Commercial Airliner Winglet Design Optimization – A Case Study

The objective of this research is to determine the effect on aerodynamic performance due to changes of winglets design variables found of the Boeing 737-700 aircraft. The various winglet types studied in this research include the blended, canted, wingtip fence and split scimitar. The variables include height, sweep angle, taper ratio, and the inclination angle. These variables are altered in 5% increments from -15% to +15% of their original baseline values. Each altered winglet design only changes one variable at a time while keeping all other variables constant. The altered models are compared to the original by finding the aerodynamic efficiency though Computational Fluid Dynamics in Solidworks. For this study, aerodynamic efficiency is defined as lift to drag ratio generated by the isolated wing coupled with the corresponding winglet design. For empirical analysis, the optimized winglets are scaled down, 3D printed and tested for their aerodynamic efficiency in the AEROLAB subsonic Educational Wind Tunnel. This study concludes that the blended winglet reaches peak aerodynamic efficiency with an increase to the sweep angle of +10% of the original baseline blended winglet value found on the B737-700 winglet. Additionally, aerodynamic efficiency of the canted winglet peaks at an inclination angle of 45 degrees. The Wingtip fence winglet derived from the Airbus A320 preformed the best at its baseline values. Lastly, the split scimitar winglet performs best with the lower member as the full cord length and scaled down to 50% of the top member. This study focuses on the relative changes of each winglet and its changes to the aerodynamic efficiency

An inter-American study of William Sydney Porter\u27s Latin American stories

Statement of the problem. This paper is an examination of William Sydney Porter\u27s Latin American stories in light of their inter-American significance. The basic point of view from which the study is made is that Porter is a North American writing about Latin American at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paper examines the Latin American and North American characters which appear in the stories and catalogs them into groups of stereotypes. The aim of this study is to discover Porter\u27s ideas, views, and concepts of Latin America, Latin Americans, and North Americas in Latin America, as they are expressed in his stories. This study cannot establish what Porter\u27s personal thoughts on Latin America and Latin Americans actually were, for Porter never published a first-person report of these thoughts. Much of the study depends entirely on the views, opinions, and feelings of the speakers and characters in the stories. Many of Porter\u27s North American characters demonstrate a negative attitude toward Latin America and its people, an attitude which is in keeping with their characters. This is particularly true of Porter\u27s North American soldier of fortune type, speculator type, adventurer type, and fugitive type. However, in order to point out the general attitude toward Latin America which is developed and expressed by Porter in his stories, it will be necessary to lump together the views and opinions of all his speakers and characters

MicroRNA Expression Signature of Retinal Pigmented Epithelial Cells Associated with the Phenotype of Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Age-related macular degeneration is a debilitating condition that manifests as a loss of the central portion of an individual’s field of vision, affecting 1 in 3 people over the age of 80. With regards to the retina, the organ primarily responsible for an individual’s sense of vision, this condition is associated with the degeneration of the central point in the retina, known as the macula, which contains the highest concentration of light-sensitive photoreceptors. It is currently known that the human retina exhibits a gradual decrease in protective detoxifying factors such as glutathione-S-transferase-1 and catalase as well as increased lipid peroxidation, all of which resulting in the age-related increase in autofluorescent lipofuscin between the retina and the choroid. This prevents the proper deliverance of nutrients to the foundational layer of cells in the retina, leading to oxidative stress-related apoptosis of first the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) and then the photoreceptors. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a group of endogenous noncoding RNA molecules that originate from parts of the genome that were originally speculated to be “junk” DNA. However, it is now known that these small RNA molecules are responsible for gene silencing on the post-transcriptional level via the degradation or transcription inhibition of specific mRNA transcripts. In the context of age-related macular degeneration, certain miRNAs may be upregulated to induce the downregulation of apoptotic genes. On the other hand, certain miRNAs is may become downregulated to promote enhanced expression of protective factors. We hypothesize that miRNAs play a role in regulating oxidative response of RPE cells, which may then contribute to cell survival by the upregulation of endogenous pro-survival antioxidant elements

Cyclometallated Compounds of Palladium(ii), Rhodium(iii), and Iridium(iii).

