Preliminary Investigation of Cyclic De-Icing of an Airfoil Using an External Electric Heater

An investigation was conducted in the NACA Lewis icing research tunnel to determine the characteristics and requirements of cyclic deicing of a 65,2-216 airfoil by use of an external electric heater. The present investigation was limited to an airspeed of 175 miles per hour. Data are presented to show the effects of variations in heat-on and heat-off periods, ambient air temperature, liquid-water content, angle of attack, and. heating distribution on the requirements for cyclic deicing. The external heat flow at various icing and heating conditions is also presented. A continuously heated parting strip at the airfoil leading edge was found necessary for quick, complete, and consistent ice removal. The cyclic power requirements were found to be primarily a function of the datum temperature and heat-on time, with the other operating and meteorological variables having a second-order effect. Short heat-on periods and high power densities resulted in the most efficient ice removal, the minimum energy input, and the minimum runback ice formations. The optimum chordwise heating distribution pattern was found to consist of a uniform distribution of cycled power density in the impingement region. Downstream of the impingement region the power density decreased to the limits of heating which, for the conditions investigated, extended from 5.7 percent chord on the upper surface of the airfoil to 8.9 percent chord on the lower surface. Ice removal did not take place at a heater surface temperature of 32 F; surface temperatures of approximately 50 to 100 F were required to effect removal. Better de-icing performance and greater energy savings would be possible with a heater having a higher thermal efficiency

Experiments to investigate particulate materials in reduced gravity fields

Study investigates agglomeration and macroscopic behavior in reduced gravity fields of particles of known properties by measuring and correlating thermal and acoustical properties of particulate materials. Experiment evaluations provide a basis for a particle behavior theory and measure bulk properties of particulate materials in reduced gravity

Investigation of Large LGB Detectors for Antineutrino Detection

A detector material or configuration that can provide an unambiguous indication of neutron capture can substantially reduce random coincidence backgrounds in antineutrino detection and capture-gated neutron spectrometry applications. Here we investigate the performance of such a material, a composite of plastic scintillator and $^6$Li$_6^{nat}$Gd$(^{10}$BO$_{3})_{3}$:Ce (LGB) crystal shards of ~1 mm dimension and comprising 1% of the detector by mass. While it is found that the optical propagation properties of this material as currently fabricated are only marginally acceptable for antineutrino detection, its neutron capture identification ability is encouraging.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods

Surface mineral crusts: A priority target in search for life on Mars

Mineral crusts are strong candidates in the search for evidence of life during planetary exploration, and should be an important target for examination in impact craters. Crusts in the Haughton crater readily yield a biological signature

An Improved Adaptive Background Mixture Model for Real-time Tracking with Shadow Detection

Real-time segmentation of moving regions in image sequences is a fundamental step in many vision systems including automated visual surveillance, human-machine interface, and very low-bandwidth telecommunications. A typical method is background subtraction. Many background models have been introduced to deal with different problems. One of the successful solutions to these problems is to use a multi-colour background model per pixel proposed by Grimson et al [1, 2,3]. However, the method suffers from slow learning at the beginning, especially in busy environments. In addition, it can not distinguish between moving shadows and moving objects. This paper presents a method which improves this adaptive background mixture model. By reinvestigating the update equations, we utilise different equations at different phases. This allows our system learn faster and more accurately as well as adapts effectively to changing environment. A shadow detection scheme is also introduced in this paper. It is based on a computational colour space that makes use of our background model. A comparison has been made between the two algorithms. The results show the speed of learning and the accuracy of the model using our update algorithm over the Grimson et al’s tracker. When incorporate with the shadow detection, our method results in far better segmentation than The Thirteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence that of Grimson et al

Stiffness of Contacts Between Rough Surfaces

The effect of self-affine roughness on solid contact is examined with molecular dynamics and continuum calculations. The contact area and normal and lateral stiffnesses rise linearly with the applied load, and the load rises exponentially with decreasing separation between surfaces. Results for a wide range of roughnesses, system sizes and Poisson ratios can be collapsed using Persson's contact theory for continuous elastic media. The atomic scale response at the interface between solids has little affect on the area or normal stiffness, but can greatly reduce the lateral stiffness. The scaling of this effect with system size and roughness is discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Towards a modeling of the time dependence of contact area between solid bodies

I present a simple model of the time dependence of the contact area between solid bodies, assuming either a totally uncorrelated surface topography, or a self affine surface roughness. The existence of relaxation effects (that I incorporate using a recently proposed model) produces the time increase of the contact area $A(t)$ towards an asymptotic value that can be much smaller than the nominal contact area. For an uncorrelated surface topography, the time evolution of $A(t)$ is numerically found to be well fitted by expressions of the form [$A(\infty)-A(t)]\sim (t+t_0)^{-q}$, where the exponent $q$ depends on the normal load $F_N$ as $q\sim F_N^{\beta}$, with $\beta$ close to 0.5. In particular, when the contact area is much lower than the nominal area I obtain $A(t)/A(0) \sim 1+C\ln(t/t_0+1)$, i.e., a logarithmic time increase of the contact area, in accordance with experimental observations. The logarithmic increase for low loads is also obtained analytically in this case. For the more realistic case of self affine surfaces, the results are qualitatively similar.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure