The Wine Stone Inn

The Wine Stone Inn is a new 12-room boutique hotel currently being built in Old Town Orcutt, California. The hotel is seeking a grand opening that will attract vintner business, agribusiness, and agricultural vendors for the hotel, and help promote local wineries and breweries in the Santa Maria Valley. Orcutt is a growing township, which is becoming very attractive to visitors because of the walking distance to restaurants, local pubs, wine venues, and other businesses that project growth in the future. Agribusiness makes up a small percentage of the corporate market and agritourism is a growing segment in this area. The author comes from an agricultural family. The author’s family identified a small piece of their property in the Old Town of Orcutt, they saw the need for a small hotel and decided to invest in the business. This project will plan the hotel’s opening day with a focus on the local agritourism amenities

Solar sustained plasma/absorber conceptual design

A space power system concept was evaluated which uses concentrated solar energy to heat a working fluid to temperatures as high as 4000 K. The high temperature working fluid could be used for efficient electric power production in advanced thermal or magnetohydrodynamic conversion cycles. Energy absorber configurations utilizing particles or cesium vapor absorber material were investigaed. Results of detailed radiant heat transfer calculations indicated approximately 86 percent of the incident solar energy could be absorbed within a 12-cm-dia flowing stream of gas borne carbon particles. Calculated total energy absorption in the cesium vapor seeded absorber configuration ranged from 34 percent to 64 percent of the incident solar energy. Solar flux concentration ratios of between approximately 3000 and 10,000 will be required to sustain absorber temperatures in the range from 3000 K to 4000 K

COMPARISON OF VERTICAL FORCES BETWEEN A PRESSURE MEASUREMENT SYSTEM AND A FORCE PLATE

Force plates and pressure measurement systems are commonly used for clinical and experimental applications. The MatScan (Tekscan Inc.), a lightweight, portable and cost-efficient pressure mapping system, can serve as an alternative to a force plate for measuring vertical forces. There has been much debate, however, as to the accuracy and precision of pressure mapping systems when compared to force plates, which have been considered the gold standard in force measurement (Hsiao, Guan & Weatherly, 2002). Although much research has been conducted using different force and pressure measurement systems, there is virtually no literature that discusses the comparisons of measured forces between these types of systems. The goal of this study was to compare the vertical forces measured by the MatScan to those measured by an AMTI force plate

Transport on randomly evolving trees

The time process of transport on randomly evolving trees is investigated. By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a model of random tree evolution is constructed which describes the spreading in time of objects corresponding to nodes. By using the method of the age-dependent branching processes we derive the joint distribution function of the number of living and dead nodes, and determine the correlation between these node numbers as a function of time. Also analyzed are the stochastic properties of the end-nodes; and the correlation between the numbers of living and dead end-nodes is shown to change its character suddenly at the very beginning of the evolution process. The survival probability of random trees is investigated and expressions are derived for this probability.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, published in Phys. Rev. E 72, 051101 (2005

Numerical and experimental studies of multi-ply woven carbon fibre prepreg forming process

Woven carbon fibre prepreg is being increasingly used in high-performance aerospace and automotive applications, primarily because of its superior mechanical properties and formability. A wide range of forming simulation options are available for predicting material deformation during the prepreg forming process, particularly change in fibre orientation. Development of a robust validated simulation model requires comprehensive material characterisation and reliable experimental validation techniques. This paper presents experimental and numerical methods for studying the fibre orientation in multi-ply woven carbon fibre prepreg forming process, using a double-dome geometry. The numerical study is performed using the commercial forming simulation software PAM-FORM and the material input data are generated from a comprehensive experimental material characterisation. Two experimental validation methods are adopted for fibre shear angle measurement: an optical method for measuring only the surface plies, and a novel CT scan method for measuring both the surface plies and the internal plies. The simulation results are compared against the experimental results in terms of fibre shear angle and the formation of wrinkles to assess the validity of the model