Spectroscopic Evidence for the Specific Na+ and K+ Interactions with the Hydrogen-bonded Water Molecules at the Electrolyte Aqueous Solution Surfaces

Sum frequency generation vibrational spectra of the water molecules at the NaF and KF aqueous solution surfaces showed significantly different spectral features and different concentration dependence. This result is the first direct observation of the cation effects of the simple alkali cations, which have been believed to be depleted from the aqueous surface, on the hydrogen bonding structure of the water molecules at the electrolyte solution surfaces. These observations may provide important clue to understand the fundamental phenomenon of ions at the air/water interface.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Gait Verification using Knee Acceleration Signals

A novel gait recognition method for biometric applications is proposed. The approach has the following distinct features. First, gait patterns are determined via knee acceleration signals, circumventing difficulties associated with conventional vision-based gait recognition methods. Second, an automatic procedure to extract gait features from acceleration signals is developed that employs a multiple-template classification method. Consequently, the proposed approach can adjust the sensitivity and specificity of the gait recognition system with great flexibility. Experimental results from 35 subjects demonstrate the potential of the approach for successful recognition. By setting sensitivity to be 0.95 and 0.90, the resulting specificity ranges from 1 to 0.783 and 1.00 to 0.945, respectively

A new approach for shaping of dual-reflector antennas

The shaping of 2-D dual-reflector antenna systems to generate a prescribed distribution with uniform phase at the aperture of the second reflector is examined. This method is based on the geometrical nature of Cassegrain and Gregorian dual-reflector antennas. The method of syntheses satisfies the principles of geometrical optics which are the foundations of dual-reflector designs. Instead of setting up differential equations or heuristically designing the subreflector, a set of algebraic equations is formulated and solved numerically to obtain the desired surfaces. The caustics of the reflected rays from the subreflector can be obtained and examined. Several examples of 2-D dual-reflector shaping are shown to validate the study. Geometrical optics and physical optics are used to calculate the scattered fields from the reflectors

Symbolic computation of exact solutions expressible in hyperbolic and elliptic functions for nonlinear PDEs

Algorithms are presented for the tanh- and sech-methods, which lead to closed-form solutions of nonlinear ordinary and partial differential equations (ODEs and PDEs). New algorithms are given to find exact polynomial solutions of ODEs and PDEs in terms of Jacobi's elliptic functions. For systems with parameters, the algorithms determine the conditions on the parameters so that the differential equations admit polynomial solutions in tanh, sech, combinations thereof, Jacobi's sn or cn functions. Examples illustrate key steps of the algorithms. The new algorithms are implemented in Mathematica. The package DDESpecialSolutions.m can be used to automatically compute new special solutions of nonlinear PDEs. Use of the package, implementation issues, scope, limitations, and future extensions of the software are addressed. A survey is given of related algorithms and symbolic software to compute exact solutions of nonlinear differential equations.Comment: 39 pages. Software available from Willy Hereman's home page at http://www.mines.edu/fs_home/whereman

Building stock dynamics and its impacts on materials and energy demand in China

China hosts a large amount of building stocks, which is nearly 50 billion square meters. Moreover, annual new construction is growing fast, representing half of the world's total. The trend is expected to continue through the year 2050. Impressive demand for new residential and commercial construction, relative shorter average building lifetime, and higher material intensities have driven massive domestic production of energy intensive building materials such as cement and steel. This paper developed a bottom-up building stock turnover model to project the growths, retrofits and retirements of China's residential and commercial building floor space from 2010 to 2050. It also applied typical material intensities and energy intensities to estimate building materials demand and energy consumed to produce these building materials. By conducting scenario analyses of building lifetime, it identified significant potentials of building materials and energy demand conservation. This study underscored the importance of addressing building material efficiency, improving building lifetime and quality, and promoting compact urban development to reduce energy and environment consequences in China

Hawking Radiation of a Quantum Black Hole in an Inflationary Universe

The quantum stress-energy tensor of a massless scalar field propagating in the two-dimensional Vaidya-de Sitter metric, which describes a classical model spacetime for a dynamical evaporating black hole in an inflationary universe, is analyzed. We present a possible way to obtain the Hawking radiation terms for the model with arbitrary functions of mass. It is used to see how the expansion of universe will affect the dynamical process of black hole evaporation. The results show that the cosmological inflation has an inclination to depress the black hole evaporation. However, if the cosmological constant is sufficiently large then the back-reaction effect has the inclination to increase the black hole evaporation. We also present a simple method to show that it will always produce a divergent flux of outgoing radiation along the Cauchy horizon where the curvature is a finite value. This means that the Hawking radiation will be very large in there and shall modify the classical spacetime drastically. Therefore the black hole evaporation cannot be discussed self-consistently on the classical Vaidya-type spacetime. Our method can also be applied to analyze the quantum stress-energy tensor in the more general Vaidya-type spacetimes.Comment: Proper boundary will lead to anti-evaporation of schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes, as corrected in Class. Quantum Grav. 11 (1994) 28