National Transonic Facility: A review of the operational plan

The proposed National Transonic Facility (NTF) operational plan is reviewed. The NTF will provide an aerodynamic test capability significantly exceeding that of other transonic regime wind tunnels now available. A limited number of academic research program that might use the NTF are suggested. It is concluded that the NTF operational plan is useful for management, technical, instrumentation, and model building techniques available in the specialized field of aerodynamic analysis and simulation. It is also suggested that NASA hold an annual conference to discuss wind tunnel research results and to report on developments that will further improve the utilization and cost effectiveness of the NTF and other wind tunnels

A Massively Parallel MIMD Implemented by SIMD Hardware?

Both conventional wisdom and engineering practice hold that a massively parallel MIMD machine should be constructed using a large number of independent processors and an asynchronous interconnection network. In this paper, we suggest that it may be beneficial to implement a massively parallel MIMD using microcode on a massively parallel SIMD microengine; the synchronous nature of the system allows much higher performance to be obtained with simpler hardware. The primary disadvantage is simply that the SIMD microengine must serialize execution of different types of instructions - but again the static nature of the machine allows various optimizations that can minimize this detrimental effect. In addition to presenting the theory behind construction of efficient MIMD machines using SIMD microengines, this paper discusses how the techniques were applied to create a 16,384- processor shared memory barrier MIMD using a SIMD MasPar MP-1. Both the MIMD structure and benchmark results are presented. Even though the MasPar hardware is not ideal for implementing a MIMD and our microinterpreter was written in a high-level language (MPL), peak MIMD performance was 280 MFLOPS as compared to 1.2 GFLOPS for the native SIMD instruction set. Of course, comparing peak speeds is of dubious value; hence, we have also included a number of more realistic benchmark results

Bound States in Sharply Bent Waveguides: Analytical and Experimental Approach

Quantum wires and electromagnetic waveguides possess common features since their physics is described by the same wave equation. We exploit this analogy to investigate experimentally with microwave waveguides and theoretically with the help of an effective potential approach the occurrence of bound states in sharply bent quantum wires. In particular, we compute the bound states, study the features of the transition from a bound to an unbound state caused by the variation of the bending angle and determine the critical bending angles at which such a transition takes place. The predictions are confirmed by calculations based on a conventional numerical method as well as experimental measurements of the spectra and electric field intensity distributions of electromagnetic waveguides

First Experimental Observation of Superscars in a Pseudointegrable Barrier Billiard

With a perturbation body technique intensity distributions of the electric field strength in a flat microwave billiard with a barrier inside up to mode numbers as large as about 700 were measured. A method for the reconstruction of the amplitudes and phases of the electric field strength from those intensity distributions has been developed. Recently predicted superscars have been identified experimentally and - using the well known analogy between the electric field strength and the quantum mechanical wave function in a two-dimensional microwave billiard - their properties determined.Comment: 4 pages, 5 .eps figure

Iowan Drift Problem, Northeastern Iowa

https://ir.uiowa.edu/igs_ri/1006/thumbnail.jp

Third rank Killing tensors in general relativity. The (1+1)-dimensional case

Third rank Killing tensors in (1+1)-dimensional geometries are investigated and classified. It is found that a necessary and sufficient condition for such a geometry to admit a third rank Killing tensor can always be formulated as a quadratic PDE, of order three or lower, in a Kahler type potential for the metric. This is in contrast to the case of first and second rank Killing tensors for which the integrability condition is a linear PDE. The motivation for studying higher rank Killing tensors in (1+1)-geometries, is the fact that exact solutions of the Einstein equations are often associated with a first or second rank Killing tensor symmetry in the geodesic flow formulation of the dynamics. This is in particular true for the many models of interest for which this formulation is (1+1)-dimensional, where just one additional constant of motion suffices for complete integrability. We show that new exact solutions can be found by classifying geometries admitting higher rank Killing tensors.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe

Effects of Heat Treatment and Formulation on the Phase Composition and Chemical Durability of the EBR-Ll Ceramic Waste Form.

