Root Zone Sensors for Irrigation Management in Intensive Agriculture

Crop irrigation uses more than 70% of the world’s water, and thus, improving irrigation efficiency is decisive to sustain the food demand from a fast-growing world population. This objective may be accomplished by cultivating more water-efficient crop species and/or through the application of efficient irrigation systems, which includes the implementation of a suitable method for precise scheduling. At the farm level, irrigation is generally scheduled based on the grower’s experience or on the determination of soil water balance (weather-based method). An alternative approach entails the measurement of soil water status. Expensive and sophisticated root zone sensors (RZS), such as neutron probes, are available for the use of soil and plant scientists, while cheap and practical devices are needed for irrigation management in commercial crops. The paper illustrates the main features of RZS’ (for both soil moisture and salinity) marketed for the irrigation industry and discusses how such sensors may be integrated in a wireless network for computer-controlled irrigation and used for innovative irrigation strategies, such as deficit or dual-water irrigation. The paper also consider the main results of recent or current research works conducted by the authors in Tuscany (Italy) on the irrigation management of container-grown ornamental plants, which is an important agricultural sector in Italy

Identification of the formation of resonant tones in compressible cavity flows

Identification of the fluid dynamic mechanisms responsible for the formation of resonant tones in a cavity flow is challenging. Time-frequency non-linear analysis techniques were applied to the post-processing of pressure signals recorded on the floor of a rectangular cavity at a transonic Mach number. The results obtained, confirmed that the resonant peaks in the spectrum were produced by the interaction of a carrier frequency (and its harmonics) and a modulating frequency. High-order spectral analysis, based on the instantaneous wavelet bi-coherence method, was able to identify, at individual samples in the pressure–time signal, that the interaction between the fundamental frequency and the amplitude modulation frequency was responsible for the creation of the Rossier–Heller tones. The same technique was also able to correlate the mode switching phenomenon, as well as the deactivation of the resonant tones during the temporal evolution of the signal

Wavelet analysis of complex geometry transonic cavity flows

The aero-acoustic analysis of a weapon bay of an Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) was predicted using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods. Along the reference geometry, consisting in the installation of the Boeing M219 modified type cavity in the Boeing UCAV1303 airframe, two additional configurations, developed modifying the leading and trailing edge geometries of the bay, were tested. Pressure signals inside the cavity were post-processed using Joint Time Frequency Analysis (JTFA) techniques, consisting in a combination of frequency domain and time-frequency domain techniques based respectively on the Fourier and wavelet transform. Results showed an intermittency nature of the modes present in the spectra as well as a continuous change, during the temporal evolution of the signal, of the dominant mode. Also were recorded, using second order wavelet spectral moments, non-linear phenomena between the main modes like phase coupling

BigraphER: rewriting and analysis engine for bigraphs

BigraphER is a suite of open-source tools providing an effi- cient implementation of rewriting, simulation, and visualisation for bigraphs, a universal formalism for modelling interacting systems that evolve in time and space and first introduced by Milner. BigraphER consists of an OCaml library that provides programming interfaces for the manipulation of bigraphs, their constituents and reaction rules, and a command-line tool capable of simulating Bigraphical Reactive Systems (BRSs) and computing their transition systems. Other features are native support for both bigraphs and bigraphs with sharing, stochastic reaction rules, rule priorities, instantiation maps, parameterised controls, predicate checking, graphical output and integration with the probabilistic model checker PRISM

Controlling unsteady cavity flows using internal structures

We report experimental measurements and preliminary analysis on a series of geometric modifications to a rectangular cavity, aimed at alleviating the severity of the aeroacoustic environment. The cavity had a length-to-depth ratio of 5 and a width-to-depth ratio of 1, and featured a simplified representation of a generic missile on the centre line. The modifications consisted of full width and depth ribs or “collars” with a cutout for the missile. Collars could be fitted at various combinations of locations in the cavity and were either straight (i.e. perpendicular to the cavity centre line), leaned or yawed. The cavity flowfield was characterised by surface pressure measurements along the ceiling. Judging from the available measurements the presence of collars modified the mean pressure distribution, and appeared to reduce the acoustic tones and generally lower the broadband noise

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Optical Absorption of CuO3_3 antiferromagnetic chains at finite temperatures

We use a high-statistic quantum Monte Carlo and Maximum Entropy regularization method to compute the dynamical energy correlation function (DECF) of the one-dimensional (1D) $S=1/2$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model at finite temperatures. We also present a finite temperature analytical ansatz for the DECF which is in very good agreement with the numerical data in all the considered temperature range. From these results, and from a finite temperature generalisation of the mechanism proposed by Lorenzana and Sawatsky [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 74}, 1867 (1995)], we compute the line shape for the optical absorption spectra of multimagnon excitations assisted by phonons for quasi 1D compounds. The line shape has two contributions analogous to the Stokes and anti-Stokes process of Raman scattering. Our low temperature data is in good agreement with optical absorption experiments of CuO$_3$ chains in Sr$_2$CuO$_3$. Our finite temperature results provide a non trivial prediction on the dynamics of the Heisenberg model at finite temperatures that is easy to verify experimentally.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure