7,772 research outputs found
A water test facility for liquid rocket engine turbopump cavitation testing
Improved understanding of the physics of turbopump cavitation and its relation to engine design parameters is needed to enhance propulsion system reliability and reduce development costs. A program to investigate cavitation phenomena in liquid rocket turbopumps has been initiated at The Aerospace Corporation to improve capability to predict the phenomena. This paper presents the methodology for the design of a new water-flow cavitation test facility capable of testing a variety of rocket turbopumps over a wide range of operating conditions to simulate the thermal characteristics of cryogenic propellants. This new cavitation test facility is now operational and qualification testing is in progress. Future experiments conducted in the facility will provide valuable data for the characterization of turbopump cavitation phenomena as well as evaluation, development, and validation of cavitation models.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84280/1/CAV2009-final11.pd
The MAHB, the Culture Gap, and Some Really Inconvenient Truths
Humanity's failure to take adequate actions to stem a likely environmental collapse calls for extraordinary measures to understand and alter human behavior, argues Paul Ehrlich. His Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB) aims to chart the path to a sustainable future
Volume Comparison for Hypersurfaces in Lorentzian Manifolds and Singularity Theorems
We develop area and volume comparison theorems for the evolution of
spacelike, acausal, causally complete hypersurfaces in Lorentzian manifolds,
where one has a lower bound on the Ricci tensor along timelike curves, and an
upper bound on the mean curvature of the hypersurface. Using these results, we
give a new proof of Hawking's singularity theorem.Comment: 15 pages, LaTe
Growth of Patterned Surfaces
During epitaxial crystal growth a pattern that has initially been imprinted
on a surface approximately reproduces itself after the deposition of an integer
number of monolayers. Computer simulations of the one-dimensional case show
that the quality of reproduction decays exponentially with a characteristic
time which is linear in the activation energy of surface diffusion. We argue
that this life time of a pattern is optimized, if the characteristic feature
size of the pattern is larger than , where is the surface
diffusion constant, the deposition rate and the surface dimension.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, uses psfig; to appear in Phys. Rev. Let
Current-Induced Step Bending Instability on Vicinal Surfaces
We model an apparent instability seen in recent experiments on current
induced step bunching on Si(111) surfaces using a generalized 2D BCF model,
where adatoms have a diffusion bias parallel to the step edges and there is an
attachment barrier at the step edge. We find a new linear instability with
novel step patterns. Monte Carlo simulations on a solid-on-solid model are used
to study the instability beyond the linear regime.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Rate theory for correlated processes: Double-jumps in adatom diffusion
We study the rate of activated motion over multiple barriers, in particular
the correlated double-jump of an adatom diffusing on a missing-row
reconstructed Platinum (110) surface. We develop a Transition Path Theory,
showing that the activation energy is given by the minimum-energy trajectory
which succeeds in the double-jump. We explicitly calculate this trajectory
within an effective-medium molecular dynamics simulation. A cusp in the
acceptance region leads to a sqrt{T} prefactor for the activated rate of
double-jumps. Theory and numerical results agree
Gravitational Waves: Just Plane Symmetry
We present some remarkable properties of the symmetry group for gravitational
plane waves. Our main observation is that metrics with plane wave symmetry
satisfy every system of generally covariant vacuum field equations except the
Einstein equations. The proof uses the homothety admitted by metrics with plane
wave symmetry and the scaling behavior of generally covariant field equations.
We also discuss a mini-superspace description of spacetimes with plane wave
symmetry.Comment: 10 pages, TeX, uses IOP style file
Numerical test of the damping time of layer-by-layer growth on stochastic models
We perform Monte Carlo simulations on stochastic models such as the
Wolf-Villain (WV) model and the Family model in a modified version to measure
mean separation between islands in submonolayer regime and damping time
of layer-by-layer growth oscillations on one dimension. The
stochastic models are modified, allowing diffusion within interval upon
deposited. It is found numerically that the mean separation and the damping
time depend on the diffusion interval , leading to that the damping time is
related to the mean separation as for the WV model
and for the Family model. The numerical results are in
excellent agreement with recent theoretical predictions.Comment: 4 pages, source LaTeX file and 5 PS figure
Impurity-induced diffusion bias in epitaxial growth
We introduce two models for the action of impurities in epitaxial growth. In
the first, the interaction between the diffusing adatoms and the impurities is
``barrier''-like and, in the second, it is ``trap''-like. For the barrier
model, we find a symmetry breaking effect that leads to an overall down-hill
current. As expected, such a current produces Edwards-Wilkinson scaling. For
the trap model, no symmetry breaking occurs and the scaling behavior appears to
be of the conserved-KPZ type.Comment: 5 pages(with the 5 figures), latex, revtex3.0, epsf, rotate, multico
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