3,143 research outputs found
A new dawn? The Roman Catholic Church and environmental issues
This is a PDF version of an article published in New Blackfriars© 1997. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.This article discusses the stance of the Roman Catholic Church on environmental issues and argues that the Church tends to stay on the fringe rather than get involved. Some of the ways in which Roman Catholic theologians have incorporated environmental issues into theological reflection is discussed, as are environmental challenges facing the Church in Britain (conservation, resources, biodiversity, animal welfare, biotechnology, cooperate/individual ethics, environmental justice, economics/policy development, and global issues)
Power computation for the triboelectric nanogenerator
We consider, from a mathematical perspective, the power generated by a
contact-mode triboelectric nanogenerator, an energy harvesting device that has
been well studied recently. We encapsulate the behaviour of the device in a
differential equation, which although linear and of first order, has periodic
coefficients, leading to some interesting mathematical problems. In studying
these, we derive approximate forms for the mean power generated and the current
waveforms, and describe a procedure for computing the Fourier coefficients for
the current, enabling us to show how the power is distributed over the
harmonics. Comparisons with accurate numerics validate our analysis
Basins of attraction in forced systems with time-varying dissipation
We consider dissipative periodically forced systems and investigate cases in
which having information as to how the system behaves for constant dissipation
may be used when dissipation varies in time before settling at a constant final
value. First, we consider situations where one is interested in the basins of
attraction for damping coefficients varying linearly between two given values
over many different time intervals: we outline a method to reduce the
computation time required to estimate numerically the relative areas of the
basins and discuss its range of applicability. Second, we observe that
sometimes very slight changes in the time interval may produce abrupt large
variations in the relative areas of the basins of attraction of the surviving
attractors: we show how comparing the contracted phase space at a time after
the final value of dissipation has been reached with the basins of attraction
corresponding to that value of constant dissipation can explain the presence of
such variations. Both procedures are illustrated by application to a pendulum
with periodically oscillating support.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures, 7 table
Quasi-periodic attractors, Borel summability and the Bryuno condition for strongly dissipative systems
We consider a class of ordinary differential equations describing
one-dimensional analytic systems with a quasi-periodic forcing term and in the
presence of damping. In the limit of large damping, under some generic
non-degeneracy condition on the force, there are quasi-periodic solutions which
have the same frequency vector as the forcing term. We prove that such
solutions are Borel summable at the origin when the frequency vector is either
any one-dimensional number or a two-dimensional vector such that the ratio of
its components is an irrational number of constant type. In the first case the
proof given simplifies that provided in a previous work of ours. We also show
that in any dimension , for the existence of a quasi-periodic solution with
the same frequency vector as the forcing term, the standard Diophantine
condition can be weakened into the Bryuno condition. In all cases, under a
suitable positivity condition, the quasi-periodic solution is proved to
describe a local attractor.Comment: 10 page
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