The National Small Wind Turbine Centre

In August 2008, the Federal government announced funding for a National Small Wind Turbine Centre (NSWTC) to be operated by the Research Institute of Sustainable Energy (RISE), based at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. The aim of the NSWTC is to promote the small wind turbine (SWT) market and industry in Australia by providing services in the areas of Testing, Standards and Labelling, Professional Development and Training, and Research. This paper summarises the work that has been carried out to date by the NSWTC in the area of Standards and Labelling. Existing certification and labelling schemes for SWTs are summarised and an overview is given of the NSWTC participation in the International Energy Agency (IEA) Task 27, a task aimed at research that will advance standards, improve the quality of SWT testing around the globe and lead to an international consumer label for SWTs. Options for certification and labelling for the emerging Australian SWT industry are analysed and the idea of introducing an Australian consumer label for SWTs is discussed

C∗C^*-simplicity and representations of topological full groups of groupoids

Given an ample groupoid $G$ with compact unit space, we study the canonical representation of the topological full group $[[G]]$ in the full groupoid $C^*$-algebra $C^*(G)$. In particular, we show that the image of this representation generates $C^*(G)$ if and only if $C^*(G)$ admits no tracial state. The techniques that we use include the notion of groups covering groupoids. As an application, we provide sufficient conditions for $C^*$-simplicity of certain topological full groups, including those associated with topologically free and minimal actions of non-amenable and countable groups on the Cantor set.Comment: 13 pages. Minor changes, including new references. Accepted in Journal of Functional Analysi

Designing Illumination Lenses and Mirrors by the Numerical Solution of Monge-Amp\`ere Equations

We consider the inverse refractor and the inverse reflector problem. The task is to design a free-form lens or a free-form mirror that, when illuminated by a point light source, produces a given illumination pattern on a target. Both problems can be modeled by strongly nonlinear second-order partial differential equations of Monge-Amp\`ere type. In [Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 25 (2015), pp. 803--837, DOI: 10.1142/S0218202515500190] the authors have proposed a B-spline collocation method which has been applied to the inverse reflector problem. Now this approach is extended to the inverse refractor problem. We explain in depth the collocation method and how to handle boundary conditions and constraints. The paper concludes with numerical results of refracting and reflecting optical surfaces and their verification via ray tracing.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; Keywords: Inverse refractor problem, inverse reflector problem, elliptic Monge-Amp\`ere equation, B-spline collocation method, Picard-type iteration; OCIS: 000.4430, 080.1753, 080.4225, 080.4228, 080.4298, 100.3190. Minor revision: two typos have been corrected and copyright note has been adde

Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto grids and associated nested dyadic grids

Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto (LGL) grids play a pivotal role in nodal spectral methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. They not only provide efficient high-order quadrature rules, but give also rise to norm equivalences that could eventually lead to efficient preconditioning techniques in high-order methods. Unfortunately, a serious obstruction to fully exploiting the potential of such concepts is the fact that LGL grids of different degree are not nested. This affects, on the one hand, the choice and analysis of suitable auxiliary spaces, when applying the auxiliary space method as a principal preconditioning paradigm, and, on the other hand, the efficient solution of the auxiliary problems. As a central remedy, we consider certain nested hierarchies of dyadic grids of locally comparable mesh size, that are in a certain sense properly associated with the LGL grids. Their actual suitability requires a subtle analysis of such grids which, in turn, relies on a number of refined properties of LGL grids. The central objective of this paper is to derive just these properties. This requires first revisiting properties of close relatives to LGL grids which are subsequently used to develop a refined analysis of LGL grids. These results allow us then to derive the relevant properties of the associated dyadic grids.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, 2 algorithms; Keywords: Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto grid, dyadic grid, graded grid, nested grid

Solving the Monge-Amp\`ere Equations for the Inverse Reflector Problem

The inverse reflector problem arises in geometrical nonimaging optics: Given a light source and a target, the question is how to design a reflecting free-form surface such that a desired light density distribution is generated on the target, e.g., a projected image on a screen. This optical problem can mathematically be understood as a problem of optimal transport and equivalently be expressed by a secondary boundary value problem of the Monge-Amp\`ere equation, which consists of a highly nonlinear partial differential equation of second order and constraints. In our approach the Monge-Amp\`ere equation is numerically solved using a collocation method based on tensor-product B-splines, in which nested iteration techniques are applied to ensure the convergence of the nonlinear solver and to speed up the calculation. In the numerical method special care has to be taken for the constraint: It enters the discrete problem formulation via a Picard-type iteration. Numerical results are presented as well for benchmark problems for the standard Monge-Amp\`ere equation as for the inverse reflector problem for various images. The designed reflector surfaces are validated by a forward simulation using ray tracing.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables; Keywords: Inverse reflector problem, elliptic Monge-Amp\`ere equation, B-spline collocation method, Picard-type iteration; Minor revision: reference [59] to a recent preprint has been added and a few typos have been correcte