462 research outputs found
Mass Exchange Dynamics of Surface and Subsurface Oil in Shallow-Water Transport
We formulate a model for the mass exchange between oil at and below the sea
surface. This is a particularly important aspect of modeling oil spills.
Surface and subsurface oil have different chemical and transport
characteristics and lumping them together would compromise the accuracy of the
resulting model. Without observational or computational constraints, it is thus
not possible to quantitatively predict oil spills based upon partial field
observations of surface and/or sub-surface oil. The primary challenge in
capturing the mass exchange is that the principal mechanisms are on the
microscale. This is a serious barrier to developing practical models for oil
spills that are capable of addressing questions regarding the fate of oil at
the large spatio-temporal scales, as demanded by environmental questions. We
use upscaling to propose an environmental-scale model which incorporates the
mass exchange between surface and subsurface oil due to oil droplet dynamics,
buoyancy effects, and sea surface and subsurface mechanics. While the mass
exchange mechanism detailed here is generally applicable to oil transport
models, it addresses the modeling needs of a particular to an oil spill model
[1]. This transport model is designed to capture oil spills at very large
spatio-temporal scales. It accomplishes this goal by specializing to
shallow-water environments, in which depth averaging is a perfectly good
approximation for the flow, while at the same time retaining mass conservation
of oil over the whole oceanic domain.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure
Approximating the largest eigenvalue of network adjacency matrices
The largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a network plays an
important role in several network processes (e.g., synchronization of
oscillators, percolation on directed networks, linear stability of equilibria
of network coupled systems, etc.). In this paper we develop approximations to
the largest eigenvalue of adjacency matrices and discuss the relationships
between these approximations. Numerical experiments on simulated networks are
used to test our results.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
Displacement Data Assimilation
We show that modifying a Bayesian data assimilation scheme by incorporating
kinematically-consistent displacement corrections produces a scheme that is
demonstrably better at estimating partially observed state vectors in a setting
where feature information important. While the displacement transformation is
not tied to any particular assimilation scheme, here we implement it within an
ensemble Kalman Filter and demonstrate its effectiveness in tracking
stochastically perturbed vortices.Comment: 26 Pages, 9 figures, 5 table
Recommended from our members
Particle and Blood Cell Dynamics in Oscillatory Flows Final Report
Our aim has been to uncover fundamental aspects of the suspension and dislodgement of particles in wall-bounded oscillatory flows, in flows characterized by Reynolds numbers en- compassing the situation found in rivers and near shores (and perhaps in some industrial processes). Our research tools are computational and our coverage of parameter space fairly broad. Computational means circumvent many complications that make the measurement of the dynamics of particles in a laboratory setting an impractical task, especially on the broad range of parameter space we plan to report upon. The impact of this work on the geophysical problem of sedimentation is boosted considerably by the fact that the proposed calculations can be considered ab-initio, in the sense that little to no modeling is done in generating dynamics of the particles and of the moving fluid: we use a three-dimensional Navier Stokes solver along with straightforward boundry conditions. Hence, to the extent that Navier Stokes is a model for an ideal incompressible isotropic Newtonian fluid, the calculations yield benchmark values for such things as the drag, buoyancy, and lift of particles, in a highly controlled environment. Our approach will be to make measurements of the lift, drag, and buoyancy of particles, by considering progressively more complex physical configurations and physics
- …