Observed dependence of characteristics of liquid-pool fires on swirl magnitude

One dozen vertically oriented thin rectangular vanes, 62 cm tall and 15.2 cm wide, were placed 27 cm from the center of heptane and ethanol pool fires in continuously fed, floor-flush pans 3.2 cm and 5.1 cm in diameter in the laboratory. The vanes were all oriented at the same fixed angles from the radial direction, for 9 different angles, ranging from 0 degrees to 85 degrees, thereby imparting 9 different levels of circulation to the air entrained by each pool fire. The different swirl levels were observed to engender dramatically different pool-fire structures. Moderate swirl suppresses the global puffing instability, replacing it by a global helical instability that generates a tall fire whirl, the height of which increases with increasing circulation. Except for the largest heptane pool, higher swirl levels produced vortex breakdown, resulting in the emergence of a bubble-like recirculation region with a ring vortex encircling the axis. Measured burning rates increase with increasing swirl levels as a consequence of the associated increasing inflow velocities reducing the thickness of the boundary layer within which combustion occurs right above the liquid surface, eventually forming detached edge flames in the boundary layer that move closer to the axis as the circulation is increased. Still higher circulation reduces the burning rate by decreasing the surface area of the liquid covered by the flame, thereby reducing the height of the fire whirl. Even higher circulation causes edge-flame detachment, resulting in formation of the blue whirl identified in recent literature, often meandering over the surface of the liquid in the present experiments. This sequence of events is documented herein

Linear theory for the interaction of small-scale turbulence with overdriven detonation

To complement our previous analysis of interactions of large-scale turbulence with strong detonations, the corresponding theory of interactions of small-scale turbulence is presented here. Focusing most directly on the results of greatest interest, the ultimate long-time effects of high-frequency vortical and entropic disturbances on the burnt-gas flow, a normal-mode analysis is selected here, rather than the Laplace-transform approach. The interaction of the planar detonation with a monochromatic pattern of perturbations is addressed first, and then a Fourier superposition for two-dimensional and three-dimensional isotropic turbulent fields is employed to provide integral formulas for the amplification of the kinetic energy, enstrophy, and density fluctuations. Effects of the propagation Mach number and of the chemical heat release and the chemical reaction rate are identified, as well as the similarities and differences from the previous result for the thin-detonation (fast-reaction) limit.This work was supported by the U.S. AFOSR Grant No. FA9550-12-1-0138.Publicad

Minimum ignition energy of methanol-air mixtures

A method for computing minimum ignition energies for gaseous fuel mixtures with detailed and reduced chemistry, by numerical integration of time-dependent conservation equations in a spherically symmetrical configuration, is presented and discussed, testing its general characteristics and accuracy. The method is applied to methanol-air mixtures described by a 38-step Arrhenius chemistry description and by an 8-step chemistry description based on steady-state approximations for reaction intermediaries. Comparisons of predictions with results of available experimental measurements produced reasonable agreements and supported both the robustness of the computational method and the usefulness of the 8-step reduction in achieving accurate predictions.This work was supported by the Spanish MCINN through Projects # CSD2010-00011, ENE2012-33213 and ENE2015-65852-C2-1-R

A multipurpose reduced chemical-kinetic mechanism for methanol combustion

A multipurpose reduced chemical-kinetic mechanism for methanol combustion comprising 8 overall reactions and 11 reacting chemical species is presented. The development starts by investigating the minimum set of elementary reactions needed to describe methanol combustion with reasonable accuracy over a range of conditions of temperature, pressure, and composition of interest in combustion. Starting from a 27-step mechanism that has been previously tested and found to give accurate predictions of ignition processes for these conditions, it is determined that the addition of 11 elementary reactions taken from its basis (San Diego) mechanism extends the validity of the description to premixed-flame propagation, strain-induced extinction of non-premixed flames, and equilibrium composition and temperatures, giving results that compare favourably with experimental measurements and also with computations using the 247-step detailed San Diego mechanism involving 50 reactive species. Specifically, premixed-flame propagation velocities and extinction strain rates for non-premixed counterflow flames calculated with the 38-step mechanism show departures from experimental measurements and detailed-chemistry computations that are roughly on the order of 10%, comparable with expected experimental uncertainties. Similar accuracy is found in comparisons of autoignition times over the range considered, except at very high temperatures, under which conditions the computations tend to overpredict induction times for all of the chemistry descriptions tested. From this 38-step mechanism, the simplification is continued by introducing steady-state approximations for the intermediate species CH3, CH4, HCO, CH3O, CH2OH, and O, leading to an 8-step reduced mechanism that provides satisfactory accuracy for all conditions tested.This work was supported by the Spanish MCINN [projects numbers CSD2010-00011, ENE2012-33213 and ENE2015-65852-C2-1-R

