CFD modeling of microwave electrothermal thrusters

Microwave-heated plasmas in convergent nozzles are analyzed using a coupled Maxwell and Navier-Stokes solver to examine relevant issues associated with microwave thermal propulsion. Parametric studies are conducted to understand the effect of power, pressure, and plasma location with respect to the nozzle throat. For nozzles in the 0.5 to 3 N range with helium flow, results show that specific impulses up to 550-650 seconds are possible, with further increases being limited by severe wall-heating. Coupling efficiencies of over 90 percent are consistently obtained, with overall efficiencies ranging from 40 percent to 80 percent. Size scale-up studies-done by scaling the frequency from 2.45 GHz to 0.91 GHz-indicate that plasma migration toward the walls occurs more frequently for the lower frequency. Increasing the cavity aspect ratio and detuning the cavity are found to be effective ways of keeping the plasma on axis

Reflected secondary shocks : some observations using afterburning

Afterburn models are typically used for charges in enclosed spaces to estimate quasi-static pressure. Also, any reflected shock that interacts with detonation products has the potential to add energy to the shock due to afterburning via additional gas mixing and heating. Air blast tests that included normally reflected pressure measurements by the University of Sheffield, provided evidence of the so called ‘secondary shock,’ i.e. the recompression and expansion of the detonation products. This repeat test data provided an opportunity to explore calibration of the LSDYNA afterburning model parameters to match the measured time of arrival and magnitude of the secondary shock. While the measured pressure histories alone are insufficient to uniquely calibrate the afterburn model, this manuscript attempts to illustrate the effect on the secondary shock of changing the four afterburn model parameters: 1. Start time for adding energy 2. End time for adding energy 3. Amount of energy to be added 4. Rate at which the energy is added, i.e. either linearly increasing or constant

\Lambda-buildings and base change functors

We prove an analog of the base change functor of \Lambda-trees in the setting of generalized affine buildings. The proof is mainly based on local and global combinatorics of the associated spherical buildings. As an application we obtain that the class of generalized affine building is closed under ultracones and asymptotic cones. Other applications involve a complex of groups decompositions and fixed point theorems for certain classes of generalized affine buildings.Comment: revised version, 29 pages, to appear in Geom. Dedicat

Invitation to the Table Conversation: A Few Diverse Perspectives on Integration

This article represents an invitation to the integration table to several previously underrepresented perspectives within Christian psychology. The Judeo-Christian tradition and current views on scholarship and Christian faith compel us to extend hospitality to minority voices within integration, thereby enriching and challenging existing paradigms in the field. Contributors to this article, spanning areas of cultural, disciplinary, and theological diversity, provide suggestions for how their distinct voices can enhance future integrative efforts

Continuous multiparametric monitoring of cell metabolism in response to transient overexpression of the sirtuin deacetylase SIRT3

The analysis and visualisation of research data in an environment which is most similar to living conditions belong to the most challenging claims of present scientific research endeavours. To date, the effect of protein function on cell metabolism is most commonly assessed from a series of end point analyses, which finally allows an approximate estimation on how a specific effect takes its course. In the study presented herein, we demonstrate how the combination of transient transfection and a biosensor chip system gives the opportunity to analyse the effect of a specific protein on cell metabolism in living cells through real-time monitoring of metabolically relevant parameters, such as oxygen consumption, acidification rate and cell adhesion. In addition, this method allows online monitoring of the time course of metabolic changes due to changes in expression levels of metabolic regulative proteins from the time of transfection to maximum overexpression. The methodology presented herein was assessed for the transient overexpression of the sirtuin deacetylase SIRT3, a mitochondrial key element in the regulation of energy metabolism, metabolic disease, cancer and ageing

Programa de articulación a distancia de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral en Matemática. Rendimiento y consecuencias

La Universidad Nacional del Litoral ha venido investigando diversos sistemas de articulación con la escuela media. Los autores de este trabajo han tomado parte activa en la definición de los contenidos para el área matemática y en el dictado y supervisión de los cursos. A partir del segundo semestre del año 1999 se pone en marcha el Programa de Articulación a Distancia (PROARDIS) siendo sus destinatarios los posibles ingresantes a la Universidad en el 2000. La novedad introducida fue la utilización de la modalidad de enseñanza a distancia a través de la Red Satelital de Aulas Remotas. Se ofrecieron dos instancias: a fines de 1999 y en febrero-marzo de 2000. La a pi icación de estos métodos plantea importantes cuestiones sobre su pertinencia, oportunidad y sobre todo eficacia. Es conveniente señalar que los autores de este trabajo tenían, y así lo comunicaron a las autoridades de la UNL serios reparos, anticipando consecuencias negativas sobre la preparación de los alumnos. El propósito de este trabajo es analizar esos interrogantes, de la manera más objetiva posible, a través del desempeño de los alumnos ingresantes a las carreras de la Facultad de Ingeniería Química (FIQ) de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL). Estos alumnos cursaron Matemática A durante el primer semestre del año 2000. Se obtienen conclusiones que consideramos pueden ser de sumo interés para la toma de importantes decisiones académicas institucionales, que tienen gran repercusión en la carrera de la mayoría de los alumnos de esta Universidad. Como primer paso se realiza un análisis intrínseco del Curso de Matemática del PROARDIS, comparando los resultados obtenidos en la modalidad de educación a distancia, con los de las instancias presenciales ofrecidas en anteriores oportunidades. Como paso siguiente, a manera de una pos-evaluación, se continúa con el estudio dentro de la FIQ de la incidencia del dominio de los contenidos del PROARDIS en la primera materia de Matemática

