Effect of vane twist on the performance of dome swirlers for gas turbine airblast atomizers

For advanced gas turbine engines, two combustor systems, the lean premixed/prevaporized (LPP) and the rich burn/quick quench/lean burn (RQL) offer great potential for reducing NO(x) emissions. An important consideration for either concept is the development of an advanced fuel injection system that will provide a stable, efficient, and very uniform combustion system over a wide operating range. High-shear airblast fuel injectors for gas turbine combustors have exhibited superior atomization and mixing compared with pressure-atomizing fuel injectors. This improved mixing has lowered NO(x) emissions and the pattern factor, and has enabled combustors to alternate fuels while maintaining a stable, efficient combustion system. The performance of high-shear airblast fuel injectors is highly dependent on the design of the dome swirl vanes. The type of swirl vanes most widely used in gas turbine combustors are usually flat for ease of manufacture, but vanes with curvature will, in general, give superior aerodynamic performance. The design and performance of high-turning, low-loss curved dome swirl vanes with twist along the span are investigated. The twist induces a secondary vortex flow pattern which will improve the atomization of the fuel, thereby producing a more uniform fuel-air distribution. This uniform distribution will increase combustion efficiency while lowering NO(x) emissions. A systematic swirl vane design system is presented based on one-, two-, and three-dimensional flowfield calculations, with variations in vane-turning angle, rate of turning, vane solidity, and vane twist as design parameters

The Case for Hypercritical Accretion in M33 X-7

The spin parameter of the black hole in M33 X-7 has recently been measured to be a*=0.77+-0.05 (Liu et al. 2008). It has been proposed that the spin of the 15.65 M_sun black hole is natal. We show that this is not a viable evolutionary path given the observed binary orbital period of 3.45 days since the explosion that would produce a black hole with the cited spin parameter and orbital period would disrupt the binary. Furthermore, we show that the system has to be evolved through the hypercritical mass transfer of about 5 M_sun from the secondary star to the black hole.Comment: 4 page

A filter-based feature selection approach for identifying potential biomarkers for lung cancer

Background: Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer in the world and its treatment is dependant on the type and stage of cancer detected in the patient. Molecular biomarkers that can characterize the cancer phenotype are thus a key tool in planning a therapeutic response. A common protocol for identifying such biomarkers is to employ genomic microarray analysis to find genes that show differential expression according to disease state or type. Data-mining techniques such as feature selection are often used to isolate, from among a large manifold of genes with differential expression, those specific genes whose differential expression patterns are of optimal value in phenotypic differentiation. One such technique, Biomarker Identifier (BMI), has been developed to identify features with the ability to distinguish between two data groups of interest, which is thus highly applicable for such studies. Results: Microarray data with validated genes was used to evaluate the utility of BMI in identifying markers for lung cancer. This data set contains a set of 129 gene expression profiles from large-airway epithelial cells (60 samples from smokers with lung cancer and 69 from smokers without lung cancer) and 7 genes from this data have been confirmed to be differentially expressed by quantitative PCR. Using this data set, BMI was compared with various well-known feature selection methods and was found to be more successful than other methods in finding useful genes to classify cancerous samples. Also it is evident that genes selected by BMI (given the same number of genes and classification algorithms) showed better discriminative power than those from the original study. After pathway analysis on the selected genes by BMI, we have been able to correlate the selected genes with well-known cancer-related pathways. Conclusions: Our results show that BMI can be used to analyze microarray data and to find useful genes for classifying samples. Pathway analysis suggests that BMI is successful in identifying biomarker-quality cancer-related genes from the data

Management of Digital Evidence: Body Worn Camera Use by Law Enforcement Agents

Body Worn Camera (BWC) is an emergent technology that has started to be deployed in law enforcement agencies in the recent past. Although there are many expected advantages to adoption and implementation of BWC, potential negative concerns range from loss of public privacy to failure in appropriate management of digital evidence. As insiders in police organizations, law enforcement agents have the capacity of either correctly or incorrectly managing digital evidence. Having clear and well-developed written policies regarding the BWC based on organizational, moral, and individual issues, is important for successful BWC implementation. In this research, we focus on ethical judgement regarding potential privacy violations of law enforcement agents in the context of BWC usage. Finding from this study will help in understanding perceptions of police officers and their ethical judgement and will assist in development of policies and provide actionable guidelines

