Forages for Conservation and Improved Soil Quality

Forages provide several soil benefits, including reduced soil erosion, reduced water runoff, improved soil physical properties, increased soil carbon, increased soil biologic activity, reduced soil salinity, and improved land stabilization and restoration when grown continuously or as part of a crop rotation. Ongoing research and synthesis of knowledge have improved our understanding of how forages alter and protect soil resources, thus providing producers, policymakers, and the general public information regarding which forage crops are best suited for a specific area or use (e.g. hay, grazing or bioenergy feedstock). Forages can be produced in forestland, range, pasture, and cropland settings. These land use types comprise 86% of non-Federal United States rural lands (Table 12.1). In the United States, active forage production occurs on 22.6 million ha and is used for hay, haylage, grass silage, and greenchop (Table 12.2). Forages are used as cover crops in several production systems, and approximately 4.2 million ha were recently planted in cover crops (Table 12.3). Currently, the highest cover crop use rates, as a percentage of total cropland within a given state, occur in the northeastern United States. Globally, permanent meadows and pastures account for over 3.3 billion ha, greater than arable land and permanent crops combined (Table 12.4). Within all regions of the world, except Europe, permanent meadows and pastures are a greater proportion of land cover than permanent crops. Pasture management information and resources are available for countries around the world (FAO 2017a,b). As seen in Tables 12.1–12.4, forages are used globally and can provide soil benefits across varied soil and climate types

Presupernova Structure of Massive Stars

Issues concerning the structure and evolution of core collapse progenitor stars are discussed with an emphasis on interior evolution. We describe a program designed to investigate the transport and mixing processes associated with stellar turbulence, arguably the greatest source of uncertainty in progenitor structure, besides mass loss, at the time of core collapse. An effort to use precision observations of stellar parameters to constrain theoretical modeling is also described.Comment: Proceedings for invited talk at High Energy Density Laboratory Astrophysics conference, Caltech, March 2010. Special issue of Astrophysics and Space Science, submitted for peer review: 7 pages, 3 figure

Toward an Automatic Reduction of Non-added Values Tasks in the Project-Product-Process Domain

Part 7: Web, Semantics and Ontologies for PLMInternational audienceTo increase their competitiveness, companies need to increase the turnover of their products. They should continuously develop attractive new products efficiently in order to increase sales volume and ensure sustainability in globalized markets. The streamlining of routine engineering processes becomes necessary to improve quality and productivity in design and allows more time to develop innovative products. The main goal of our contribution is to develop a design process framework to allow a reduction in routine design processes which will thus increase time available for innovative design processes. The methodology proposed consists of integrating data management, information management, knowledge management, and decision-support methods and tools, such as PDM (product data management), PLM (product lifecycle management), and KBE (Knowledge based engineering). In the area of knowledge management, some methodologies exist to reduce non-added value tasks such as KBE models, Top down design or Design for X (Design for manufacture, Design for assembly, dis-assembly, etc...). Our methodology deals with the reduction of routine design by automatic design project initiation, including knowledge management. This methodology is tested in a firm specialized in rolling shutter components. This approach allows time reduction of “non-added value tasks” and allows justifying any specification by knowledge and know-how gained in the past. When a new design project is created, often it will require one or several manufacturing processes to create the product. So, the designer has to use his own skills and experience to define the task lengths. One issue is how to keep the information usable by every designer, not only the expert. Another issue is how to preserve the knowledge embedded into the product, the manufacturing process and also in the project. Our contribution uses automatic project initiation, stored in a PLM tool. The automatic generation is based on several models which use configuration containing parameters and knowledge. By introducing a tool using this methodology in an industrial firm, we can reduce routine design and improve design robustness. Additional research will be performed towards an ergonomic use of the tool

Stochastic excitation of gravity modes in massive main-sequence stars

We investigate the possibility that gravity modes can be stochastically excited by turbulent convection in massive main-sequence (MS) stars. We build stellar models of MS stars with masses M=10 M [SUB]ȯ[/SUB],15 M [SUB]ȯ[/SUB], and 20 M [SUB]ȯ[/SUB]. For each model, we then compute the power supplied to the modes by turbulent eddies in the convective core (CC) and the outer convective zones (OCZ). We found that, for asymptotic gravity modes, the major part of the driving occurs within the outer iron convective zone, while the excitation of low n order modes mainly occurs within the CC. We compute the mode lifetimes and deduce the expected mode amplitudes. We finally discuss the possibility of detecting such stochastically-excited gravity modes with the CoRoT space-based mission