The Context-Freeness Problem Is coNP-Complete for Flat Counter Systems

International audienceBounded languages have recently proved to be an important class of languages for the analysis of Turing-powerful models. For instance, bounded context-free languages are used to under-approximate the behav-iors of recursive programs. Ginsburg and Spanier have shown in 1966 that a bounded language L ⊆ a * 1 · · · a * d is context-free if, and only if, its Parikh image is a stratifiable semilinear set. However, the question whether a semilinear set is stratifiable, hereafter called the stratifiability problem, was left open, and remains so. In this paper, we give a partial answer to this problem. We focus on semilinear sets that are given as finite systems of linear inequalities, and we show that stratifiability is coNP-complete in this case. Then, we apply our techniques to the context-freeness problem for flat counter systems, that asks whether the trace language of a counter system intersected with a bounded regular language is context-free. As main result of the paper, we show that this problem is coNP-complete

Charge Imbalance Effects on Interlayer Hopping and Fermi Surfaces in Multilayered High-T_c Cuprates

We study doping dependence of interlayer hoppings, t_\perp, in multilayered cuprates with four or more CuO_2 planes in a unit cell. When the double occupancy is forbidden in the plane, an effective amplitude of t_\perp in the Gutzwiller approximation is shown to be proportional to the square root of the product of doping rates in adjacent two planes, i.e., t^eff_\perp \propto t_\perp \sqrt{\delta_1\delta_2}, where \delta_1 and \delta_2 represent the doping rates of the two planes. More than three-layered cuprates have two kinds of \cuo planes, i.e., inner- and outer planes (IP and OP), resulting in two different values of t^eff_{\perp}, i.e., t^eff_\perp 1 \propto t_\perp \sqrt{\delta_IP \delta_IP} between IP's, and t^eff_\perp 2 \propto t_\perp \sqrt{\delta_IP \delta_OP} between IP and OP. Fermi surfaces are calculated in the four-layered t-t'-t''-J model by the mean-field theory. The order parameters, the renormalization factor of t_\perp, and the site-potential making the charge imbalance between IP and OP are self-consistently determined for several doping rates. We show the interlayer splitting of the Fermi surfaces, which may be observed in the angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurement.Comment: Some typographical errors are revised. Journal of Physical Society of Japan, Vol.75, No.3, in pres

Observations from Preliminary Experiments on Spatial and Temporal Pressure Measurements from Near-Field Free Air Explosions

It is self-evident that a crucial step in analysing the performance of protective structures is to be able to accurately quantify the blast load arising from a high explosive detonation. For structures located near to the source of a high explosive detonation, the resulting pressure is extremely high in magnitude and highly non-uniform over the face of the target. There exists very little direct measurement of blast parameters in the nearfield, mainly attributed to the lack of instrumentation sufficiently robust to survive extreme loading events yet sensitive enough to capture salient features of the blast. Instead literature guidance is informed largely by early numerical analyses and parametric studies. Furthermore, the lack of an accurate, reliable data set has prevented subsequent numerical analyses from being validated against experimental trials. This paper presents an experimental methodology that has been developed in part to enable such experimental data to be gathered. The experimental apparatus comprises an array of Hopkinson pressure bars, fitted through holes in a target, with the loaded faces of the bars flush with the target face. Thus, the bars are exposed to the normally or obliquely reflected shocks from the impingement of the blast wave with the target. Pressure-time recordings are presented along with associated Arbitary-Langrangian-Eulerian modelling using the LS-DYNA explicit numerical code. Experimental results are corrected for the effects of dispersion of the propagating waves in the pressure bars, enabling accurate characterisation of the peak pressures and impulses from these loadings. The combined results are used to make comments on the mechanism of the pressure load for very near-field blast events

Transcript Specificity in Yeast Pre-mRNA Splicing Revealed by Mutations in Core Spliceosomal Components

Appropriate expression of most eukaryotic genes requires the removal of introns from their pre–messenger RNAs (pre-mRNAs), a process catalyzed by the spliceosome. In higher eukaryotes a large family of auxiliary factors known as SR proteins can improve the splicing efficiency of transcripts containing suboptimal splice sites by interacting with distinct sequences present in those pre-mRNAs. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae lacks functional equivalents of most of these factors; thus, it has been unclear whether the spliceosome could effectively distinguish among transcripts. To address this question, we have used a microarray-based approach to examine the effects of mutations in 18 highly conserved core components of the spliceosomal machinery. The kinetic profiles reveal clear differences in the splicing defects of particular pre-mRNA substrates. Most notably, the behaviors of ribosomal protein gene transcripts are generally distinct from other intron-containing transcripts in response to several spliceosomal mutations. However, dramatically different behaviors can be seen for some pairs of transcripts encoding ribosomal protein gene paralogs, suggesting that the spliceosome can readily distinguish between otherwise highly similar pre-mRNAs. The ability of the spliceosome to distinguish among its different substrates may therefore offer an important opportunity for yeast to regulate gene expression in a transcript-dependent fashion. Given the high level of conservation of core spliceosomal components across eukaryotes, we expect that these results will significantly impact our understanding of how regulated splicing is controlled in higher eukaryotes as well