Perspectives on hypersonic viscous and nonequilibrium flow research

An attempt is made to reflect on current focuses in certain areas of hypersonic flow research by examining recent works and their issues. Aspects of viscous interaction, flow instability, and nonequilibrium aerothermodynamics pertaining to theoretical interest are focused upon. The field is a diverse one, and many exciting works may have either escaped the writer's notice or been abandoned for the sake of space. Students of hypersonic viscous flow must face the transition problems towards the two opposite ends of the Reynolds or Knudsen number range, which represents two regimes where unresolved fluid/gas dynamic problems abound. Central to the hypersonic flow studies is high-temperature physical gas dynamics; here, a number of issues on modelling the intermolecular potentials and inelastic collisions remain the obstacles to quantitative predictions. Research in combustion and scramjet propulsion will certainly be benefitted by advances in turbulent mixing and new computational fluid dynamics (CFD) strategies on multi-scaled complex reactions. Even for the sake of theoretical development, the lack of pertinent experimental data in the right energy and density ranges is believed to be among the major obstacles to progress in aerothermodynamic research for hypersonic flight. To enable laboratory simulation of nonequilibrium effects anticipated for transatmospheric flight, facilities capable of generating high enthalpy flow at density levels higher than in existing laboratories are needed (Hornung 1988). A new free-piston shock tunnel capable of realizing a test-section stagnation temperature of 10(exp 5) at Reynolds number 50 x 10(exp 6)/cm is being completed and preliminary tests has begun (H. Hornung et al. 1992). Another laboratory study worthy of note as well as theoretical support is the nonequilibrium flow experiment of iodine vapor which has low activation energies for vibrational excitation and dissociation, and can be studied in a laboratory with modest resources (Pham-Van-Diep et al. 1992)

The Casimir effect for parallel plates at finite temperature in the presence of one fractal extra compactified dimension

We discuss the Casimir effect for massless scalar fields subject to the Dirichlet boundary conditions on the parallel plates at finite temperature in the presence of one fractal extra compactified dimension. We obtain the Casimir energy density with the help of the regularization of multiple zeta function with one arbitrary exponent and further the renormalized Casimir energy density involving the thermal corrections. It is found that when the temperature is sufficiently high, the sign of the Casimir energy remains negative no matter how great the scale dimension $\delta$ is within its allowed region. We derive and calculate the Casimir force between the parallel plates affected by the fractal additional compactified dimension and surrounding temperature. The stronger thermal influence leads the force to be stronger. The nature of the Casimir force keeps attractive.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

Effect of surface asperity on elastohydrodynamic lubrication

The important aspects of elastohydrodynamic lubrication, with a single, one-dimensional asperity, have been found by solving numerically the coupled transient Reynolds equation and the elasticity equation. Even though the assumption of a single asperity is highly ideal, this study sheds some light on the effect of surface roughness on elastohydrodynamic lubrication. The results show that the film pressure tends to increase more than the steady state pressure, and in particular, the increase in pressure reaches a maximum as the asperity approaches the inlet of the contact region. The asperity height and the pressure increase above the steady state pressure are closely related to each other; the higher the asperity height, the larger the pressure increase. In the pure rolling case, it has been found that a local pressure peak is not developed. However, in the cases of sliding and rolling, a small, local pressure peak is developed on the pressure profile when the asperity moves into the contact region. In general, the overall film thickness profile increases with increasing asperity height, but is not significantly affected by the asperity width. Moreover, the slope of the overall film thickness profile for the transient cases is much greater than the steady state profile, which is approximately constant across the contact width. The increase in the center film thickness also depends upon the width and height of the asperity

The Radio and Gamma-Ray Luminosities of Blazars

Based on the $\gamma$-ray data of blazars in the third EGRET catalog and radio data at 5 GHz, we studied the correlation between the radio and $\gamma$-ray luminosities using two statistical methods. The first method was the partial correlation analysis method, which indicates that there exist correlations between the radio and $\gamma$-ray luminosities in both high and low states as well as in the average case. The second method involved a comparison of expected $\gamma$-ray luminosity distribution with the observed data using the Kolmogorov-- Smirnov (KS) test. In the second method, we assumed that there is a correlation between the radio and $\gamma$-ray luminosities and that the $\gamma$-ray luminosity function is proportional to the radio luminosity function. The KS test indicates that the expected gamma-ray luminosity distributions are consistent with the observed data in a reasonable parameter range. Finally, we used different $\gamma$-ray luminosity functions to estimate the possible 'observed' $\gamma$-ray luminosity distributions by GLAST.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, one table, PASJ, 53 (2001

