Vehicle test report: Electric Vehicle Associates electric conversion of an AMC Pacer

Tests were performed to characterize certain parameters of the EVA Pacer and to provide baseline data that can be used for the comparison of improved batteries that may be incorporated into the vehicle at a later time. The vehicle tests were concentrated on the electrical drive subsystem; i.e., the batteries, controller and motor. The tests included coastdowns to characterize the road load, and range evaluations for both cyclic and constant speed conditions. A qualitative evaluation of the vehicle's performance was made by comparing its constant speed range performance with other electric and hybrid vehicles. The Pacer performance was approximately equal to the majority of those vehicles assessed in 1977

Vehicle test report: Electric Vehicle Associates electric conversion of an AMC Pacer

The change of pace, an electric vehicle was tested. These tests were performed to characterize certain parameters of the electric vehicle pacer and to provide baseline data that can be used for the comparison of improved batteries that may be incorporated into the vehicle at a later time. The vehicle tests were concentrated on the electrical drive subsystem, the batteries, controller and motor. Coastdowns to characterize the road load, and range evaluations for both cyclic and constant speed conditions were performed. The vehicle's performance was evaluated by comparing its constant speed range performance with described vehicles. It is found that the pacer performance is approximately equal to the majority of the vehicles tested in the 1977 assessment

The New Deal, Race, and Home Ownership in the 1920s and 1930s

Many federal government housing policies began during the New Deal of the 1930s. Many claim that minorities benefited less from these policies than whites. We estimate the relationships between policies in the 1920s and 1930s and black and white home ownership in farm and nonfarm settings using a pseudo-panel of repeated cross-sections of households in 1920, 1930, and 1940 matched with policy measures in 460 state economic areas. The policies examined include FHA mortgage insurance, HOLC loan refinancing, state mortgage moratoria, farm loan programs, public housing, public works and relief, and payments to farmers to take land out of production.

Non-linear resistivity and heat dissipation in monolayer graphene

We have experimentally studied the nonlinear nature of electrical conduction in monolayer graphene devices on silica substrates. This nonlinearity manifests itself as a nonmonotonic dependence of the differential resistance on applied DC voltage bias across the sample. At temperatures below ~70K, the differential resistance exhibits a peak near zero bias that can be attributed to self-heating of the charge carriers. We show that the shape of this peak arises from a combination of different energy dissipation mechanisms of the carriers. The energy dissipation at higher carrier temperatures depends critically on the length of the sample. For samples longer than 10um the heat loss is shown to be determined by optical phonons at the silica-graphene interface.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

On the detection of nearly optimal solutions in the context of single-objective space mission design problems

When making decisions, having multiple options available for a possible realization of the same project can be advantageous. One way to increase the number of interesting choices is to consider, in addition to the optimal solution x*, also nearly optimal or approximate solutions; these alternative solutions differ from x* and can be in different regions – in the design space – but fulfil certain proximity to its function value f(x*). The scope of this article is the efficient computation and discretization of the set E of e–approximate solutions for scalar optimization problems. To accomplish this task, two strategies to archive and update the data of the search procedure will be suggested and investigated. To make emphasis on data storage efficiency, a way to manage significant and insignificant parameters is also presented. Further on, differential evolution will be used together with the new archivers for the computation of E. Finally, the behaviour of the archiver, as well as the efficiency of the resulting search procedure, will be demonstrated on some academic functions as well as on three models related to space mission design

A re-interpretation of the Triangulum-Andromeda stellar clouds: a population of halo stars kicked out of the Galactic disk

The Triangulum-Andromeda stellar clouds (TriAnd1 and TriAnd2) are a pair of concentric ring- or shell-like over-densities at large $R$ ($\approx$ 30 kpc) and $Z$ ($\approx$ -10 kpc) in the Galactic halo that are thought to have been formed from the accretion and disruption of a satellite galaxy. This paper critically re-examines this formation scenario by comparing the number ratio of RR Lyrae to M giant stars associated with the TriAnd clouds with other structures in the Galaxy. The current data suggest a stellar population for these over-densities ($f_{\rm RR:MG} < 0.38$ at 95% confidence) quite unlike any of the known satellites of the Milky Way ($f_{\rm RR:MG} \approx 0.5$ for the very largest and $f_{\rm RR:MG} >>1$ for the smaller satellites) and more like the population of stars born in the much deeper potential well inhabited by the Galactic disk ($f_{\rm RR:MG} < 0.01$). N-body simulations of a Milky-Way-like galaxy perturbed by the impact of a dwarf galaxy demonstrate that, in the right circumstances, concentric rings propagating outwards from that Galactic disk can plausibly produce similar over-densities. These results provide dramatic support for the recent proposal by Xu et al. (2015) that, rather than stars accreted from other galaxies, the TriAnd clouds could represent stars kicked-out from our own disk. If so, these would be the first populations of disk stars to be found in the Galactic halo and a clear signature of the importance of this second formation mechanism for stellar halos more generally. Moreover, their existence at the very extremities of the disk places strong constraints on the nature of the interaction that formed them.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures; published in MNRA