On the mechanisms governing gas penetration into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection

A new 1D radial fluid code, IMAGINE, is used to simulate the penetration of gas into a tokamak plasma during a massive gas injection (MGI). The main result is that the gas is in general strongly braked as it reaches the plasma, due to mechanisms related to charge exchange and (to a smaller extent) recombination. As a result, only a fraction of the gas penetrates into the plasma. Also, a shock wave is created in the gas which propagates away from the plasma, braking and compressing the incoming gas. Simulation results are quantitatively consistent, at least in terms of orders of magnitude, with experimental data for a D 2 MGI into a JET Ohmic plasma. Simulations of MGI into the background plasma surrounding a runaway electron beam show that if the background electron density is too high, the gas may not penetrate, suggesting a possible explanation for the recent results of Reux et al in JET (2015 Nucl. Fusion 55 093013)

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Relationship of edge localized mode burst times with divertor flux loop signal phase in JET

A phase relationship is identified between sequential edge localized modes (ELMs) occurrence times in a set of H-mode tokamak plasmas to the voltage measured in full flux azimuthal loops in the divertor region. We focus on plasmas in the Joint European Torus where a steady H-mode is sustained over several seconds, during which ELMs are observed in the Be II emission at the divertor. The ELMs analysed arise from intrinsic ELMing, in that there is no deliberate intent to control the ELMing process by external means. We use ELM timings derived from the Be II signal to perform direct time domain analysis of the full flux loop VLD2 and VLD3 signals, which provide a high cadence global measurement proportional to the voltage induced by changes in poloidal magnetic flux. Specifically, we examine how the time interval between pairs of successive ELMs is linked to the time-evolving phase of the full flux loop signals. Each ELM produces a clear early pulse in the full flux loop signals, whose peak time is used to condition our analysis. The arrival time of the following ELM, relative to this pulse, is found to fall into one of two categories: (i) prompt ELMs, which are directly paced by the initial response seen in the flux loop signals; and (ii) all other ELMs, which occur after the initial response of the full flux loop signals has decayed in amplitude. The times at which ELMs in category (ii) occur, relative to the first ELM of the pair, are clustered at times when the instantaneous phase of the full flux loop signal is close to its value at the time of the first ELM

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Relação entre o genótipo e o temperamento de novilhos em pastejo e seu efeito na qualidade da carne Relation between genotype and temperament of grazing steers on meat quality

Avaliaram-se a interação grupo genético ' temperamento e seu efeito sobre a carne de bovinos de corte. Foram utilizados 40 novilhos machos castrados de dois grupos genéticos (Aberdeen Angus - AA e 50% Aberdeen Angus e 50% Nelore - NA), com dois anos de idade e peso inicial de 336,4 ± 29,39 kg, distribuídos em delineamento completamente casualizado. O temperamento foi avaliado por meio da atribuição de escores comportamentais (EC) e mensuração do tempo de saída (TS). Os novilhos NA apresentaram os maiores EC. Os TS dos animais AA foram maiores que os dos NA nas avaliações 1 e 4 (2,1 x 1,3 e 4,7 x 2,3 segundos, respectivamente). O ganho médio de peso foi negativamente correlacionado ao ECm e positivamente ao TSm. No grupo genético NA, os animais mais reativos apresentaram menor ganho de peso e aqueles com EC mais altos, menores valores de pH1 (6,47; 6,28; e 6,09 para EC 1, 2 e 3, respectivamente). Os pH1 mais baixos foram verificados em animais com TS (6,10; 6,43; e 6,43 para TS 1, 2 e 3, respectivamente). Os animais NA apresentaram pH1 menor que os AA, com 6,17 e 6,57, respectivamente. A carne de novilhos NA com maiores TS foi superior em 23% para a cor a* (P=0,0394) e em 9% para a cor b* (P=0,0808). A cor L* se correlacionou negativamente com EC3 e pH24 (r=-0,54 e -0,39, respectivamente) e a cor b*, com pH3 e pH7 (r =-0,39 e -0,45, respectivamente). Novilhos azebuados e mais agitados apresentam ganho de peso inferior e menores alterações quanto ao pH inicial e à cor da carne.<br>The effect of two genetic groups, Aberdeen angus (AA) and 50% Nellore x 50% Aberdeen angus (NA), on temperament and meat quality of 40 steers averaging 2 years of age and 336.4 ± 29.39 kg of body weight was evaluated in this trial. Animals were assigned to treatments according to a completely randomized design. Temperament was evaluated through measurements of composite behavior score (BS) and flight time (FT). NA steers had higher BS than AA steers in this trial. Conversely, AA steers had greater FT values than NA steers on evaluations 1 and 4: 2.1 vs. 1.3 e 4.7 vs. 2.3 seconds, respectively. Mean daily weight gain was negatively related with overall BS (r = -0.47, P=0.0075, n=30) while the opposite was observed with overall FT (r = 0.39, P=0.0336, n=30). Within the NA group, more reactive animals gained less weight. Steers with higher BS showed lower pH1 values: 6.47, 6.28 and 6.09, respectively, for BS of 1, 2 and 3. Steers with smaller FT showed lower pH1: 6.1, 6.43, and 6.43, respectively, for TF of 1, 2 and 3. Meat of NA steers showed pH1 lower than that of AA steers: 6.17 vs. 6.57. It was observed 23% more color a* (P=0.0394) and 9% more color b* (P=0.0808) on meat from NA steers with larger FT values. Color L* was negatively related with BS3 and pH24 (r= -0.54 and -0.39, respectively) whereas color b* was negatively related with pH3 and pH7 (r= -0.39 and r= -0.45, respectively). Crossbred and more nervous steers had lower weight gain and poorer meat quality