914 research outputs found
Evaluation of on-board hydrogen storage methods for hypersonic vehicles
Hydrogen is the foremost candidate as a fuel for use in high speed transport. Since any aircraft moving at hypersonic speeds must have a very slender body, means of decreasing the storage volume requirements below that for liquid hydrogen are needed. The total performance of the hypersonic plane needs to be considered for the evaluation of candidate fuel and storage systems. To accomplish this, a simple model for the performance of a hypersonic plane is presented. To allow for the use of different engines and fuels during different phases of flight, the total trajectory is divided into three phases: subsonic-supersonic, hypersonic and rocket propulsion phase. The fuel fraction for the first phase is found be a simple energy balance using an average thrust to drag ratio for this phase. The hypersonic flight phase is investigated in more detail by taking small altitude increments. This approach allowed the use of flight profiles other than the constant dynamic pressure flight. The effect of fuel volume on drag, structural mass and tankage mass was introduced through simplified equations involving the characteristic dimension of the plane. The propellant requirement for the last phase is found by employing the basic rocket equations. The candidate fuel systems such as the cryogenic fuel combinations and solid and liquid endothermic hydrogen generators are first screened thermodynamically with respect to their energy densities and cooling capacities and then evaluated using the above model
Linking existing in vitro dermal absorption data to physicochemical properties: Contribution to the design of a weight-of-evidence approach for the safety evaluation of cosmetic ingredients with low dermal bioavailability.
To characterize the risk of cosmetic ingredients when threshold toxicity is assumed, often the "margin of safety" (MoS) is calculated. This uncertainty factor is based on the systemic no observable (adverse) effect level (NO(A)EL) which can be derived from in vivo repeated dose toxicity studies. As in vivo studies for the purpose of the cosmetic legislation are no longer allowed in Europe and a validated in vitro alternative is not yet available, it is no longer possible to derive a NO(A)EL value for a new cosmetic ingredient. Alternatively, cosmetic ingredients with a low dermal bioavailability might not need repeated dose data, as internal exposure will be minimal and systemic toxicity might not be an issue. This study shows the possibility of identifying compounds suspected to have a low dermal bioavailability based on their physicochemical properties (molecular weight, melting point, topological polar surface area and log P) and their in vitro dermal absorption data. Although performed on a limited number of compounds, the study suggests a strategic opportunity to support the safety assessor's reasoning to omit a MoS calculation and to focus more on local toxicity and mutagenicity/genotoxicity for ingredients for which limited systemic exposure is to be expected
Scheduling Task-parallel Applications in Dynamically Asymmetric Environments
Shared resource interference is observed by applications as dynamic
performance asymmetry. Prior art has developed approaches to reduce the impact
of performance asymmetry mainly at the operating system and architectural
levels. In this work, we study how application-level scheduling techniques can
leverage moldability (i.e. flexibility to work as either single-threaded or
multithreaded task) and explicit knowledge on task criticality to handle
scenarios in which system performance is not only unknown but also changing
over time. Our proposed task scheduler dynamically learns the performance
characteristics of the underlying platform and uses this knowledge to devise
better schedules aware of dynamic performance asymmetry, hence reducing the
impact of interference. Our evaluation shows that both criticality-aware
scheduling and parallelism tuning are effective schemes to address interference
in both shared and distributed memory applicationsComment: Published in ICPP Workshops '2
Proposal of an in silico profiler for categorisation of repeat dose toxicity data of hair dyes
This study outlines the analysis of repeat dose toxicity data taken from Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) opinions for commonly used hair dyes in the European Union. Structural similarity was applied to group these chemicals into categories. Subsequent mechanistic analysis suggested that toxicity to mitochondria is potentially a key driver of repeat dose toxicity for chemicals within each of the categories. The mechanistic hypothesis allowed for an in silico profiler consisting of mechanism-based structural alerts to be proposed. This in silico profiler is intended for grouping chemicals into mechanism-based categories within the Adverse Outcome Pathway paradigm
Demonstration of coherent emission from high- photonic crystal nanolasers at room temperature
We report on lasing at room temperature and at telecommunications wavelength
from photonic crystal nanocavities based on InAsP/InP quantum dots. Such laser
cavities with a small modal volume and high quality factor display a high
spontaneous emission coupling factor beta. Lasing is confirmed by measuring the
second order autocorrelation function. A smooth transition from chaotic to
coherent emission is observed, and coherent emission is obtained at 8 times the
threshold power
Boosting up quantum key distribution by learning statistics of practical single photon sources
We propose a simple quantum-key-distribution (QKD) scheme for practical
single photon sources (SPSs), which works even with a moderate suppression of
the second-order correlation of the source. The scheme utilizes a
passive preparation of a decoy state by monitoring a fraction of the signal via
an additional beam splitter and a detector at the sender's side to monitor
photon number splitting attacks. We show that the achievable distance increases
with the precision with which the sub-Poissonian tendency is confirmed in
higher photon number distribution of the source, rather than with actual
suppression of the multi-photon emission events. We present an example of the
secure key generation rate in the case of a poor SPS with , in
which no secure key is produced with the conventional QKD scheme, and show that
learning the photon-number distribution up to several numbers is sufficient for
achieving almost the same achievable distance as that of an ideal SPS.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures; published version in New J. Phy
Improving the performance of bright quantum dot single photon sources using amplitude modulation
Single epitaxially-grown semiconductor quantum dots have great potential as
single photon sources for photonic quantum technologies, though in practice
devices often exhibit non-ideal behavior. Here, we demonstrate that amplitude
modulation can improve the performance of quantum-dot-based sources. Starting
with a bright source consisting of a single quantum dot in a fiber-coupled
microdisk cavity, we use synchronized amplitude modulation to temporally filter
the emitted light. We observe that the single photon purity, temporal overlap
between successive emission events, and indistinguishability can be greatly
improved with this technique. As this method can be applied to any triggered
single photon source, independent of geometry and after device fabrication, it
is a flexible approach to improve the performance of solid-state systems, which
often suffer from excess dephasing and multi-photon background emission
Properties of a single photon generated by a solid-state emitter: effects of pure dephasing
We investigate the properties of a single photon generated by a solid-state
emitter subject to strong pure dephasing. We employ a model in which all the
elements of the system, including the propagating fields, are treated quantum
mechanically. We analytically derive the density matrix of the emitted photon,
which contains full information about the photon, such as its pulse profile,
power spectrum, and purity. We visualize these analytical results using
realistic parameters and reveal the conditions for maximizing the purity of
generated photons.Comment: 25pages(one column), 10 figure
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