A number of new complex compounds of palladium, gold, rhodium, iridium, and platinum have been synthesized and characterized. The organic ligands used in the preponderance of reactions involve some nitrogen heterocycle such as 2-arylpyridines, 2,6-diarylpyridines, benzo{h}quinoline, and caffeine. In most cases, the organic ligand underwent an intramolecular metallation (designated orthometallation or more generally cyclometallation ) with subsequent formation of a chelate ring containing a covalent metal to carbon bond. The effect of varying the substituents on the aryl moiety of the 2-arylpyridines supported the hypothesis that after initial N-complexation, the 2-position of the aryl nucleus experiences an electrophilic attack by the palladium atom. Several different palladium starting materials were used and it was found that: (a) Pd(acetylacetonate)(,2) did not react; (b) PdCl(,2)(C(,6)H(,5)CN)(,2) did not metallate, but did give a 2:1 (ligand-to-metal) adduct; and (c) both PdCl(,4)(\u272-) and Pd(CH(,3)COO)(,2) gave the desired cyclometallated products. Palladium(II) acetate has proven to be a more useful starting material than the tetrachloropalladata, since the resulting acetato-bridged dimers, unlike the chloro-bridged dimers, are soluble in polar organic solvents. Reactions of gold in such forms as AuCl(,4)(\u27-), (C(,6)H(,5))(,3)PAuCl, and dichloro-(mu)-1,2-bis(diphenylphosphino)ethanedigold(I) failed to produce any cyclometallated products under a broad assortment of conditions. Only compounds containing 1:1 (ligand to metal) adducts were formed. Occasionally, reduction to metallic gold occurred. Both rhodium and iridium formed biscyclometallated products containing two chelated rings per six-coordinated trivalent metal atom. In contrast to the four-coordinate palladium(II) chlorobridged dimers, the chloro-bridged dimers of rhodium and iridium were conveniently soluble in organic solvents. Platinum formed a compound which was analogous to those of the palladium chloro-bridged dimers. Detailed high resolution (\u271)H NMR studies (200 MHz) showed that cyclometallation did occur on the aryl nucleus of the 2-arylpyridines. The 6-heteroaryl protons and those \u27ortho\u27 to the metal-carbon bond are both shifted from the free ligand position. Depending on the metal, the shifts are either up- or downfield. These shifts can be explained by either through-space interactions of overlying aromatic rings and/or through-bond (metal-to-ligand) effects. The (\u271)H NMR spectra of these biscyclometallated rhodium and iridium complexes have established a trans-nitrogen octahedral structure for all of these d(\u276) compounds. Both acetato- and chloro-bridged dimers react with certain ligands to give mononuclear complexes containing the intact cyclometallated ligand. (\u271)H NMR studies of palladium and rhodium complexes containing diethyldithiocarbamate and 2-arylpyridines as chelating ligands strongly suggest that in the d(\u278) palladium compound there is metal-to-ligand back bonding whereas in the d(\u276) rhodium compound no such bonding occurs. Furthermore, in the former complex the methyl groups are found to be in non-equivalent sites while the methylene protons are in equivalent sites. The reverse is true for the latter (Rh) complex. These observations are explained by the different structures of the Pd and Rh complexes, but more importantly by different metal-ligand bonding to both the arylpyridine and the dtc ligands. The nitrogen of the dtc ligand appears to be sp(\u273) in the Rh complex and closer to sp(\u272) in the Pd complex. Single crystal X-ray determinations have confirmed that metallation of an aryl ring of both 2-arylpyridines and 2,6-diarylpyridines has occurred

Parallelization of a Six Degree of Freedom Entry Vehicle Trajectory Simulation Using OpenMP and OpenACC

The art and science of writing parallelized software, using methods such as Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) and Open Accelerators (OpenACC), is dominated by computer scientists. Engineers and non-computer scientists looking to apply these techniques to their project applications face a steep learning curve, especially when looking to adapt their original single threaded software to run multi-threaded on graphics processing units (GPUs). There are significant changes in mindset that must occur; such as how to manage memory, the organization of instructions, and the use of if statements (also known as branching). The purpose of this work is twofold: 1) to demonstrate the applicability of parallelized coding methodologies, OpenMP and OpenACC, to tasks outside of the typical large scale matrix mathematics; and 2) to discuss, from an engineers perspective, the lessons learned from parallelizing software using these computer science techniques. This work applies OpenMP, on both multi-core central processing units (CPUs) and Intel Xeon Phi 7210, and OpenACC on GPUs. These parallelization techniques are used to tackle the simulation of thousands of entry vehicle trajectories through the integration of six degree of freedom (DoF) equations of motion (EoM). The forces and moments acting on the entry vehicle, and used by the EoM, are estimated using multiple models of varying levels of complexity. Several benchmark comparisons are made on the execution of six DoF trajectory simulation: single thread Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPU, multi-thread CPU using OpenMP, multi-thread Xeon Phi 7210 using OpenMP, and multi-thread NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU using OpenACC. These benchmarks are run on the Pleiades Supercomputer Cluster at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center (ARC), and a Xeon Phi 7210 node at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC)

Physically Dense Server Architectures.

