Sewage treatment

The basic function of the wastewater treatment plant is to speed up the natural processes by which water purifies itself. In earlier years, the natural treatment process in streams and lakes was adequate to perform basic wastewater treatment. As our population and industry grew, increased levels of treatment became necessary before discharging domestic wastewater

Influence of Hydrodynamic Regimes on Mixing of Waters of Confluent Rivers

At present, a significant weakening of the intensity of transverse mixing at the confluence of large rivers, which is observed in a number of cases, is widely discussed. Since the observed features of the confluence of large watercourses are not only of research interest but also of significant economic importance associated with the characteristics of water management at these water bodies, a large number of works are devoted to their study. Water resources management requires measures for the organization of water use which can be rational only under the understanding of processes occurring in water basins. To explain the phenomenon of suppression of the transverse mixing, which is interesting and important from the point of view of ecology, a wide range of hypotheses is proposed, up to the negation of turbulence in rivers. One of the possible mechanisms for explaining the suppression of transversal mixing can be the presence of transverse circulation manifesting itself as Prandtl’s secondary flows of the second kind. The characteristic velocity of these circulation flows is very small and difficult to measure directly by instruments; however, in our opinion, they can significantly complicate the transverse mixing at the confluence. The proposed hypothesis is tested in computational experiments in the framework of the three-dimensional formulation for dimensions of a real water object at the mouth of the Vishera River where it meets the Kama. Calculations demonstrate that, at sufficiently large flow rates, the two waters practically do not mix in the horizontal direction throughout the depth over long distances from the confluence. It has been found that a two-vortex flow is formed downstream the confluence, which just attenuates the mixing; the fluid motion in the vortices is such that, near the free surface, the fluid moves from the banks to the middle of the riverbed

A numerical study of the influence of channel-scale secondary circulation on mixing processes downstream of river junctions

A rapid downstream weakening of the processes that drive the intensity of transverse mixing at the confluence of large rivers has been identified in the literature and attributed to the progressive reduction in channel scale secondary circulation and shear-driven mixing with distance downstream from the junction. These processes are investigated in this paper using a three-dimensional computation of the Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes equations combined with a Reynolds stress turbulence model for the confluence of the Kama and Vishera rivers in the Russian Urals. Simulations were carried out for three different configurations: an idealized planform with a rectangular cross-section (R), the natural planform with a rectangular cross-section (P), and the natural planform with the measured bathymetry (N), each one for three different discharge ratios. Results show that in the idealized configuration (R), the initial vortices that form due to channel-scale pressure gradients decline rapidly with distance downstream. Mixing is slow and incomplete at more than 10 multiples of channel width downstream from the junction corner. However, when the natural planform and bathymetry are introduced (N), rates of mixing increase dramatically at the junction corner and are maintained with distance downstream. Comparison with the P case suggests that it is the bathymetry that drives the most rapid mixing and notably when the discharge ratio is such that a single channel-scale vortex develops aided by curvature in the post junction channel. This effect is strongest when the discharge of the tributary that has the same direction of curvature as the post junction channel is greatest. A comprehensive set of field data are required to test this conclusion. If it holds, theoretical models of mixing processes in rivers will need to take into account the effects of bathymetry upon the interaction between river discharge ratio, secondary circulation development, and mixing rates

Effect of Current Density on Electrodeposition of Nickel-Organic Microcapsules Composite Coatings

A formation of protective composite coatings based on nickel and organic substance of inert nature, containing a corrosion inhibitor, encapsulated in a polymer shell, was studied. The microcapsules were synthesized in an aqueous-organic emulsion using the method of formation of shell of the modified gelatine on the surface of microdroplets. Composite coatings were obtained by electrochemical codeposition of nickel matrix and microcapsules, suspended in the electrolyte. Changes of surface morphology, microhardness and corrosive properties of coatings with respect to changes of deposition parameters of coatings were investigated. The distribution of particle sizes in coatings depending on the current density was studied. It was shown that an increase in the mass fraction of the microcapsules in the coating leads to an increase in its corrosion resistance

Subthreshold antiproton production in proton-carbon reactions

Data from KEK on subthreshold antiproton as well as on pi(+-) and K(+-) production in proton-nucleus reactions are described at projectile energies between 3.5 and 12.0 GeV. We use a model which considers a hadron-nucleus reaction as an incoherent sum over collisions of the projectile with a varying number of target nucleons. It samples complete events and allows thus for the simultaneous consideration of all particle species measured. The overall reproduction of the data is quite satisfactory. It is shown that the contributions from the interaction of the projectile with groups of several target nucleons are decisive for the description of subthreshold production. Since the collective features of subthreshold production become especially significant far below the threshold, the results are extrapolated down to COSY energies. It is concluded that an antiproton measurement at ANKE-COSY should be feasible, if the high background of other particles can be efficiently suppressed.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, gzipped tar file, submitted to J. Phys. G v2: Modification of text due to demands of referee

PaLM 2 Technical Report

We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report