1,209 research outputs found
Waste Gasification
This document summarizes the work the IGT Team has conducted on the topic of waste to energy gasification over the Cal Poly Winter, Spring, and Fall quarters of 2019. The project is being carried out by four Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering students: Nash Taylor, Glyn Lewis, David McCallum, and Nicholas Ordonez and the sponsor of this project is Tod duBois. The team’s original goal was to successfully create a system that compiles residential solid waste on a small scale, gasifies it, and measures the typical syngas outputs, so that the team may assess the viability of gasification of household waste on a small scale. The project has drastically changed multiple times and the changes have been documented throughout this paper. Due to safety concerns and uncertainty regarding the prototype vessel, the team’s final goal is to prove successful gasification using their keg based system. The team has spent most of the quarters conducting researching and narrowing the scope of work to something they believe they can successfully and manageably complete over the next year. The purpose of this document is to summarize the research, present and justify some design choices, and present the design solution as resolved to the current date
Time-reversal symmetric resolution of unity without background integrals in open quantum systems
We present a new complete set of states for a class of open quantum systems,
to be used in expansion of the Green's function and the time-evolution
operator. A remarkable feature of the complete set is that it observes
time-reversal symmetry in the sense that it contains decaying states (resonant
states) and growing states (anti-resonant states) parallelly. We can thereby
pinpoint the occurrence of the breaking of time-reversal symmetry at the choice
of whether we solve Schroedinger equation as an initial-condition problem or a
terminal-condition problem. Another feature of the complete set is that in the
subspace of the central scattering area of the system, it consists of
contributions of all states with point spectra but does not contain any
background integrals. In computing the time evolution, we can clearly see
contribution of which point spectrum produces which time dependence. In the
whole infinite state space, the complete set does contain an integral but it is
over unperturbed eigenstates of the environmental area of the system and hence
can be calculated analytically. We demonstrate the usefulness of the complete
set by computing explicitly the survival probability and the escaping
probability as well as the dynamics of wave packets. The origin of each term of
matrix elements is clear in our formulation, particularly the exponential
decays due to the resonance poles.Comment: 62 pages, 13 figure
Hypervelocity Impact Performance of Open Cell Foam Core Sandwich Panel Structures
Open cell metallic foam core sandwich panel structures are of interest for application in spacecraft micrometeoroid and orbital debris shields due to their novel form and advantageous structural and thermal performance. Repeated shocking as a result of secondary impacts upon individual foam ligaments during the penetration process acts to raise the thermal state of impacting projectiles ; resulting in fragmentation, melting, and vaporization at lower velocities than with traditional shielding configurations (e.g. Whipple shield). In order to characterize the protective capability of these structures, an extensive experimental campaign was performed by the Johnson Space Center Hypervelocity Impact Technology Facility, the results of which are reported in this paper. Although not capable of competing against the protection levels achievable with leading heavy shields in use on modern high-risk vehicles (i.e. International Space Station modules), metallic foam core sandwich panels are shown to provide a substantial improvement over comparable structural panels and traditional low weight shielding alternatives such as honeycomb sandwich panels and metallic Whipple shields. A ballistic limit equation, generalized in terms of panel geometry, is derived and presented in a form suitable for application in risk assessment codes
TURBULENT STRESS DISTRIBUTION IN THE TURBULENT BOUNDARY LAYER ON A PERMEABLE POROUS PLATE
In this paper the results of experimental tests on turbulent boundary layer on a plate with air blowing through permeable porous wall are presented. Tests were performed in an aerodynamic tunnel varying the blowing rate within the range of 0 to 2.5% of the air flow velocity in the tunnel, using thermoanemometers of constant temperature. It has been determined that the blowing increases the boundary layer thickness and strongly transforms the boundary layer inner part and turbulent nucleus, while the outer part remains not deformed. An increase in blowing causes an abrupt viscous stress decrease, also decreasing skin friction. Thick boundary layers (up to 120 mm) allowed a profound analysis of Reynolds' turbulent stresses. It has been found a general distribution of turbulent stress in the turbulent layer which is independent of blowing velocity. It has been established for the turbulent characteristics that the determining coordinate is the relative horizontal velocity, not the distance from the wall. With a turbulent stress database obtained from turbulent stresses direct measurements, it has been proposed a flow model for boundary layer on a permeable porous plate. It has also been demonstrated that in high blowing conditions the horizontal velocity profile in the boundary layer becomes equal to the velocity profile in a plane jet
Low Energy Theorems For Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering
Low energy theorems are derived for the coefficients of the effective range
expansion in s-wave nucleon-nucleon scattering valid to leading order in an
expansion in which both and (where is the scattering length)
are treated as small mass scales. Comparisons with phase shift data, however,
reveal a pattern of gross violations of the theorems for all coefficients in
both the and channels. Analogous theorems are developed for the
energy dependence parameter which describes mixing.
