81,074 research outputs found
Impact of the Redheaded Pine Sawfly (Hymenoptera: Diprionidae) on Young Red Pine Plantations
The ecology of the redheaded pine sawfly was studied relative to its impact on red pine plantations. An ecological model, which formed the basis for socioeconomic analysis, was constructed. Because the sawfly prefers trees under moisture stress, damage is most severe in stands growing on sand blows, where there is competition for moisture from bracken fern and hardwoods, and where soils are too moist, too shallow, or too compacted. Outbreaks also appear to be related to dry years. The sawfly has a variable impact on multiple-use values. Because it injures the least productive trees in a stand, timber is only indirectly affected. Small openings created by tree mortality after an outbreak may provide edge \u27Wildlife habitat. The sawfly has both negative and positive effects on recreationists, depending upon the type of recreation; it may be a nuisance to campers, but may positively influence hunting. Preventive sawfly management involves proper site selection for red pine
High-temperature thermal storage systems for advanced solar receivers materials selections
Advanced space power systems that use solar energy and Brayton or Stirling heat engines require thermal energy storage (TES) systems to operate continuously through periods of shade. The receiver storage units, key elements in both Brayton and Stirling systems, are designed to use the latent heat of fusion of phase-change materials (PCMs). The power systems under current consideration for near-future National Aeronautics and Space Administration space missions require working fluid temperatures in the 1100 to 1400 K range. The PCMs under current investigation that gave liquid temperatures within this range are the fluoride family of salts. However, these salts have low thermal conductivity, which causes large temperature gradients in the storage systems. Improvements can be obtained, however, with the use of thermal conductivity enhancements or metallic PCMs. In fact, if suitable containment materials can be found, the use of metallic PCMs would virtually eliminate the orbit associated temperature variations in TES systems. The high thermal conductivity and generally low volume change on melting of germanium and alloys based on silicon make them attractive for storage of thermal energy in space power systems. An approach to solving the containment problem, involving both chemical and physical compatibility, preparation of NiSi/NiSi2, and initial results for containment of germanium and NiSi/NiSi2, are presented
Systematic Renormalization in Hamiltonian Light-Front Field Theory: The Massive Generalization
Hamiltonian light-front field theory can be used to solve for hadron states
in QCD. To this end, a method has been developed for systematic renormalization
of Hamiltonian light-front field theories, with the hope of applying the method
to QCD. It assumed massless particles, so its immediate application to QCD is
limited to gluon states or states where quark masses can be neglected. This
paper builds on the previous work by including particle masses
non-perturbatively, which is necessary for a full treatment of QCD. We show
that several subtle new issues are encountered when including masses
non-perturbatively. The method with masses is algebraically and conceptually
more difficult; however, we focus on how the methods differ. We demonstrate the
method using massive phi^3 theory in 5+1 dimensions, which has important
similarities to QCD.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Corrected error in Eq. (11), v3: Added extra
disclaimer after Eq. (2), and some clarification at end of Sec. 3.3. Final
published versio
Optimization of field-dependent nonperturbative renormalization group flows
We investigate the influence of the momentum cutoff function on the
field-dependent nonperturbative renormalization group flows for the
three-dimensional Ising model, up to the second order of the derivative
expansion. We show that, even when dealing with the full functional dependence
of the renormalization functions, the accuracy of the critical exponents can be
simply optimized, through the principle of minimal sensitivity, which yields
and .Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Design and test of a pump failure anticipator
Tests were conducted on two different types of pumps in order to refine the concept and to finalize design details of a positive displacement internal gear pump and a shroudless centrifugal pump. A concept and a system that could be used with pumps to allow a rapid judgement to be made of the suitability of the pump for futher service is developed. Test results and detailed data analysis are included
Systematic Renormalization in Hamiltonian Light-Front Field Theory
We develop a systematic method for computing a renormalized light-front field
theory Hamiltonian that can lead to bound states that rapidly converge in an
expansion in free-particle Fock-space sectors. To accomplish this without
dropping any Fock sectors from the theory, and to regulate the Hamiltonian, we
suppress the matrix elements of the Hamiltonian between free-particle
Fock-space states that differ in free mass by more than a cutoff. The cutoff
violates a number of physical principles of the theory, and thus the
Hamiltonian is not just the canonical Hamiltonian with masses and couplings
redefined by renormalization. Instead, the Hamiltonian must be allowed to
contain all operators that are consistent with the unviolated physical
principles of the theory. We show that if we require the Hamiltonian to produce
cutoff-independent physical quantities and we require it to respect the
unviolated physical principles of the theory, then its matrix elements are
uniquely determined in terms of the fundamental parameters of the theory. This
method is designed to be applied to QCD, but for simplicity, we illustrate our
method by computing and analyzing second- and third-order matrix elements of
the Hamiltonian in massless phi-cubed theory in six dimensions.Comment: 47 pages, 6 figures; improved referencing, minor presentation change
The dimension of loop-erased random walk in 3D
We measure the fractal dimension of loop-erased random walk (LERW) in 3
dimensions, and estimate that it is 1.62400 +- 0.00005. LERW is closely related
to the uniform spanning tree and the abelian sandpile model. We simulated LERW
on both the cubic and face-centered cubic lattices; the corrections to scaling
are slightly smaller for the face-centered cubic lattice.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. v2 has more data, minor additional change
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