of this perspective is used and demonstrated to provide significant progress on the noise abatement problem for jet aircraft. Using local information and actions, optimal impedance values for an acoustic liner are determined in situ providing the basis for an adaptive noise abatement system that provides superior noise reduction compared with current technology and previous research efforts