Organic chains in the United Kingdom and Germany: lessons for Dutch organic agribusiness

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. This paper presents lessons for Dutch organic agribusiness based on a study of the UK and Germany. The following lessons are drawn: public-private cooperation is desirable for the sake of further development; the supermarket chain is necessary in order to achieve a large market share; consumers and supermarket chains subject organic products to at least the same demands that they have for regular products; communication: [1] a task for the government and market parties, [2] striving for one mark of quality [3] health is the driving motivation, although not communicated as such; organic agriculture has more chains and more segments

A method for estimating the extent of denitrification of Arctic polar vortex air from tracer-tracer scatter plots

A method for estimating the extent of denitrification of Arctic polar vortex air is proposed. Previous estimates of denitrification using tracer-tracer scatter plots have not allowed for mixing-induced changes in tracer-tracer relationships in a sufficiently general way. This difficulty is overcome by constructing an artificial "reference tracer'' from a linear combination of other long-lived tracers. The reference tracer is designed so that, as far as possible, it has a linear canonical relationship with NOy in midlatitudes. A linear relationship is unaffected by mixing, so denitrification is apparent as deviations of vortex measurements from the linear midlatitude relationship. The method is first demonstrated using data from a chemical transport model in which no denitrification processes are present. It is then applied to balloon, aircraft and shuttle-borne measurements made before and during the breakdown of the Arctic vortex in 1992-1993 and 1996-1997. In each case the method indicates that little or no denitrification had occurred in any of the vortex air encountered. When the method is applied to the southern hemisphere vortex in 1994, by contrast, denitrified air is clearly seen to be present around 19-23 km in the vortex

Turbulent kinetic energy production in the vane of a low-pressure linear turbine cascade with incoming wakes

Copyright © 2015 V. Michelassi and J. G. Wissink. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Incompressible large eddy simulation and direct numerical simulation of a low-pressure turbine at R e = 5.18 × 10 4 and 1.48 × 10 5 with discrete incoming wakes are analyzed to identify the turbulent kinetic energy generation mechanism outside of the blade boundary layer. The results highlight the growth of turbulent kinetic energy at the bow apex of the wake and correlate it to the stress-strain tensors relative orientation. The production rate is analytically split according to the principal axes, and then terms are computed by using the simulation results. The analysis of the turbulent kinetic energy is followed both along the discrete incoming wakes and in the stationary frame of reference. Both direct numerical and large eddy simulation concur in identifying the same production mechanism that is driven by both a growth of strain rate in the wake, first, followed by the growth of turbulent shear stress after. The peak of turbulent kinetic energy diffuses and can eventually reach the suction side boundary layer for the largest Reynolds number investigated here with higher incidence angle. As a consequence, the local turbulence intensity outside the boundary layer can grow significantly above the free-stream level with a potential impact on the suction side boundary layer transition mechanism.The German Research Foundation (DFG) within the joint Project “Periodic Unsteady Flow in Turbomachinery.

Direct numerical simulation of turbulent scalar transport across a flat surface

To elucidate the physical mechanisms that play a role in the interfacial transfer of atmospheric gases into water, a series of direct numerical simulations of mass transfer across the air-water interface driven by isotropic turbulence diffusing from below has been carried out for various turbulent Reynolds numbers ( RT=84,195,507). To allow a direct (unbiased) comparison of the instantaneous effects of scalar diffusivity, in each of the DNS up to six scalar advection-diffusion equations with different Schmidt numbers were solved simultaneously. As far as the authors are aware this is the first simulation that is capable to accurately resolve the realistic Schmidt number, Sc=500, that is typical for the transport of atmospheric gases such as oxygen in water. For the range of turbulent Reynolds numbers and Schmidt numbers considered, the normalized transfer velocity KL was found to scale with RT-1/2 and Sc-1/2, which indicates that the largest eddies present in the isotropic turbulent flow introduced at the bottom of the computational domain tend to determine the mass transfer. The KL results were also found to be in good agreement with the surface divergence model of McCready, Vassiliadou & Hanratty (AIChE J., vol. 32, 1986, pp. 1108-1115) when using a constant of proportionality of 0.525. Although close to the surface large eddies are responsible for the bulk of the gas transfer, it was also observed that for higher $R-T$ the influence of smaller eddies becomes more important. © 2014 Cambridge University Press

Travelling waves in two-dimensional plane Poiseuille flow

The asymptotic structure of laminar modulated travelling waves in two-dimensional high-Reynolds-number plane Poiseuille flow is investigated on the upper-energy branch. A finite set of independent slowly varying parameters are identified which parameterize the solution of the Navier–Stokes equations in this subset of the phase space. Our parameterization of the weakly stable modes describes an attracting manifold of maximum-entropy configurations. The complementary modes, which have been neglected in this parameterization, are strongly damped. In order to seek a closure, a countably infinite number of modulation equations are derived on the long viscous time scale: a single equation for averaged kinetic energy and momentum; and the remaining equations for averaged powers of vorticity. Only a finite number of these vorticity modulation equations are required to determine the finite number of unknowns. The new results show that the evolution of the slowly varying amplitude parameters is determined by the vorticity field and that the phase velocity responds to these changes in the amplitude in accordance with the kinetic energy and momentum. The new results also show that the most crucial physical mechanism in the production of vorticity is the interaction between vorticity and kinetic energy, this interaction being responsible for the existence of the attractor

