2,902 research outputs found
Study of fuel cell powerplant with heat recovery
It was shown that heat can be recovered from fuel cell power plants by replacing the air-cooled heat exchangers in present designs with units which transfer the heat to the integrated utility system. Energy availability for a 40-kW power plant was studied and showed that the total usable energy at rated power represents 84 percent of the fuel lower heating value. The effects of design variables on heat availability proved to be small. Design requirements were established for the heat recovery heat exchangers, including measurement of the characteristics of two candidate fuel cell coolants after exposure to fuel cell operating conditions. A heat exchanger test program was defined to assess fouling and other characteristics of fuel cell heat exchangers needed to confirm heat exchanger designs for heat recovery
Towards an expanded model of litigation
Introduction: The call for contributions for this workshop describes the important new challenges for the legal search
community this domain brings. Rather than just understanding the challenges this domain poses in terms of
their technical properties, we would like to suggest that understanding these challenges as socio-technical
challenges will be important. That is, as well as calling for research on a technical level to address these
challenges we are also calling for work to understand the social practices of those involved in e-discovery
(ED) and related legal work. A particularly interesting feature of this field is that it is likely that search
technologies will (at least semi-)automate responsiveness review in the relatively near term and this will
change the way that the work is organised and done in many ways – offering new possibilities for new
ways of organising the work. As well as designing those technologies for automating responsiveness
review we need to be envisioning how the work will be done in the future, how these technologies will
impact the organisation of the case and so on. In this position paper we therefore outline the importance of
understanding the wider social context of ED when designing tools and technologies to support and change
the work. We would like to reinforce and expand on Conrad’s call for IR researchers to understand just
what ED entails [2], include the stages that come both before and after core retrieval activities.
The importance of considering the social aspects of work in the design of the technology has been
established for some time. Ushering in this ‘turn to the social,’ and focusing on interface design, Gentner
and Grudin [4] described how the GUI has already changed from an interface for engineers, representing
the engineering model of the machine to one that supported single ‘everyman’ users (based on ideas from
psychology). From then onwards the interface has evolved to support groups of users, taking into account
the social and organisational contexts of use. This has particular resonance for the design of ED
technologies: during ED in particular and the wider legal process there are often many lawyers involved –
reviewing documents, determining issues, etc. Even if the way that their work is organised currently is not
seen as collaborative in the traditional sense – with individual lawyers working on individual document sets
to review them - their work needs to be coordinated and it seems likely that their work could be enhanced
by, for example, knowledge of what their colleagues had found, how the case was shaping up, new key
terms and facts turned up and so on. Work is often modelled for the purposes of design using process
models, but this misses out on the richness and variety actually found when one examines how the work is
carried out [3]. Technologies which strictly enforce the process models can often hinder the work, or end
up being worked around as was the case with workflow systems since people interpret processes very
flexibly to get the work done ([1], [3]). Other studies in other fields have found similar problems when
systems are designed on for example cognitive models of how the work is done; they often do not take into
account the situated nature of the work and thus they can be very difficult to use [5]. We believe, like [2],
that a clear understanding of the social practices of ED is vital for the creation of high-quality, meaningful
tools and technologies. We furthermore propose that work practice studies, to be used in combination with
other methods, are a central part of getting the detailed understanding of the work practices central to
designing useful and intelligent tools. Work practice studies would involve ethnographies, consisting
primarily of observation, undertaken of practitioners engaging in the work of ED
Gyrofluid simulations of collisionless reconnection in the presence of diamagnetic effects
The effects of the ion Larmor radius on magnetic reconnection are
investigated by means of numerical simulations, with a Hamiltonian gyrofluid
model. In the linear regime, it is found that ion diamagnetic effects decrease
the growth rate of the dominant mode. Increasing ion temperature tends to make
the magnetic islands propagate in the ion diamagnetic drift direction. In the
nonlinear regime, diamagnetic effects reduce the final width of the island.
Unlike the electron density, the guiding center density does not tend to
distribute along separatrices and at high ion temperature, the electrostatic
potential exhibits the superposition of a small scale structure, related to the
electron density, and a large scale structure, related to the ion
guiding-center density
Gyrofluid simulations of collisionless reconnection in the presence of diamagnetic effects
The effects of the ion Larmor radius on magnetic reconnection are
investigated by means of numerical simulations, with a Hamiltonian gyrofluid
model. In the linear regime, it is found that ion diamagnetic effects decrease
the growth rate of the dominant mode. Increasing ion temperature tends to make
the magnetic islands propagate in the ion diamagnetic drift direction. In the
nonlinear regime, diamagnetic effects reduce the final width of the island.