These theorems are also violated. These failures strongly suggest that the
physical value of is too large for the chiral expansion to be valid in
this context. Comparisons of with phenomenological scales known to
arise in the two-nucleon problem support this conjecture.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; appendix added to discuss behavior in
chiral limit; minor revisions including revised figure reference to recent
work adde
Exhaustive and Efficient Constraint Propagation: A Semi-Supervised Learning Perspective and Its Applications
This paper presents a novel pairwise constraint propagation approach by
decomposing the challenging constraint propagation problem into a set of
independent semi-supervised learning subproblems which can be solved in
quadratic time using label propagation based on k-nearest neighbor graphs.
Considering that this time cost is proportional to the number of all possible
pairwise constraints, our approach actually provides an efficient solution for
exhaustively propagating pairwise constraints throughout the entire dataset.
The resulting exhaustive set of propagated pairwise constraints are further
used to adjust the similarity matrix for constrained spectral clustering. Other
than the traditional constraint propagation on single-source data, our approach
is also extended to more challenging constraint propagation on multi-source
data where each pairwise constraint is defined over a pair of data points from
different sources. This multi-source constraint propagation has an important
application to cross-modal multimedia retrieval. Extensive results have shown
the superior performance of our approach.Comment: The short version of this paper appears as oral paper in ECCV 201
Near-Earth asteroids spectroscopic survey at Isaac Newton Telescope
The population of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) shows a large variety of
objects in terms of physical and dynamical properties. They are subject to
planetary encounters and to strong solar wind and radiation effects. Their
study is also motivated by practical reasons regarding space exploration and
long-term probability of impact with the Earth. We aim to spectrally
characterize a significant sample of NEAs with sizes in the range of 0.25
- 5.5 km (categorized as large), and search for connections between their
spectral types and the orbital parameters. Optical spectra of NEAs were
obtained using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) equipped with the IDS
spectrograph. These observations are analyzed using taxonomic classification
and by comparison with laboratory spectra of meteorites. A total number of 76
NEAs were observed. We classified 44 of them as Q/S-complex, 16 as B/C-complex,
eight as V-types, and another eight belong to the remaining taxonomic classes.
Our sample contains 27 asteroids categorized as potentially hazardous and 31
possible targets for space missions including (459872) 2014 EK24, (436724) 2011
UW158, and (67367) 2000 LY27. The spectral data corresponding to (276049) 2002
CE26 and (385186) 1994 AW1 shows the 0.7 m feature which indicates the
presence of hydrated minerals on their surface. We report that Q-types have the
lowest perihelia (a median value and absolute deviation of AU)
and are systematically larger than the S-type asteroids observed in our sample.
We explain these observational evidences by thermal fatigue fragmentation as
the main process for the rejuvenation of NEA surfaces. In general terms, the
taxonomic distribution of our sample is similar to the previous studies and
matches the broad groups of the inner main belt asteroids. Nevertheless, we
found a wide diversity of spectra compared to the standard taxonomic types.Comment: Accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A
Chiral 3-exchange NN-potentials: Results for dominant next-to-leading order contributions
We calculate in (two-loop) chiral perturbation theory the local NN-potentials
generated by the three-pion exchange diagrams with one insertion from the
second order chiral effective pion-nucleon Lagrangian proportional to the
low-energy constants . The resulting isoscalar central potential
vanishes identically. In most cases these -exchange potentials are larger
than the ones generated by the diagrams involving only leading order vertices
due to the large values of (which mainly represent virtual
-excitation). A similar feature has been observed for the chiral
-exchange. We also give suitable (double-integral) representations for
the spin-spin and tensor potentials generated by the leading-order diagrams
proportional to involving four nucleon propagators. In these cases the
Cutkosky rule cannot be used to calculate the spectral-functions in the
infinite nucleon mass limit since the corresponding mass-spectra start with a
non-vanishing value at the -threshold. Altogether, one finds that chiral
-exchange leads to small corrections in the region fm where
- and chiral -exchange alone provide a very good strong NN-force as
shown in a recent analysis of the low-energy pp-scattering data-base.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to be published in The Physical Review
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