Unstable resonators with Gosper-island boundary conditions : virtual-source computation of fractal eigenmodes

The Gosper island is a well-known fractal belonging to a family of self-similar “root 7” curves constructed from a simple iterative algorithm [1]. One begins with a regular hexagon (the initiator, corresponding to iteration n = 0) with sides of reference length l 0 , and then breaks each of these straight-edge elements into three equal segments of length l n = l 0 (1/7 1/2 ) n where n = 1, 2,3,... (the generator stages). If the total number of length elements after applying the generator n times is given by N n = 6 × 3 n , then the Hausdorff-Besicovich dimension of such a curve is calculated to be D = lim n→∞ -log(N n )/log(l n ) = 2log(3)/log(7) ≈ 1.1292.In this presentation, we report on our latest theoretical results predicting the modes of unstable resonators [2,3] when the small feedback mirror has a shape corresponding to increasing iterations of the Gosper island fractal. A fully two-dimensional generalization of Southwell's virtual source (2D-VS) method [4] (itself an approximation of Horwitz's asymptotic theory [5]) is deployed, whereby the resonator is unfolded into an equivalent sequence of apertures illuminated by a plane wave. Each aperture has a characteristic size (capturing a band of pattern spatial scalelengths), and it acts as a virtual source of diffracted waves that are computed using edge-wave decompositions within a circulation-integral method [6]. The empty-cavity eigenmodes are then constructed from a linear combination of the constituent single-aperture Fresnel patterns

Video retrieval based on deep convolutional neural network

Recently, with the enormous growth of online videos, fast video retrieval research has received increasing attention. As an extension of image hashing techniques, traditional video hashing methods mainly depend on hand-crafted features and transform the real-valued features into binary hash codes. As videos provide far more diverse and complex visual information than images, extracting features from videos is much more challenging than that from images. Therefore, high-level semantic features to represent videos are needed rather than low-level hand-crafted methods. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network is proposed to extract high-level semantic features and a binary hash function is then integrated into this framework to achieve an end-to-end optimization. Particularly, our approach also combines triplet loss function which preserves the relative similarity and difference of videos and classification loss function as the optimization objective. Experiments have been performed on two public datasets and the results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with other state-of-the-art video retrieval methods

A nitric oxide synthase transgene ameliorates muscular dystrophy in mdx mice.

Dystrophin-deficient muscles experience large reductions in expression of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), which suggests that NO deficiency may influence the dystrophic pathology. Because NO can function as an antiinflammatory and cytoprotective molecule, we propose that the loss of NOS from dystrophic muscle exacerbates muscle inflammation and fiber damage by inflammatory cells. Analysis of transgenic mdx mice that were null mutants for dystrophin, but expressed normal levels of NO in muscle, showed that the normalization of NO production caused large reductions in macrophage concentrations in the mdx muscle. Expression of the NOS transgene in mdx muscle also prevented the majority of muscle membrane injury that is detectable in vivo, and resulted in large decreases in serum creatine kinase concentrations. Furthermore, our data show that mdx muscle macrophages are cytolytic at concentrations that occur in dystrophic, NOS-deficient muscle, but are not cytolytic at concentrations that occur in dystrophic mice that express the NOS transgene in muscle. Finally, our data show that antibody depletions of macrophages from mdx mice cause significant reductions in muscle membrane injury. Together, these findings indicate that macrophages promote injury of dystrophin-deficient muscle, and the loss of normal levels of NO production by dystrophic muscle exacerbates inflammation and membrane injury in muscular dystrophy

Transcritical rotating flow over topography

The flow of a one-and-a-half layer fluid over a three-dimensional obstacle of non-dimensional height M, relative to the lower layer depth, is investigated in the presence of rotation, the magnitude of which is measured by a non-dimensional parameter B (inverse Burger number). The transcritical regime in which the Froude number F, the ratio of the flow speed to the interfacial gravity wave speed, is close to unity is considered in the shallow-water (small-aspect-ratio) limit. For weakly rotating flow over a small isolated obstacle (M -> 0) a similarity theory is developed in which the behaviour is shown to depend on the parameters Gamma = (F - 1)M-2/3 and nu = (BM-1/3)-M-1/2. The flow pattern in this regime is determined by a nonlinear equation in which Gamma and nu appear explicitly, termed here the 'rotating transcritical small-disturbance equation' (rTSD equation, following the analogy with compressible gasdynamics). The rTSD equation is forced by 'equivalent aerofoil' boundary conditions specific to each obstacle. Several qualitatively new flow behaviours are exhibited, and the parameter reduction afforded by the theory allows a (Gamma, nu) regime diagram describing these behaviours to be constructed numerically. One important result is that, in a supercritical oncoming flow in the presence of sufficient rotation (nu greater than or similar to 2), hydraulic jumps can appear downstream of the obstacle even in the absence of an upstream jump. Rotation is found to have the general effect of increasing the amplitude of any existing downstream hydraulic jumps and reducing the lateral extent and amplitude of upstream jumps. Numerical results are compared with results from a shock-capturing shallow-water model, and the (Gamma, nu) regime diagram is found to give good qualitative and quantitative predictions of flow patterns at finite obstacle height (at least for M less than or similar to 0.4). Results are compared and contrasted with those for a two-dimensional obstacle or ridge, for which rotation also causes hydraulic jumps to form downstream of the obstacle and acts to attenuate upstream jumps