DEVELOPMENT OF AN ADVANCED HIGH PRESSURE RATIO TRANSONIC FAN STAGE. PART-I: DESIGN AND ANALYSIS

A high performance fan stage of pressure ratio 2.0 is being designed and developed under a joint programme between Chinese Aeronautical Establishment (CAE) China and National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), Bangalore, India.. Special features of the aerodynamic design are i) forward blade sweep and lean to increase the ability to bear intake distortion ii) reverse camber fan tip to reduce losses via pre compression iii) low aspect ratio of the blades to maximize stall margin. The blade will be fabricated using laminates of Carbon/Epoxy composites with tip shroud so as to limit the blade stress and deformation. Stress analysis was carried out using MSC/NASTRAN Finite Element Package. The fan stage has undergone a series of design improvements. Comparison of typical results obtained at NAL and BUAA is shown for the final version of the fan stage TTT98-29

Ionization near-zones associated with quasars at z ~ 6

We analyze the size evolution of HII regions around 27 quasars between z=5.7 to 6.4 ('quasar near-zones' or NZ). We include more sources than previous studies, and we use more accurate redshifts for the host galaxies, with 8 CO molecular line redshifts and 9 MgII redshifts. We confirm the trend for an increase in NZ size with decreasing redshift, with the luminosity normalized proper size evolving as: R_{NZ,corrected} = (7.4 \pm 0.3) - (8.0 \pm 1.1) \times (z-6) Mpc. While derivation of the absolute neutral fraction remains difficult with this technique, the evolution of the NZ sizes suggests a decrease in the neutral fraction of intergalactic hydrogen by a factor ~ 9.4 from z=6.4 to 5.7, in its simplest interpretation. Alternatively, recent numerical simulations suggest that this rapid increase in near-zone size from z=6.4 to 5.7 is due to the rapid increase in the background photo-ionization rate at the end of the percolation or overlap phase, when the average mean free path of ionizing photons increases dramatically. In either case, the results are consistent with the idea that z ~ 6 to 7 corresponds to the tail end of cosmic reionization. The scatter in the normalized NZ sizes is larger than expected simply from measurement errors, and likely reflects intrinsic differences in the quasars or their environments. We find that the near-zone sizes increase with quasar UV luminosity, as expected for photo-ionization dominated by quasar radiation.Comment: 16 pages, aas format, 4 figures, to appear in the ApJ letter