22,936 research outputs found
Decision-making for unmanned aerial vehicle operation in icing conditions
With the increased use of unmanned aerial systems
(UAS) for civil and commercial applications, there is
a strong demand for new regulations and technology that
will eventually permit for the integration of UAS in
unsegregated airspace. This requires new technology to
ensure sufficient safety and a smooth integration process.
The absence of a pilot on board a vehicle introduces new
problems that do not arise in manned flight. One challenging
and safety-critical issue is flight in known icing
conditions. Whereas in manned flight, dealing with icing is
left to the pilot and his appraisal of the situation at hand; in
unmanned flight, this is no longer an option and new
solutions are required. To address this, an icing-related
decision-making system (IRDMS) is proposed. The system
quantifies in-flight icing based on changes in aircraft performance
and measurements of environmental properties,
and evaluates what the effects on the aircraft are. Based on
this, it determines whether the aircraft can proceed, and
whether and which available icing protection systems should be activated. In this way, advice on an appropriate
response is given to the operator on the ground, to ensure
safe continuation of the flight and avoid possible accidents
Study of thermal insulation for airborne liquid hydrogen fuel tanks
A concept for a fail-safe thermal protection system was developed. From screening tests, approximately 30 foams, adhesives, and reinforcing fibers using 0.3-meter square liquid nitrogen cold plate, CPR 452 and Stafoam AA1602, both reinforced with 10 percent by weight of 1/16 inch milled OCF Style 701 Fiberglas, were selected for further tests. Cyclic tests with these materials in 2-inch thicknesses bonded on a 0.6-meter square cold plate with Crest 7410 adhesive systems, were successful. Zero permeability gas barriers were identified and found to be compatible with the insulating concept
Approximate roots of a valuation and the Pierce-Birkhoff Conjecture
This paper is a step in our program for proving the Piece-Birkhoff Conjecture
for regular rings of any dimension (this would contain, in particular, the
classical Pierce-Birkhoff conjecture which deals with polynomial rings over a
real closed field). We first recall the Connectedness and the Definable
Connectedness conjectures, both of which imply the Pierce - Birkhoff
conjecture. Then we introduce the notion of a system of approximate roots of a
valuation v on a ring A (that is, a collection Q of elements of A such that
every v-ideal is generated by products of elements of Q). We use approximate
roots to give explicit formulae for sets in the real spectrum of A which we
strongly believe to satisfy the conclusion of the Definable Connectedness
conjecture. We prove this claim in the special case of dimension 2. This proves
the Pierce-Birkhoff conjecture for arbitrary regular 2-dimensional rings
Revisiting the effect of external fields in Axelrod's model of social dynamics
The study of the effects of spatially uniform fields on the steady-state
properties of Axelrod's model has yielded plenty of controversial results. Here
we re-examine the impact of this type of field for a selection of parameters
such that the field-free steady state of the model is heterogeneous or
multicultural. Analyses of both one and two-dimensional versions of Axelrod's
model indicate that, contrary to previous claims in the literature, the steady
state remains heterogeneous regardless of the value of the field strength.
Turning on the field leads to a discontinuous decrease on the number of
cultural domains, which we argue is due to the instability of zero-field
heterogeneous absorbing configurations. We find, however, that spatially
nonuniform fields that implement a consensus rule among the neighborhood of the
agents enforces homogenization. Although the overall effects of the fields are
essentially the same irrespective of the dimensionality of the model, we argue
that the dimensionality has a significant impact on the stability of the
field-free homogeneous steady state
Interplay between the magnetic anisotropy contributions of Cobalt nanowires
We report on the magnetic properties and the crystallographic structure of
the cobalt nanowire arrays as a function of their nanoscale dimensions. X-ray
diffraction measurements show the appearance of an in-plane HCP-Co phase for
nanowires with 50 nm diameter, suggesting a partial reorientation of the
magnetocrystalline anisotropy axis along the membrane plane with increasing
pore diameter. No significant changes in the magnetic behavior of the nanowire
system are observed with decreasing temperature, indicating that the effective
magnetoelastic anisotropy does not play a dominant role in the remagnetization
processes of individual nanowires. An enhancement of the total magnetic
anisotropy is found at room temperature with a decreasing nanowire
diameter-to-length ratio (d/L), a result that is quantitatively analyzed on the
basis of a simplified shape anisotropy model.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
Simultaneous Kummer congruences and -orientations of KO and tmf
Building on results of M. Ando, M.J. Hopkins and C. Rezk, we show the
existence of uncountably many -String orientations of real
K-theory KO and of topological modular forms tmf, generalizing the -
(resp. the Witten) genus. Furthermore, the obstruction to lifting an
-String orientations from KO to tmf is identified with a
classical Iwasawa-theoretic condition. The common key to all these results is a
precise understanding of the classical Kummer congruences, imposed for all
primes simultaneously. This result is of independent arithmetic interest.Comment: final versio
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