Thermal elastohydrodynamic lubrication of spur gears

An analysis and computer program called TELSGE were developed to predict the variations of dynamic load, surface temperature, and lubricant film thickness along the contacting path during the engagement of a pair of involute spur gears. The analysis of dynamic load includes the effect of gear inertia, the effect of load sharing of adjacent teeth, and the effect of variable tooth stiffness which are obtained by a finite-element method. Results obtained from TELSGE for the dynamic load distributions along the contacting path for various speeds of a pair of test gears show patterns similar to that observed experimentally. Effects of damping ratio, contact ratio, tip relief, and tooth error on the dynamic load were examined. In addition, two dimensionless charts are included for predicting the maximum equilibrium surface temperature, which can be used to estimate directly the lubricant film thickness based on well established EHD analysis

Transient effect of lubricant on elastohydro-dynamic film thickness

The inlet solution of the elastohydrodynamic lubricated rolling contact problem was obtained by considering lubricants with transient viscosity. The effect of the viscoelastic retardation time of the lubricant on the center film thickness was investigated. The effect of transient viscosity in response to a sudden pressure was found to be insignificant in determining the film thickness in elastohydrodynamic contacts

Polarization and Variations of BL Lacertae Objects

BL Lacertae objects are an extreme subclass of AGNs showing rapid and large-amplitude variability, high and variable polarization, and core-dominated radio emissions. If a strong beaming effect is the cause of the extreme observation properties, one would expect that these properties would be correlated with each other. Based on the relativistic beaming model, relationships between the polarization and the magnitude variation in brightness, as well as the core- dominance parameter are derived and used statistically to compare with the observational data of a BL Lacertae object sample. The statistical results are consistent with these correlations, which suggests that the polarization, the variation, and the core-dominance parameter are possible indications of the beaming effect.Comment: 6 pages, two figures, one table, some revisions. PASJ, 53 (2001

Basic properties of Gamma-ray loud blazars

In this paper, a method is proposed to determine the basic properties of $\gamma$-ray loud blazars, among them the central black hole mass, M, the Doppler factor, $\delta$, the propagation angle of the $\gamma$-rays with respect to the symmetric axis of a two-temperature accretion disk, $\Phi$, and the distance (i.e. the height above the accretion disk), d at which the $\gamma$-rays are created, for seven $\gamma$-ray loud blazars with available GeV variability timescales and in which the absorption effect of a $\gamma$-ray and the beaming effect have been taken into account. Our results indicate that, if we take the intrinsic $\gamma$-ray luminosity to be $\lambda$ times the Eddington luminosity, $L_{\gamma}^{in} = \lambda L_{Edd.}$, the masses of the blazars are in the range of $(4 \sim 131)\times 10^{7}M_{\odot}$, the Doppler factors ($\delta$) lie in the range of 0.57 to 5.33 the angle ($\Phi$) is in the range of $13^{\circ}$ to 43$^{\circ}$ and the distance (d) is in the range of 26R_{g} to 411R_{g}. Our model results are independent of $\gamma$-ray emission mechanisms but they do depend on the X-ray emission mechanism of the accretion disk.Comment: 14 pages, 3 tables, A&A accepte

Statistics Of The Burst Model At Super-critical Phase

We investigate the statistics of a model of type-I X-ray burst [Phys. Rev. E, {\bf 51}, 3045 (1995)] in its super-critical phase. The time evolution of the burnable clusters, places where fire can pass through, is studied using simple statistical arguments. We offer a simple picture for the time evolution of the percentage of space covered by burnable clusters. A relation between the time-average and the peak percentage of space covered by burnable clusters is also derived.Comment: 11 Pages in Revtex 3.0. Two figures available by sending request to [email protected]