2,624 research outputs found
Emergence of District-Heating Networks; Barriers and Enablers in the Development Process
Infrastructure provision business models that promise resource efficiencies and additional benefits, such as job
creation, community cohesion and crime reduction exist at sub-national scales. These local business models,
however, exist only as isolated cases of good practice and their expansion and wider adoption has been limited in
the context of many centralised systems that are currently the norm. In this contribution, we present a conceptual
agent based model for analysing the potential for different actors to implement local infrastructure provision business
models. The model is based on agents’ ability to overcome barriers that occur throughout the development (i.e.
feasibility, business case, procurement, and construction), and operation and maintenance of alternative business
models. This presents a novel approach insofar as previous models have concentrated on the acceptance of
alternative value provision models rather than the emergence of underlying business models. We implement the
model for the case study of district heating networks in the UK, which have the potential to significantly contribute to
carbon emission reductions, but remain under-developed compared with other European countries
Kinetic Scale Density Fluctuations in the Solar Wind
We motivate the importance of studying kinetic scale turbulence for
understanding the macroscopic properties of the heliosphere, such as the
heating of the solar wind. We then discuss the technique by which kinetic scale
density fluctuations can be measured using the spacecraft potential, including
a calculation of the timescale for the spacecraft potential to react to the
density changes. Finally, we compare the shape of the density spectrum at ion
scales to theoretical predictions based on a cascade model for kinetic
turbulence. We conclude that the shape of the spectrum, including the ion scale
flattening, can be captured by the sum of passive density fluctuations at large
scales and kinetic Alfven wave turbulence at small scales
Proton Heating in Solar Wind Compressible Turbulence with Collisions between Counter-propagating Waves
Magnetohydronamic turbulence is believed to play a crucial role in heating
the laboratorial, space, and astrophysical plasmas. However, the precise
connection between the turbulent fluctuations and the particle kinetics has not
yet been established. Here we present clear evidence of plasma turbulence
heating based on diagnosed wave features and proton velocity distributions from
solar wind measurements by the Wind spacecraft. For the first time, we can
report the simultaneous observation of counter-propagating magnetohydrodynamic
waves in the solar wind turbulence. Different from the traditional paradigm
with counter-propagating Alfv\'en waves, anti-sunward Alfv\'en waves (AWs) are
encountered by sunward slow magnetosonic waves (SMWs) in this new type of solar
wind compressible turbulence. The counter-propagating AWs and SWs correspond
respectively to the dominant and sub-dominant populations of the imbalanced
Els\"asser variables. Nonlinear interactions between the AWs and SMWs are
inferred from the non-orthogonality between the possible oscillation direction
of one wave and the possible propagation direction of the other. The associated
protons are revealed to exhibit bi-directional asymmetric beams in their
velocity distributions: sunward beams appearing in short and narrow patterns
and anti-sunward broad extended tails. It is suggested that multiple types of
wave-particle interactions, i.e., cyclotron and Landau resonances with AWs and
SMWs at kinetic scales, are taking place to jointly heat the protons
perpendicularly and parallel
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