Modified multipurpose reduced chemistry for ethanol combustion

We present in this short communication a modification to our previous ethanol reduced combustion chemistry (Millán-Merino, 2018) that eliminates nonphysical values of the species concentrations which we discovered in applying the mechanism to the combustion of an isolated ethanol droplet. This unsteady test is reported here to check the multipurpose character of the reduced mechanism for a problem that combines non-homogeneous autoignition, rich and lean premixed-flame propagation, and the development of a diffusion flame, as well as a the presence of a cold moving boundary at the droplet surface. During the computations, production and consumption rates of the alfa-hydroxyethyl (CH3CHOH) intermediary radical became unbalanced, invalidating its steady-state hypothesis, which was used during the derivation of the reduced scheme. This difficulty is removed here by taking CH3CHOH out of steady state, thereby augmenting slightly the reduced mechanism.This work was supported by the project ENE2015-65852-C2-1-R (MINECO/FEDER,UE)

The slowly reacting mode of combustion of gaseous mixtures in spherical vessels. Part 1: transient analysis and explosion limit

In this paper we revisit Frank-Kamenetskii’s analysis of thermal explosions, using also a single-reaction model with an Arrhenius rate having a large activation energy, to describe the transient combustion of initially cold gaseous mixtures enclosed in a spherical vessel with a constant wall temperature. The analysis shows two modes of combustion, including a flameless slowly reacting mode for low wall temperatures or small vessel sizes, when the temperature rise due to the reaction is kept small by the heat-conduction losses to the wall, so as not to change significantly the order of magnitude of the reaction rate. In the second mode of combustion the slow reaction rates occur only in the first ignition stage, which ends abruptly when very large reaction rates cause a temperature runaway, or thermal explosion, at a welldefined ignition time and location, which triggers a flame that propagates across the vessel to consume rapidly the reactant. We define the explosion limits, in agreement with FrankKamenetskii’s analysis, by the limiting conditions for existence of the slowly reacting mode of combustion. In this mode, a quasi-steady temperature distribution is established after a transient reaction stage with small reactant consumption. Most of the reactant is burnt, with nearly uniform mass fraction, in a second long stage, when the temperature follows a quasisteady balance between the rates of heat conduction to the wall and of chemical heat release. The changes in the explosion limits due to the enhanced heat transfer rates by the buoyant motion are described in an accompanying paper.This work was supported by the Spanish MCINN through project # CSD2010- 00010

The slowly reacting mode of combustion of gaseous mixtures in spherical vessels. Part 2: buoyancy-induced motion and its effect on the explosion limits

This paper investigates the effect of buoyancy-driven motion on the quasi-steady “slowly reacting” mode of combustion and on its thermal-explosion limits, for gaseous mixtures enclosed in a spherical vessel with a constant wall temperature. Following Frank-Kamenetskii’s seminal analysis of this problem, the strong temperature dependence of the effective overall reaction rate is taken into account by using a single-reaction model with an Arrhenius rate having a large activation energy, resulting in a critical value of the vessel radius above which the slowly reacting mode of combustion no longer exists. In his contant-density, convection-free analysis, the critical conditions were found to depend on the value of a Damk¨ohler number, defined as the ratio of the time for the heat released by the reaction to be conducted to the wall, to the homogeneous explosion time evaluated at the wall temperature. For gaseous mixtures under normal gravity, the critical Damk¨ohler number increases through the effect of buoyancy-induced motion on the rate of heat conduction to the wall, measured by an appropriate Rayleigh number Ra. In the present analysis, for small values of Ra, the temperature is given in the first approximation by the spherically symmetric Frank-Kamenetskii solution, used to calculate the accompanying gas motion, an axisymmetric annular vortex determined at leading order by the balance between viscous and buoyancy forces, which we call the FrankKamenetskii vortex. This flow is used in the equation for conservation of energy to evaluate the influence of convection on explosion limits for small Ra, resulting in predicted critical Damk¨ohler numbers that are accurate up to values of Ra on the order of a few hundred.This work was supported by the Spanish MCINN through project # CSD2010- 00010. FAW is supported by the US National Science Foundation through award #CBET-1404026