GlycomicsDB - A Data Integration Platform for Glycans and their Strucutres

Glycomics is a discipline of biology that deals with the structure and function of glycans (or carbohydrates). Analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry (MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are having a significant impact on the field of glycomics. However, effective progress in glycomics research requires collaboration between laboratories to share experimental data, structural information of glycans, and simulation results. Herein we report the development of a web-based data management system that can incorporate large volumes of data from disparate sources and organize them into a uniform format for users to store and access. This system enables participating laboratories to set up a shared data repository which members of interdisciplinary teams can access. The system is able to manage and share raw MS data and structural information of glycans

A Pilot Study of an mHealth Application for Healthcare Workers: Poor Uptake Despite High Reported Acceptability at a Rural South African Community-Based MDR-TB Treatment Program

Introduction: As the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal addresses a growing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) epidemic by shifting care and treatment from trained specialty centers to community hospitals, delivering and monitoring MDR-TB therapy has presented new challenges. In particular, tracking and reporting adverse clinical events have been difficult for mobile healthcare workers (HCWs), trained health professionals who travel daily to patient homes to administer and monitor therapy. We designed and piloted a mobile phone application (Mobilize) for mobile HCWs that electronically standardized the recording and tracking of MDR-TB patients on low-cost, functional phones. Objective: We assess the acceptability and feasibility of using Mobilize to record and submit adverse events forms weekly during the intensive phase of MDR-TB therapy and evaluate mobile HCW perceptions throughout the pilot period. Methods: All five mobile HCWs at one site were trained and provided with phones. Utilizing a mixed-methods evaluation, mobile HCWs’ usage patterns were tracked electronically for seven months and analyzed. Qualitative focus groups and questionnaires were designed to understand the impact of mobile phone technology on the work environment. Results: Mobile HCWs submitted nine of 33 (27%) expected adverse events forms, conflicting with qualitative results in which mobile HCWs stated that Mobilize improved adverse events communication, helped their daily workflow, and could be successfully expanded to other health interventions. When presented with the conflict between their expressed views and actual practice, mobile HCWs cited forgetfulness and believed patients should take more responsibility for their own care. Discussion This pilot experience demonstrated poor uptake by HCWs despite positive responses to using mHealth. Though our results should be interpreted cautiously because of the small number of mobile HCWs and MDR-TB patients in this study, we recommend carefully exploring the motivations of HCWs and technologic enhancements prior to scaling new mHealth initiatives in resource poor settings

Biola Hour Highlights, 1974 - 09

How to Win Over Worry by Gerald Griffiths Psalm 37: The Psalm of Serenity by Al Sanders The Revelation of Jesus Christ by Lloyd Anderson Panel Discussions with Richard Chase, Charles Feinberg, and Samuel Sutherlandhttps://digitalcommons.biola.edu/bhhs/1008/thumbnail.jp

Renormalized Effective Actions in Radially Symmetric Backgrounds I: Partial Wave Cutoff Method

The computation of the one-loop effective action in a radially symmetric background can be reduced to a sum over partial-wave contributions, each of which is the logarithm of an appropriate one-dimensional radial determinant. While these individual radial determinants can be evaluated simply and efficiently using the Gel'fand-Yaglom method, the sum over all partial-wave contributions diverges. A renormalization procedure is needed to unambiguously define the finite renormalized effective action. Here we use a combination of the Schwinger proper-time method, and a resummed uniform DeWitt expansion. This provides a more elegant technique for extracting the large partial-wave contribution, compared to the higher order radial WKB approach which had been used in previous work. We illustrate the general method with a complete analysis of the scalar one-loop effective action in a class of radially separable SU(2) Yang-Mills background fields. We also show that this method can be applied to the case where the background gauge fields have asymptotic limits appropriate to uniform field strengths, such as for example in the Minkowski solution, which describes an instanton immersed in a constant background. Detailed numerical results will be presented in a sequel.Comment: 35 page