Flash flood simulations for an Egyptian city - mitigation measures and impact of infiltration

Within this work, the impact of mitigation measures and infiltration on flash floods is investigated by using a 2D robust shallow water model including infiltration with the Green-Ampt model. The results show the combined effects of infiltration and mitigation measures as well as the effectiveness of bypass channels in addition to retention basins. Retention basins at appropriate locations could reduce the maximum water depth at critical locations by 23%, while the additional implementation of drainage channels lead to a reduction of 75%, considering also infiltration lead to a further reduction of 97%. If infiltration was considered without mitigation measures, the peak water depth was reduced by 67%. For an exceptional extreme event the measures lead to a reduction of 73% at some locations, while at other locations the overflow from retention basins due to overstraining generated even higher inundations with an increase of 58%

Plasma Catalytic Reforming of Biofuels

Vegetable oils and ethanol have been used in a plasmatron reformer to generate synthesis gas. Corn, canola, and soybean oils and ethanol have been reformed at different oxygen to carbon ratios and different power levels. Both homogeneous plasma reforming (uncatalyzed) and catalytic plasma reformer have been evaluated. I

Decomposition of 1,1-Dichloroethane and 1,1-Dichloroethene in an electron beam generated plasma reactor

An electron beam generated plasma reactor is used to decompose low concentrations (100–3000 ppm) of 1,1-dichloroethane and 1,1-dichloroethene in atmospheric pressure air streams. The energy requirements for 90% and 99% decomposition of each compound are reported as a function of inlet concentration. Dichloroethene decomposition is enhanced by a chlorine radical propagated chain reaction. The chain length of the dichloroethene reaction is estimated to increase with dichloroethene concentration from 10 at 100 ppm initial dichloroethene concentration to 30 at 3000 ppm. Both the dichloroethane and dichloroethene reactions seem to be inhibited by electron scavenging decomposition products. A simple analytic expression is proposed for fitting decomposition data where inhibition effects are important and simple first order kinetics are not observed

Analytical, experimental and numerical study of a graded honeycomb structure under in-plane impact load with low velocity

Given the significance of energy absorption in various industries, light shock absorbers such as honeycomb structure under in-plane and out-of-plane loads have been in the core of attention. The purpose of this research is the analyses of graded honeycomb structure (GHS) behaviour under in-plane impact loading and its optimisation. Primarily, analytical equations for plateau stress and specific energy are represented, taking power hardening model (PHM) and elastic–perfectly plastic model (EPPM) into consideration. For the validation and comparison of acquired analytical equations, the energy absorption of a GHS made of five different aluminium grades is simulated in ABAQUS/CAE. In order to validate the numerical simulation method in ABAQUS, an experimental test has been conducted as the falling a weight with low velocity on a GHS. Numerical results retain an acceptable accordance with experimental ones with a 5.4% occurred error of reaction force. For a structure with a specific kinetic energy, the stress–strain diagram is achieved and compared with the analytical equations obtained. The maximum difference between the numerical and analytical plateau stresses for PHM is 10.58%. However, this value has been measured to be 38.78% for EPPM. In addition, the numerical value of absorbed energy is compared to that of analytical method for two material models. The maximum difference between the numerical and analytical absorbed energies for PHM model is 6.4%, while it retains the value of 48.08% for EPPM. Based on the conducted comparisons, the numerical and analytical results based on PHM are more congruent than EPPM results. Applying sequential quadratic programming method and genetic algorithm, the ratio of structure mass to the absorbed energy is minimised. According to the optimisation results, the structure capacity of absorbing energy increases by 18% compared to the primary model

Detection of grapevine closterovirus A in infected grapevine tissue by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction

Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was successfully applied to detection of GVA RNA in nucleic acid extracts of infected grapevines. In particular, an artificially synthesized DNA primer set designed to amplify a GVA cDNA fragment of 430 base pairs, specifically detected GVA RNA sequences in extracts from infected grapevine tissues such as leaves from in vitro-grown explants, leaves from greenhouse-grown rooted cuttings, and bark scrapings of mature canes from field-grown vines. The detection limit of GVA RNA by RT-PCR was estimated to be 200 fold higher than that obtained by molecular hybridization or ELISA

Multidimensional Inverse Boundary Value Problem for a System of Hyperbolic Equations

In the paper we investigate the solvability of the inverse multidimensional boundary value problem for the system of hyperbolic type equations. A method is proposed to reduce the considered problem to some non infinite system of differential equations. The proposed method allows one to prove the existence and uniqueness theorems for the multidimensional inverse boundary value problems in the class of the functions with bounded smoothness