Effects of differential diffusion on nonpremixed-flame temperature

This numerical and analytical study investigates effects of differential diffusion on nonpremixed-flame temperatures. To focus more directly on transport effects the work considers a single irreversible reaction with an infinitely fast rate, with Schab-Zel'dovich coupling functions introduced to write the conservation equations of energy and reactants in a chemistry-free form accounting for non-unity values of the fuel Lewis number L-F. Different flow configurations of increasing complexity are analyzed, beginning with canonical flamelet models that are reducible to ordinary differential equations, for which the variation of the flame temperature with fuel-feed dilution and L-F is quantified, revealing larger departures from adiabatic values in dilute configurations with oxidizer-to-fuel stoichiometric ratios S of order unity. Marble&#39;s problem of an unsteady flame wrapped by a line vortex is considered next, with specific attention given to large-Peclet-number solutions. Unexpected effects of differential diffusion are encountered for S < 1 near the vortex core, including superadiabatic/subadibatic flame temperatures occurring for values of L-F larger/smaller than unity as well as temperature profiles peaking on the oxidizer side of the flame. Direct numerical simulations of diffusion flames in a temporal turbulent mixing layer are used to further investigate these unexpected differential- diffusion effects. The results, confirming and extending previous findings, underscore the nontrivial role of differential diffusion in nonpremixed-combustion systems

SCPS: a fast implementation of a spectral method for detecting protein families on a genome-wide scale

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An important problem in genomics is the automatic inference of groups of homologous proteins from pairwise sequence similarities. Several approaches have been proposed for this task which are "local" in the sense that they assign a protein to a cluster based only on the distances between that protein and the other proteins in the set. It was shown recently that global methods such as spectral clustering have better performance on a wide variety of datasets. However, currently available implementations of spectral clustering methods mostly consist of a few loosely coupled Matlab scripts that assume a fair amount of familiarity with Matlab programming and hence they are inaccessible for large parts of the research community.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>SCPS (Spectral Clustering of Protein Sequences) is an efficient and user-friendly implementation of a spectral method for inferring protein families. The method uses only pairwise sequence similarities, and is therefore practical when only sequence information is available. SCPS was tested on difficult sets of proteins whose relationships were extracted from the SCOP database, and its results were extensively compared with those obtained using other popular protein clustering algorithms such as TribeMCL, hierarchical clustering and connected component analysis. We show that SCPS is able to identify many of the family/superfamily relationships correctly and that the quality of the obtained clusters as indicated by their F-scores is consistently better than all the other methods we compared it with. We also demonstrate the scalability of SCPS by clustering the entire SCOP database (14,183 sequences) and the complete genome of the yeast <it>Saccharomyces cerevisiae </it>(6,690 sequences).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Besides the spectral method, SCPS also implements connected component analysis and hierarchical clustering, it integrates TribeMCL, it provides different cluster quality tools, it can extract human-readable protein descriptions using GI numbers from NCBI, it interfaces with external tools such as BLAST and Cytoscape, and it can produce publication-quality graphical representations of the clusters obtained, thus constituting a comprehensive and effective tool for practical research in computational biology. Source code and precompiled executables for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are freely available at <url>http://www.paccanarolab.org/software/scps</url>.</p

Broad targeting of resistance to apoptosis in cancer

Apoptosis or programmed cell death is natural way of removing aged cells from the body. Most of the anti-cancer therapies trigger apoptosis induction and related cell death networks to eliminate malignant cells. However, in cancer, de-regulated apoptotic signaling, particularly the activation of an anti-apoptotic systems, allows cancer cells to escape this program leading to uncontrolled proliferation resulting in tumor survival, therapeutic resistance and recurrence of cancer. This resistance is a complicated phenomenon that emanates from the interactions of various molecules and signaling pathways. In this comprehensive review we discuss the various factors contributing to apoptosis resistance in cancers. The key resistance targets that are discussed include (1) Bcl-2 and Mcl-1 proteins; (2) autophagy processes; (3) necrosis and necroptosis; (4) heat shock protein signaling; (5) the proteasome pathway; (6) epigenetic mechanisms; and (7) aberrant nuclear export signaling. The shortcomings of current therapeutic modalities are highlighted and a broad spectrum strategy using approaches including (a) gossypol; (b) epigallocatechin-3-gallate; (c) UMI-77 (d) triptolide and (e) selinexor that can be used to overcome cell death resistance is presented. This review provides a roadmap for the design of successful anti-cancer strategies that overcome resistance to apoptosis for better therapeutic outcome in patients with cancer