Unlike the electron density, the guiding center density does not tend to
distribute along separatrices and at high ion temperature, the electrostatic
potential exhibits the superposition of a small scale structure, related to the
electron density, and a large scale structure, related to the ion
guiding-center density
Gyrofluid simulations of collisionless reconnection in the presence of diamagnetic effects
The effects of the ion Larmor radius on magnetic reconnection are
investigated by means of numerical simulations, with a Hamiltonian gyrofluid
model. In the linear regime, it is found that ion diamagnetic effects decrease
the growth rate of the dominant mode. Increasing ion temperature tends to make
the magnetic islands propagate in the ion diamagnetic drift direction. In the
nonlinear regime, diamagnetic effects reduce the final width of the island.
Unlike the electron density, the guiding center density does not tend to
distribute along separatrices and at high ion temperature, the electrostatic
potential exhibits the superposition of a small scale structure, related to the
electron density, and a large scale structure, related to the ion
guiding-center density
Condensation of charged bosons in plasma physics and cosmology
The screening of impurities in plasma with Bose-Einstein condensate of
electrically charged bosons is considered. It is shown that the screened
potential is drastically different from the usual Debye one. The polarization
operator of photons in plasma acquires infrared singular terms at small photon
momentum and the screened potential drops down as a power of distance and even
has an oscillating behavior, similar to the Friedel oscillations in plasma with
degenerate fermions. The magnetic properties of the cosmological plasma with
condensed W-bosons are also discussed. It is shown that W-bosons condense in
the ferromagnetic state. It could lead to spontaneous magnetization of the
primeval plasma. The created magnetic fields may seed galactic and
intergalactic magnetic fields observed in the present-day universe.Comment: 9 pages, invited talk at the International Seminar "Quarks 2010",
Kolomna, Russia, June, 6-12, 201
Relic Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Turbulence
Turbulence may have been produced in the early universe during several kind
of non-equilibrium processes. Periods of cosmic turbulence may have left a
detectable relic in the form of stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves.
In this paper we derive general expressions for the power spectrum of the
expected signal. Extending previous works on the subject, we take into account
the effects of a continuous energy injection power and of magnetic fields. Both
effects lead to considerable deviations from the Kolmogorov turbulence
spectrum. We applied our results to determine the spectrum of gravity waves
which may have been produced by neutrino inhomogeneous diffusion and by a first
order phase transition. We show that in both cases the expected signal may be
in the sensitivity range of LISA.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figur
The role of structural polymorphism in driving the mechanical performance of the alzheimer's beta amyloid fibrils
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is related with the abnormal aggregation of amyloid β-peptides Aβ1-40 and Aβ1-42, the latter having a polymorphic character which gives rise to U- or S-shaped fibrils. Elucidating the role played by the nanoscale-material architecture on the amyloid fibril stability is a crucial breakthrough to better understand the pathological nature of amyloid structures and to support the rational design of bio-inspired materials. The computational study here presented highlights the superior mechanical behavior of the S-architecture, characterized by a Young's modulus markedly higher than the U-shaped architecture. The S-architecture showed a higher mechanical resistance to the enforced deformation along the fibril axis, consequence of a better interchain hydrogen bonds' distribution. In conclusion, this study, focusing the attention on the pivotal multiscale relationship between molecular phenomena and material properties, suggests the S-shaped Aβ1-42 species as a target of election in computational screen/design/optimization of effective aggregation modulators
Child Well-being in the Pacific Rim
This study extends previous efforts to compare the well-being of children using multi-dimensional indicators derived from sample survey and administrative series to thirteen countries in the Pacific Rim. The framework for the analysis of child well-being is to organise 46 indicators into 21 components and organise the components into 6 domains: material situation, health, education, subjective well-being, living environment, as well as risk and safety. Overall, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have the highest child well-being and Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines the lowest. However, there are substantial variations between the domains. Japan and Korea perform best on the material well-being of children and also do well on health and education but they have the lowest subjective well-being among their children by some margin. There is a relationship between child well-being and GDP per capita but children in China have higher well-being than you would expect given their GDP and children in Australia have lower well-being. The analysis is constrained by missing data particularly that the Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children Survey is not undertaken in any of these countries
Radiative Neutrino Decay in Media
In this letter we introduce a new method to determine the radiative neutrino
decay rate in the presence of a medium. Our approach is based on the
generalisation of the optical theorem at finite temperature and density.
Differently from previous works on this subject, our method allows to account
for dispersive and dissipative electromagnetic properties of the medium. Some
inconsistencies that are present in the literature are pointed-out and
corrected here. We shortly discuss the relevance of our results for neutrino
evolution in the early universe.Comment: 11 pages, 3 encapsulated figure
- …