Pump instability phenomena generated by fluid forces

Rotor dynamic behavior of high energy centrifugal pumps is significantly affected by two types of fluid forces; one due to the hydraulic interaction of the impeller with the surrounding volute or diffuser and the other due to the effect of the wear rings. The available data on these forces is first reviewed. A simple one degree-of-freedom system containing these forces is analytically solved to exhibit the rotor dynamic effects. To illustrate the relative magnitude of these phenomena, an example of a multistage boiler feed pump is worked out. It is shown that the wear ring effects tend to suppress critical speed and postpone instability onset. But the volute-impeller forces tend to lower the critical speed and the instability onset speed. However, for typical boiler feed pumps under normal running clearances, the wear ring effects are much more significant than the destabilizing hydraulic interaction effects

Spin-catalyzed hopping conductivity in disordered strongly interacting quantum wires

In one-dimensional electronic systems with strong repulsive interactions, charge excitations propagate much faster than spin excitations. Such systems therefore have an intermediate temperature range [termed the "spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid'" (SILL) regime] where charge excitations are "cold" (i.e., have low entropy) whereas spin excitations are "hot." We explore the effects of charge-sector disorder in the SILL regime in the absence of external sources of equilibration. We argue that the disorder localizes all charge-sector excitations; however, spin excitations are protected against full localization, and act as a heat bath facilitating charge and energy transport on asymptotically long timescales. The charge, spin, and energy conductivities are widely separated from one another. The dominant carriers of energy are neither charge nor spin excitations, but neutral "phonon" modes, which undergo an unconventional form of hopping transport that we discuss. We comment on the applicability of these ideas to experiments and numerical simulations.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Stabilization in relation to wavenumber in HDG methods

Simulation of wave propagation through complex media relies on proper understanding of the properties of numerical methods when the wavenumber is real and complex. Numerical methods of the Hybrid Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) type are considered for simulating waves that satisfy the Helmholtz and Maxwell equations. It is shown that these methods, when wrongly used, give rise to singular systems for complex wavenumbers. A sufficient condition on the HDG stabilization parameter for guaranteeing unique solvability of the numerical HDG system, both for Helmholtz and Maxwell systems, is obtained for complex wavenumbers. For real wavenumbers, results from a dispersion analysis are presented. An asymptotic expansion of the dispersion relation, as the number of mesh elements per wave increase, reveal that some choices of the stabilization parameter are better than others. To summarize the findings, there are values of the HDG stabilization parameter that will cause the HDG method to fail for complex wavenumbers. However, this failure is remedied if the real part of the stabilization parameter has the opposite sign of the imaginary part of the wavenumber. When the wavenumber is real, values of the stabilization parameter that asymptotically minimize the HDG wavenumber errors are found on the imaginary axis. Finally, a dispersion analysis of the mixed hybrid Raviart-Thomas method showed that its wavenumber errors are an order smaller than those of the HDG method