High-level radioactive waste salts generated during the electrometallurgical treatment of spent sodium-bonded nuclear fuel from the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II will be immobilized in a ceramic waste form (CWF). Tests are being conducted to evaluate the suitability of the CWF for disposal in the planned federal high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain. In this report, the results of laboratory tests and analyses conducted to address product consistency and thermal stability issues called out in waste acceptance requirements are presented. The tests measure the impacts of (1) variations in the amounts of salt and binder glass used to make the CWF and (2) heat treatments on the phase composition and chemical durability of the waste form. A series of CWF materials was made to span the ranges of salt and glass contents that could be used during processing: between 5.0 and 15 mass% salt loaded into the zeolite (the nominal salt loading is 10.7%, and the process control range is 10.6 to 11.2 mass%), and between 20 and 30 mass% binder glass mixed with the salt-loaded zeolite (the nominal glass content is 25% and the process control range is 20 to 30 mass%). In another series of tests, samples of two CWF products made with the nominal salt and glass contents were reheated to measure the impact on the phase composition and durability: long-term heat treatments were conducted at 400 and 500 C for durations of 1 week, 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year; short-term heat treatments were conducted at 600, 700, 800, and 850 C for durations of 4, 28, 52, and 100 hours. All of the CWF products that were made with different amounts of salt, zeolite, and glass and all of the heat-treated CWF samples were analyzed with powder X-ray diffraction to measure changes in phase compositions and subjected to 7-day product consistency tests to measure changes in the chemical durability. The salt loading had the greatest impact on phase composition and durability. A relatively large amount of nepheline, Na{sub 4}(AlSiO{sub 4}){sub 4}, was formed in the material made with 5.0 mass% salt loading, which was also the least durable of the materials that were tested. Nepheline was not detected in materials made with salt-loaded zeolites containing 15 or 20 mass% salt. Conversely, halite was not detected with XRD in materials made with 5.0 or 7.5 mass% salt loading, but similar amounts of halite were measured in the other CWF materials. The sodalite contents of all materials were similar. The halite content in the CWF source material used in the short-term heat-treatment study, which had the nominal salt and binder glass loadings, was determined to be about 1.3 mass% by standard addition analysis. Heat treatment had only a small effect on the phase composition: the amount of halite increased to as much as 3.7 mass%, and trace amounts of nepheline were detected in samples treated at 800 and 850 C. The CWF samples treated at high temperatures had lower amounts of halite detected in the rapid water-soluble test. The releases of B, Na, and Si in the product consistency tests (PCTs) were not sensitive to the heat-treatment conditions. The PCT responses of all salt-loaded and heat-treated CWF materials were well below that of the Environmental Assessment (EA) glass

Schwarzschild black hole levitating in the hyperextreme Kerr field

The equilibrium configurations between a Schwarzschild black hole and a hyperextreme Kerr object are shown to be described by a three-parameter subfamily of the extended double-Kerr solution. For this subfamily, its Ernst potential and corresponding metric functions, we provide a physical representation which employs as arbitrary parameters the individual Komar masses and relative coordinate distance between the sources. The calculation of horizon's local angular velocity induced in the Schwarzschild black hole by the Kerr constituent yields a simple expression inversely proportional to the square of the distance parameter.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; improved versio

Two Kerr black holes with axisymmetric spins: An improved Newtonian model for the head-on collision and gravitational radiation

We present a semi-analytical approach to the interaction of two (originally) Kerr black holes through a head-on collision process. An expression for the rate of emission of gravitational radiation is derived from an exact solution to the Einstein's field equations. The total amount of gravitational radiation emitted in the process is calculated and compared to current numerical investigations. We find that the spin-spin interaction increases the emission of gravitational wave energy up to 0.2% of the total rest mass. We discuss also the possibility of spin-exchange between the holes.Comment: 8 pages, RevTeX, 2 figures, psbox macro include