Update on the NET Power 50 MWth zero emission power station

The Allam Cycle is a highly-recuperated oxy-fuel supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle that offers significant advantages over traditional power cycles, including high efficiencies, low capital costs, low or no water consumption, and elimination of all air emissions, including CO2. Traditional power cycles, such as natural gas combined cycle, supercritical coal cycles, and integrated gasification combined cycle, all require the addition of expensive, efficiency-reducing equipment in order to decrease and capture emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The Allam Cycle takes a novel approach to reducing emissions from fossil fuel power generation, whereby the system uses oxy-combustion of fossil fuels and high-pressure supercritical CO2 as the working fluid in a highly recuperated cycle. In this configuration, the only by-products are liquid water and a stream of high-purity CO2 that is already at pipeline pressure as a result of the operating conditions of the cycle, thereby avoiding the additional capture, clean-up, and compression of previous systems. The cycle is able to utilize a variety of hydrocarbon fuels, including natural gas, unprocessed raw and sour gas, and gasified solid fuels such as coal or biomass. The result is a power cycle with major advantages over conventional systems that do not capture CO2, attaining comparable efficiencies to best-in-class natural gas power plants, currently reaching 59% LHV; significantly higher efficiencies than state-of-the-art coal plants, currently reaching 52% LHV; low capital costs due to the simplicity and high-pressure of the cycle; reduced or no water consumption and virtually no air emissions, including full CO2 capture. In Q1 2016, NET Power, working with CB&I, Exelon Corporation, 8 Rivers Capital, and Toshiba Corporation, brought the cycle to the demonstration phase by beginning construction on a 50 MWt natural gas-fired Allam Cycle demonstration plant outside of Houston, Texas. The 50 MWt Allam Cycle demonstration plant in Texas will be a fully operational, grid-connected power plant containing all key system components. It will demonstrate the full operability of the cycle, including start-up, shut-down, ramping, and partial-load operation. Commissioning will be nearly complete by Q1 2017. In tandem with the construction effort, significant progress has been made on the detailed system design, component-level testing, and the control system, which is in the process of finalization using a detailed plant-wide simulator. This presentation provides an update on the status of the technology including a discussion of the engineering and construction progress of the demonstration plant and the development status and schedule for the first 295MWe, commercial-scale NET Power plants

Phase and Scaling Properties of Determinants Arising in Topological Field Theories

In topological field theories determinants of maps with negative as well as positive eigenvalues arise. We give a generalisation of the zeta-regularisation technique to derive expressions for the phase and scaling-dependence of these determinants. For theories on odd-dimensional manifolds a simple formula for the scaling dependence is obtained in terms of the dimensions of certain cohomology spaces. This enables a non-perturbative feature of Chern-Simons gauge theory to be reproduced by path-integral methods.Comment: 12 pages, Latex. To appear in Physics Letters

That ‘70s Show: Why the 11th Circuit was Wrong to Rely on Cases from the 1970s to Decide a Cell-Phone Tracking Case

In light of society\u27s increasing reliance on technology, this article explores a critical question – that of the Fourth Amendment’s protection over privacy in the digital age. Specifically, this article addresses how the law currently fails to protect the privacy of one’s cell phone records and its ramifications. By highlighting the antiquated precedent leading up to the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling in United States v. Davis, this article calls on the judiciary to find a more appropriate balance for protecting the right to privacy in a modern society

Heating Features of Interesting Supra-Arcade Downflows

Supra-arcade downflows (SADs) have been observed above flare loops during the decay phase of flare. They appear as tadpole-like dark plasma voids traveling towards the Sun. In areas surrounding where they appear, temperatures are often high. We aim to investigate temperature and heating mechanism of SADs. We apply our analysis to the M1.7 flare that occurred on 2012 July 12 and was observed by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. There are many obvious SADs above the arcade during this event in the AIA 131 channel. We calculate the differential emission measure and emission measure weighted temperature with AIA data in the region where SADs are concentrated. We find that the temperature in SADs region tends to be lower than the surrounding plasma. We also calculate velocities of SADs using the Fourier Local Correlation Tracking (FLCT, Fisher & Welsch, 2008) method to derive velocities in the supra-arcade region. Using corks to track the calculated velocities, we find our velocity results are consistent with the SAD motions in the AIA 131 intensity movie. We use the velocities to derive the adiabatic heating caused by the compression of plasma. Preliminary results indicate that there is adiabatic heating in front of the SADs

New Tools for Aspect-oriented Programming in Music and Media Programming Environments

(Abstract to follow

David Freed, Printmaker: A Retrospective

This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition David Freed: Printmaker: A Retrospective, curated by Ted Potter, August 31-October 28, 2001. Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts. --p. 4.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/anderson_gallery/1005/thumbnail.jp