Distributed, in-memory key-value stores have emerged as one of today's most important data center workloads. Being critical for the scalability of modern web services, vast resources are dedicated to key-value stores in order to ensure that quality of service guarantees are met. These resources include: many server racks to store terabytes of key-value data, the power necessary to run all of the machines, networking equipment and bandwidth, and the data center warehouses used to house the racks. There is, however, a mismatch between the key-value store software and the commodity servers on which it is run, leading to inefficient use of resources. The primary cause of inefficiency is the overhead incurred from processing individual network packets, which typically carry small payloads, and require minimal compute resources. Thus, one of the key challenges as we enter the exascale era is how to best adjust to the paradigm shift from compute-centric to storage-centric data centers. This dissertation presents a hardware/software solution that addresses the inefficiency issues present in the modern data centers on which key-value stores are currently deployed. First, it proposes two physical server designs, both of which use 3D-stacking technology and low-power CPUs to improve density and efficiency. The first 3D architecture---Mercury---consists of stacks of low-power CPUs with 3D-stacked DRAM. The second architecture---Iridium---replaces DRAM with 3D NAND Flash to improve density. The second portion of this dissertation proposes and enhanced version of the Mercury server design---called KeyVault---that incorporates integrated, zero-copy network interfaces along with an integrated switching fabric. In order to utilize the integrated networking hardware, as well as reduce the response time of requests, a custom networking protocol is proposed. Unlike prior works on accelerating key-value stores---e.g., by completely bypassing the CPU and OS when processing requests---this work only bypasses the CPU and OS when placing network payloads into a process' memory. The insight behind this is that because most of the overhead comes from processing packets in the OS kernel---and not the request processing itself---direct placement of packet's payload is sufficient to provide higher throughput and lower latency than prior approaches.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111414/1/atgutier_1.pd

Ineffective Aggregation of Filipino-American Health Assessment Data & It\u27s Effect on Individualized Healthcare

Background Filipino-Americans and their health care data seem to be difficult to find individually, and this is due to the continual grouping of this population with other Asian subgroups into the Asian-American population. The needs of the Filipino-American population are distinctly different from other Asian-American subgroups, and the underrepresentation leads to inadequate health care, lack of education within the community, and in some cases, disproportional deaths of Filipino-Americans. Objective To highlight the importance of adequate aggregation of health assessment data of a specific population on individualized care, in this paper, Filipino-Americans. Summary of Findings In the review of literature, it seems that aggregation of health assessment data specifically for Filipino-Americans depict major issues that may not reflect on the majority of the Asian-American population. The inadequate aggregation of Filipino-American healthcare data is also comparable to the experiences of Filipino-Canadians, who also face a similar issue in their country. Proposal Through a mixed-method study, the researchers aim to identify some of the more prominent health disparities of Filipinos in America, research possible interventions for those disparities, and create ways to prevent inadequate aggregation of Filipino-American healthcare data

Hurricane Madness: Teaching, Learning And The Importance Of Flexibility In The Wake Of Disaster

The present study examines stress among college students (N=107) that were exposed to natural disasters at the start of the 2004 Fall Semester after Hurricane Charley and Frances battered Central Florida within three weeks of each other. The study also examines adjustments made by two faculty members during the semester in attempts to reduce student stress while maintaining high academic standards in the wake of disaster. Findings indicate that students experienced a substantial amount of stress as a result of the storms.  Of the students surveyed 50 percent indicated they suffered lost wages or income, 65 percent sustained some damage to their residences, and 63 percent experienced moderate to extremely high levels of stress. Concerning the adjustments implemented by the instructors, 84 percent of the students agreed or strongly agreed that the academic quality of their education was not compromised. While educators must have well-designed and planned courses, when disaster strikes, it is imperative that they incorporate creative and flexible teaching methods and policies in their classrooms

Nivel de desempeño de los colaboradores del Hotel Royal Park aplicando el método de escalas gráficas, distrito de San Isidro, 2018

La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo identificar el nivel del desempeño de los colaboradores del hotel Royal Park del distrito de San Isidro, 2018. Así mismo el estudio fue de diseño no experimental y de corte transversal con un enfoque cuantitativo. La investigación se realizó a base de los conceptos del autor Idalberto Chiavenato en cuanto a su aporte con temas sobre desempeño y gestión del talento humano. La población de estudio estuvo conformada por 60 colaboradores del área operativa del hotel Royal Park, motivo por el cual se aplicó un censo, permitiendo así llegar a la conclusión que el nivel de desempeño de los colaboradores del hotel Royal Park del distrito de San Isidro, 2018 es medio

Party Mobile iOS Application

The Party Mobile Application project was created in order to give users the power of a surround sound system at their fingertips. Following the ideas of apps such as AmpMe and SoundSeeder this application aims to synchronize audio between phones in order to play music. Just like surround speakers, these phones would play music throughout a room, car, or house for the enjoyment of users. Party Mobile also aims to give people the ability to share their music with the rest of the world with its playlist upload functionality. Any user can upload a playlist of their music to the application’s server, and then play it in a session for a group of people. Additionally, all playlists uploaded to the server are public so users can also listen to playlists compiled by other people. With its various functionalities, the Party Mobile Application aims to give users the ability to share, listen, and enjoy music with their friends anywhere in the world. The application accomplishes this goal through two primary means. The first is utilizing Bluetooth as the primary method of communication between devices. All phones in a session connect to each other using Bluetooth and send each other the necessary data to play music synchronized. Alternatively, the application can also use wifi to send data to phones; however, this method is situational based on the security settings of whatever network your phone is on. In addition, to this, the application also uses an Amazon AWS server to store all of the playlists created by users. Utilizing the Swift coding language Party Mobile is able to interact with the AWS server directly, and download songs and playlists to user phones. These two parts of the application, when put together, create the experience that Party Mobile was created to give its users. In the rest of this report, readers can learn about the details behind the apps two main features as well as the development cycle of the application